Abusive parents, internet and TV violence, and social exclusion are all contributing to growing violence in schools, with verbal aggression being the most common type of aggressive behaviour among young people, according to Irina Sizova, Head of the Sociology Laboratory at the HSE Branch in Nizhny Novgorod.
A predominance of women on a company's boards of directors can lead to a loss of flexibility in governance. Yet in times of change, for example during periods of rapid growth or crisis, women can make better leaders than men: they are more willing to take risks and tend to find more unconventional solutions, according to a report 'The Impact of Gender Diversity of the Board and Ownership Structure on Corporate Performance: Evidence from Western Europe' by HSE researchers Tatiana Ratnikova and Dmitry Gavrilov.
Social workers tend to believe that society underestimates the complexity of their mission and fails to fully appreciate the gift of caring and compassion that they offer their clients. Experts warn that social work may lead to burnout, unless practitioners are taught the skills of managing their emotions in dealing with clients and equipped with standard algorithms facilitating their 'emotional work' and thus helping to alleviate stress, according to Olga Simonova, Deputy Head of the HSE Department of General Sociology.
There is not a single country in the world where all people share the same system of values. Every society has members focused on serving others as well as those who value personal achievement above all and rely only on themselves. Independent altruists committed to helping others, yet expecting nothing in return, are relatively rare in all European countries, particularly in post-Soviet countries, where their proportion is among the smallest, according to Vladimir Magun and Maksim Rudnev of the HSE's Laboratory for Comparative Studies in Mass Consciousness.
Russian businesses have been slow in adopting new media tools. Many companies continue to rely on official websites to reach out to customers and avoid using social media and blogs, as they are not ready for an equal dialogue with external audiences, according to Iosif Dzyaloshinsky and Maria Pilgun, professors of the HSE Faculty of Communication, Media and Design.
Once unemployed, mid-level employees suffer primarily from loss of income, while senior-level leaders mostly resent the loss of respect; of all employee categories, production and service workers are most likely to become unemployed. These are some of the findings summarized in the paper 'The dynamics of subjective social status associated with loss of employment: an analysis of occupational differences', which was presented by Anna Zudina, Junior Research Fellow of the Centre for Labour Market Studies, at the Ninth Yuri Levada Memorial Conference on Contemporary Russian Society and Sociology hosted by HSE.
For people today, a job is not only a source of revenue, but also an essential attribute of a full life. Professional work must be interesting, in demand by society, well paid, and must leave a certain level of freedom, young Russians believe. This is what researchers from the HSE Centre for Youth Studies (CYS) in St. Petersburg found out as part of their project ‘Youth solidarities and generations of the 21st century: the values of labour and consumption’.
In Russia, access to professional development is determined by one's occupation, as well as job position, company size, and characteristics of the local labour market. Skilled personnel in non-physical jobs and public sector employees are more likely to pursue professional development, while low-skilled employees in private firms are effectively excluded from any such opportunity, according to Vasiliy Anikin, Assistant Professor of the HSE Department of Applied Economics.
About 40% of the Russian able-bodied population are employed in the informal sector of the economy. This is a competitive market economy. Subsistence production, distributed manufacturing, ‘garage production’, seasonal work and various cottage industries flourish in the Russian regions. The economies of many small cities feature strict specialization and developed cooperation, in the context of internal competition between families and clans. These are the findings of HSE professors Simon Kordonsky and Yury Pliusnin in their study ‘Social Structure of the Russian Provinces’.
The current crisis in Russia is different from all others in its heightened uncertainty and unpredictable consequences, and recent events are comparable to the transformative crisis that occurred in Russia in the 1990s, the Director of the Centre of Development Institute, Natalia Akindinova, and HSE Academic Supervisor Evgeny Yasin said in their paper ‘A New Stage of Economic Development in Post-Soviet Russia.’ The researchers propose four possible scenarios for how the Russian economy might change, the most probable of which, they posit, is a so-called ‘mobilisation scenario.’
