2003. vol. 3. No. 3

This paper is devoted to the proving of three fundamental principles of democracy. The first one notes that the ideal of democracy has some kind of uncertainty. The second one remarks that the concept of “civil society” is unsuitable for solving analytical and practical problems. Finally, the third one points out that the key for understanding the correlation between democratic ideal & democratic reality is the question about human rights & social justice. Because of these principles, modern political science has some new questions, such as “Who is nation?” & “Is it possible for democracy to have more than one nation?”. During this research we have shown some approaches for solving these questions. 

An elementary difficulty with the analysis of ephemeral communicative processes — as of all social interaction — is their transformation into data (into “texts”). Audio- and video-recording technologies are a presupposition — and no more — for the solution of this difficulty. Contextual problems of interpretation encountered in the analysis of the products of certain kinds of communicative interaction, texts, are compounded when dealing with the interactive, situational and social contexts of dialogical “texts”. The ontological assumptions underlying the analysis of texts and “texts” (the realism of common sense and the realism of science) have methodological implications among which one in particular, pertaining especially to “texts”, will be discussed, the need for the reconstruction of the intersubjective step-by-step nature of dialogue in the form of sequential analysis. The reconstruction of dialogue must be able to account for the reciprocally oriented perspectives guiding the communicative actions of the participants in dialogical time. In addition to meeting the requirements of such analysis, the main issues arising from that are analogous to those which beset the interpretation of texts: how can one identify the “units” of meaning and how can one locate their embeddedness in multiple (biographical and institutional) lines of significance. The possibilities of a sequential reconstruction of “texts” in contexts will be discussed.

This paper is devoted to review of the 6th Conference of the European Sociological Association, which a lot of Russian sociologists participated in. For example, there was A. Gofman, S. Novikova, V. Bolgov, T. Kozlova, I. Turina etc. This article describes the features of different sections of this conference and reflects its main discussions.

Any empirical research in the field of community studies and urban studies implies certain kind of axiomatic assumptions about space, time and their interrelations. This article is devoted to analysis of such assumptions based on the case study of “residential differentiation” phenomena. Residential communities are social establishments that appear as a result of non-linear, wave-like inhabitation of territories. In such communities groups of “oldtimers” and “newcomers”, “old families” and “new families” are well distinguished and easy to analyze. That allows grasping residential phenomena as a factor of social differentiation in space and time. This article demonstrates that in such residential communities of various caliber – from a military barracks and student dormitory to Newburyport (MA) and Haifa (Israel) – similar patterns of relations between “old” and “new” residential groups can be observed. Taking from H. Lefebvre and A. Giddens theoretical suggestions the author is trying to show what kind of axiomatic assumptions about space-time relations are implied in residential differentiation studies.

Modern Russia is including in global informational process & become a part of united Europe. Due to this transformation, sociologists must answer the concrete questions about country development tendencies. However, sociology can not predict the future development at all. This research demonstrates classical sociological approaches, which were suggested by M. Weber and F. Tönnies and which can be certainly useful today.