Vol 23, No 1 (2023)

The article considers the history of the conceptual pair Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft (community/society) used by classics of sociology to explain the fundamental difference of modern society from the previous forms of social life. The author emphasizes the popularity of these categories as identifying the temporally successive types of sociality: Gemeinschaft refers to the original form of traditional organic community, and Gesellschaft - to the mass urbanized society of the modern age. The article shows the structural relationship between the early sociological concepts and the philosophy of modern history as an analytical (self)description of modern societies. The article reconstructs the development of Ferdinand Tönnies’ views, who introduced the pair Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft as an analytical tool for social theory and challenged the opposition of these two types of social integration by emphasizing their presence in every social interaction. The author briefly outlines Max Weber’s perception of this conceptual pair in the form of Vergemeinschaftung/Vergesellschaftung social relations as ideally-typically value-oriented and instrumentally rational. The article explains the drastic politicization of the Gemeinschaft semantics in inter-war Germany - the term became a marker of the social-political polarization. Then the author focuses on the differentiated theory of Gemeinschaft developed in Hans Freyer’s sociology and on the Nazis’ attempt to make this term a basis of their theory of homogeneous society. The article considers the reception of Tönnies’ categories in American sociology, especially by Talcott Parsons, and highlights his contribution to the theory of socialization and integration of large societies with small solidarity groups. The last part of the article emphasizes the significance of the conceptual pair for the theory of late modernity - its structure of social action consists of elements of both community and society.

The birth rate reducing to the level that does not ensure even the simple reproduction of the population, which leads to problems in the economy and social sphere and to migration crises, is a challenge for many developed countries. The demographic and family policy measures aim at solving this problem, which is reflected, for instance, in the Russian National Security Strategy approved on July 2, 2021 by the Decree of the President: the increasing birth rate is declared a required condition for increasing the country’s population. In contemporary Russia, the age model of fertility has transformed: the spreading practice of postponing childbirth in the last fifteen years has led to an increase in the modal age of mothers by more than five years, which is a factor in the decline in fertility. One of the mechanisms that can change this trend but lacks the due attention is the institution of the student family. The study aims at identifying those factors that determine the marriage intentions of the student youth. The article is based on the quantitative analysis of the surveys data of the Rosstat and authors’ sociological research, including logistic models and the decision tree method, which allowed to conduct modeling and select factors to identify the determinants of student marriage. The modeling results revealed the role of the value-system structure of students and their parental family in the motivation for marriage and starting family life. One of the main conclusions of practical significance is the confirmed importance for the youth of marriage as such and as a key stage in the life path, which under the postponing childbirth and reducing birth rate determines the need for the state support for the student family. The results of the study can help to solve a complex demographic problem of the decline and aging of the birth rate, which requires systematic work to create an image of the happy student family and to introduce mechanisms for supporting it.

In sociology of religion, there are few works on the quantitative analysis of the reactions of the main social institutions to the phenomenon of religiosity. Social representations and illusions about non-traditional religiosity are formed within the boundaries of many unrelated and uncoordinated reactions of representatives of each institution. The logic of choosing the object of reactions among the existing religious organizations reflects both the specifics of the social institution and external influences, i.e., the social context. The article aims at identifying the institutional specifics of the reactions of traditional religions to non-traditional religiosity based on the analysis of the perception of new religious movements by the Orthodox and Catholic churches in the Republic of Belarus in 1992-2020. The content analysis was used to analyze 715 books, articles in the media, leaflets, proceeding of conferences and other publications of churches on new religions. The author argues that 407 groups were identified, and their configuration reflects the selective attention of traditional confessions to new religions; presents their distribution according to the structural and content characteristics, recursiveness and frequency of mentions, the status of authors in the hierarchy of churches, the influence of foreign articles reprinted in the Belarusian media. The author identifies the institutional specifics of the perception of new religions by religious organizations as criticism from the standpoint of their own dogma; moreover, the features of the past and contemporary life of Christian churches make them primarily respond to the intra-church sectarianism, Christian and pseudoChristian groups, then to neo-paganism and groups of magic, divination and healing, Satanism and occult-mystical groups. The article mentions external and internal factors determining the churches’ perception of new religious organizations in a non-typical form, and the range of variability of the antisectarian discourse of the Orthodox and Catholic churches.

Confucianism like Taoism is a part of the treasury of the world spiritual culture as created by the “axial age” (K. Jaspers); however, time affects even the most humanistic teachings, many of the provisions of which can be formalized, become obsolete, requiring both a “return to the origins” and clarification or reinterpretation and renewal. These processes of both positive and negative nature affected the norms of Confucian ethics in Vietnam. The article aims at examining the gender content of the Vietnamese Confucian ideals and their impact on the contemporary Vietnamese society. Confucian ethics was introduced in Vietnam during the Chinese colonization and had a great influence on both feudalism in general and on the social perception of the woman and her position in the family, determining gender roles and corresponding gender stereotypes for a millennium. The article identifies both general and special features of the gender issues in the Chinese and Vietnamese traditional Confucian ethics. In addition to many negative aspects (such as restraining women’s personal development and limiting their participation in feudal ceremonies), the Vietnamese Confucian ethics regarding women was changed for the better, contributing to the humanization of gender relations. Confucian gender principles continue to have both beneficial and detrimental influence on the Vietnamese society today. The study of the distribution and dynamics of changes in gender roles in the traditional and contemporary Vietnamese society can provide empirical data for gender sociology, as it is hard to analyze gender relations without considering national traditions and culture in general.

The article aims at linking social reality with the category of temporality in the conceptual perspective based on some modifications of modernity as culture. The author explains and applies the epistemological means of the temporal turn and presents the agent-subject interpretation of social reality in a new way. The article focuses on the potential of the temporal discourse which is poorly articulated in contemporary works but is immanently inherent in the sociological science. The survey methodology provides variables related to the past and making demands on memory and the ability to reconstruct events, and also projective questions implying the respondent’s ability to extrapolate patterns from the present to the future. The author summarizes the issues of time in her early and recent works and concludes that there is the temporal turn in the studies of social problems, social policy and social reality. The idea of integrating temporality and sociality results in the new components of the proposed analytical approach which emphasizes the agency of the scientific intelligentsia and updates the intellectual-educational and temporal content of the concept and thesaurus of social reality. The relevance and fundamental nature of the proposed approach are determined by the intersection of the temporality of the social life of individuals and groups with the sociological reflection of the fundamental categories and concepts of time in the academic discourse. Post-non-classical reality allows to conceptually explicate the temporality of inclusive-bifurcation sociality which explains institutional and microsocial problems of communities as non-linear worlds. The scientific-practical meaning of the proposed approach is that the concept of temporal social reality results in the study of modifications of value-symbolic and institutional characteristics of the discourse of the scientists’ role as agents of post-non-classical reality.

The criteria for the analysis of the emotional-psychological state of the organization’s personnel imply the study of the capitalization of cultural values and the presentations of results in the form of mathematical indicators of the projective situation. In the article, corporate culture is considered through the capitalization of its team’s cultural values and its business reputation. The study is based on the metric data (parameters) of the capitalization of cultural values in the context of their application to assess the behavior and cultural ethos of the organization’s team. The object of the applied research was the collective of the private enterprise providing services in the fuel-energy sector; the authors examined the social factors in the formation of its corporate culture (the survey focused on the personnel and managers’ assessment of the social-psychological climate and was based on the quota sample consisting of 16 managers and 100 staff members). The results of the study allow to develop a technology for the effective management of corporate culture under new challenges and risks. Traditions of cooperation, trust and reciprocity were considered on the basis of the works of the classics of sociology. The authors suggested the criteria (parameters) for assessing social capital and social norms which reveal the personnel’s abilities and are developed by the organization in a certain period. The study showed discrepancies in the assessment of the parameters of corporate culture by managers and staff. Thus, managers attach great importance to such a parameter as the emotional-psychological state of the team, while the staff does not appreciate the mutual understanding of micro-groups and shows less emotional involvement. Such results confirm the problems in the management of corporate culture as social capital.

The article is a reflection on the monograph by Zh.T. Toshchenko Trauma Society: Between Evolution and Revolution (Theoretical-Empirical Analysis) (Moscow: Ves Mir, 2020. 352 p.). The book analyzes the huge trauma of the Russian state and people after the collapse of the USSR. At the same time, the book identifies those traumas of the past and present that other countries experience under political, economic, social, and often military cataclysms.

The article is a review of the monograph Essays on the Contemporary Tuvan Culture by the famous Tuvinian scholar C.K. Lamazhaa (Saint Petersburg: Nestor-History, 2021. 192 p.). The reviewed book considers the latest social-cultural processes in the Tuvan society and trends in the development of the Tuvinian studies. Each of the nine sections focuses on a separate feature of the social and cultural life of the contemporary ethnic Tuvans - the indigenous people of the Republic of Tuva, and all sections are logically and meaningfully related. In general, the study is a comprehensive description of the mutual influence and coexistence, of a kind of intertwining past and present in the social-cultural life of the Tuvan people. As a collection, the essays show the author’s confidence in the need to study internal differentiations of any society to produce new knowledge relevant to the reality and providing an adequate understanding of the political and socialcultural life of the multinational society. Lamazhaa believes that to overcome some stagnation, inertia in the Tuvinian studies, we need to combine various research positions and to update the theoretical-methodological basis. Lamazhaa suggests an approach which is based on the principles of the thesaurus approach developed by Val.A. and Vl.A. Lukovs (correlates with the indigenous methodology) and actualizes the subjectivity of indigenous researchers.

From August 22 to 26, 2022, the VIII International Congress of American Studies was held in Rio de Janeiro. This congress focused on the most pressing issues in the contemporary Latin American agenda - globalization and regionalization, economic development, impact of the covid-19 pandemic on social, political, economic, and demographic processes. As a part of the congress, the round table “Migration, Migrants, Migration Policy in the Era of the covid-19: Trends, Consequences, Conclusions” was held. Not only Latin-American researchers, but also scientists from the leading Russian, European, Asian universities and research institutes participated in the round table. They discussed transformations of the international migration and migration policy under the pandemic, ways to ensure the rights of migrants and refugees, state policy measures aimed at restoring internal and international mobility, interstate cooperation and the role of international institutions in ensuring safe, ordered and legal migration.