Tag "sociology"

Since World War II, people in many countries have enjoyed a better sense of wellbeing, which has resulted in survival values giving way to emancipation values. Threats no longer lurk at every turn, and each new generation sees more opportunities and fewer barriers to empowerment. The book Freedom Rising by LCCR Chief Research Fellow Christian Welzel offers some ideas on how widespread this process is, whether it is irreversible and where human emancipation can lead.

Residents of provincial Russian towns put it differently when talking about their towns to Muscovites, foreigners, and tourists from other Russian regions. Such an ‘individual approach’ is spontaneous and may be useful in creating city tourist brands, concluded Nadezhda Radina as a result of her experiment, which involved over 800 residents of Russian provinces.

In October, the international seminar ‘Creative Labour Revisited: Cultural Production in Distinct Institutional Environments’ took place at the Experimental Sound Museum in St. Petersburg. The event was supported by the HSE campus in St. Petersburg and the Centre for German and European Studies. The seminar was initiated by Margarita Kuleva, lecturer at HSE’s Department of Sociology in St. Petersburg, and attracted Russian scholars, including HSE researchers and international academics.

Social scientists from National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE) measured scientific capital of 39 physics institutions of Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). More detailed information about research results can be found in the journal Scientometrics.

From July 10 – 14, 2016, the Third International Sociological Association (ISA) Forum of Sociology on ‘The Futures We Want: Global Sociology and the Struggles for a Better World’ took place in Vienna. About 5,000 scholars from 126 countries took part in the event.

Youth in medium-sized and small towns who engage in after-school activities such as hobby clubs are less likely to drink alcohol. Generally, school-age youth in communities with higher educational levels, social and professional status are less vulnerable to alcohol abuse.

An article by Director of the Centre for Culture of Sociology and Anthropology of Education (CCSAE), Dmitry Kurakin has been published in Oxford University Press’s leading international sociology journal the European Sociological Review. Dr. Kurakin co-wrote the article Horizontal and 'Vertical Gender Segregation in Russia — Changes upon Labour Market Entry before and after the Collapse of the Soviet Regime' with fellow researchers at the European University Institute on the eduLIFE project.

The Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (IGITI) held an international conference on 29-30 October 2015 on ‘Biological Concepts, Models, and Metaphors in Social and Human Sciences’. For two days, Russian, European and American researchers discussed the relations between social sciences and the humanities and various life sciences. This topic arises largely in the light of the recent boom in genetics, medicine and biology which have led academics to reconsider previous concepts of boundaries and connections between disciplines.

Ambiguous attitudes held by the heirs of Russian moguls may affect the future of the country's big businesses. On one hand, the children of wealthy Russian business owners have an excellent headstart – they are well-educated and generally share their parents' values. Yet on the other hand, they are not likely to become selfless workaholics. Instead, they tend to be more hedonistic than their parents and less inclined to devote their entire life to building the family business. Most Russian business heirs expect to retire early and switch to hobbies, recreation and entertainment in their mid-life. Elena Rozhdestvenskaya, professor of the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences, is the first Russian researcher to study the mindsets of heirs of biggest Russian fortunes.

More than twenty years after the collapse of the socialist bloc, virtually none of the post-communist countries have attained the level of socioeconomic development characteristic of advanced democracies. Likewise, none of the post-communist countries have emerged as successful autocracies with high-quality public institutions, such as those found in Singapore or Oman. Professor Andrei Melville, Dean of the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences, and Mikhail Mironyuk, Associate Professor of the HSE School of Political Science, examine possible reasons why it is so.