No 2 (2015)

The article is a new link in a series of publications devoted to the analysis of empirical data obtained in the inter-regional survey conducted by the Institute of Socio-Political Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences in cooperation with the Moscow Institute of Socio-Cultural Programs. Veterans of the Great Patriotic War were the main object of the study as having certain attitudes and beliefs, worldview and value orientations. The survey was conducted in different regions of Russia including Moscow, Saint Petersburg, regions and republics of the European Russia, the Caucasus, and Siberia. Among other questions, the authors reveal the veterans’ attitude to the events of the war itself (comparative evaluation of the combat capability of the Red Army and the army of Nazi Germany, the factors that influenced the course of the war, the relationships with the commanding staff, etc.). The authors undertake a detailed analysis of the socio-demographic characteristics of the veterans, their typical biographical trajectories during the war, religious beliefs and its changes in the life course. The article pays special attention to the questions asking veterans to assess their current social and financial situation, the availability of cultural facilities, the attitudes towards them from the state in different periods of post-war Russian history up to the present day.

The article assembles theoretic models that define magic as an original social phenomenon fundamentally different from religion. Referring to the definitions of C. Lévi-Strauss, G. Gurvitch and V.I. Garadga the author focuses on the conception of magic proposed by Marcel Mauss. He defined magic as a practical idea in which knowledge and experience coincide, therefore, magic cannot exist as something abstract or theoretical, as an ordinary turnover of representations and experience but rather as their alloy. A representation becomes magical only at the rite, which in its turn can be considered magical only if the principle of mana was intended. According to Mauss, mana is a nominal universal measure of the intensity of connections between natural elements including people. For an adept of magic, the magic reasoning does not suppose discovering some meanings - rather an active interpretation of the idea of potential contact or contrast between all elements. In other words, mana does not possess any real content; this magic institution does not impose meanings, but allows to express and support them in the mutually conditioned oppositions in a differentiation system. Thus, we can identify a magical worldview based on mana as a plastic cognitive formation, in which we can trace a special interlacing of ‘cosmic freedom’ and ‘traditional unfreedom’ for a magician. Magic as knowledge does not substantialize in either society nor nature despite its direct appeal to the physical characteristics of objects and playing up the role orders. Magic is a fine example of a purely social formation for nothing else but inner social machinery explains it; the casuistry of magic cannot be objectified without special collective representations.

The article describes the problem of the unpredictable proliferation and complication of techno-social systems (such as Internet and financial markets). The authors try to explicate the social risks generated by these systems with the theoretical resources of the system theory of communication (N. Luhmann), which is based on the concepts of ‘recursion’, ‘process’ (‘operation’), ‘operationally closed system’, ‘autopoiesis’, etc. The authors believe that the autopoietic system response to external stimuli cannot be predicted by classical means of sociology and cybernetics. Turbulence and continuous complication of techno-social objects let the authors suggest that the dynamics of the systems under consideration contains some features of autopoiesis. Thus, the analysis of the financial market as a complex techno-social object based on the ideas of G. Akerlof (theory of irrational economic behavior) and K. Knorr Cetina (object-centric sociology) allows to better understand the phenomenon of unpredictable market dynamics (the risk of proliferation of market expectations, inability to capture the control level by any of the participants, etc). The authors believe that such a conceptualization helps to bring together sociological practices of the techno-social objects research and perspective methods of applied mathematics (fractal geometry, theory of reflexive relations, ‘soft’ models, etc.), as well as contributes to the search of effective tools for modeling complex techno-social objects, and, thus, social risks accompanying them.

The article describes the specific features of the socio-structural processes that take place in the Russian economy over the past decades, determine the dynamics of interaction between social groups, and change the criteria of social inequality and differentiation. The authors believe that the transformation of property relations in the Russian society led to a sharp polarization in income and changed the structure of employment. In the first part of the article, the authors analyze the employment by economic sectors, identify general characteristics of the labor market at different levels (macro- and micro-levels in the field of socio-economic and socio-labor relations). In the second part of the article, the authors on the basis of their own empirical studies estimate the positions of employees working in both the public and private sectors, but focus on the private sector employees as a new social class. The authors describe how a class of employees is forming in Russia; indicate the general characteristics of this community, as well as the factors that determine the social differences within it, and the nature of these differences, which depend on the sector of employment, employee professional and educational level, his age, and job position.