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Research Papers
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9–48
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The article aims to examine Russian workers’ career strategies in situations of biographical choices. Based on class and intersectional analyses, the authors define different types of working-class career strategies, understood here as professional choices corresponding to their social mobility. Young workers’ upward mobility is possible in the hierarchy of large industrial enterprises on the condition that they upgrade their skills and improve their professional knowledge. The factory hierarchy allows them to convert educational capital into symbolic and economic capitals. For instance, getting a higher education can help a worker to become a shop supervisor. Downward mobility is typical mostly for workers of the older generations who could not adjust to the new socio-economic conditions in the transition period, failing professionally and then being downgraded. The article supports the idea that the strategy of class reproduction is typical for the working-class environment in modern Russia. Workers’ career strategies are gender-specific. In spite of the fact that female workers have career ambitions, they aim to become more successful in the private sphere (e.g., in marriage and family life), while “success” for male workers is manifested either in building a professional career, or in improving their living conditions. The authors conclude that Russian workers today generally do not problematize their social status strongly. |
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49–67
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The article deals with the rhetoric of Russian authorities in relation to youth from May, 2012, the beginning of Vladimir Putin’s third presidential term, to May, 2016. The study is based on a constructionist research program of four dimensions of social problems discourse developed by Peter Ibarra and John Kitsuse, rhetorical idioms, motifs, claims-making styles,and counter-rhetorics. The analysis focuses on the identification of the motifs of the power rhetoric in relation to young people, that is, recurrent speech constructions highlighting a central dimension of the problematized situation and the responses to it. The analysis of the rhetoric confirms the assumption about the pragmatic attitude of the Russian ruling elite concerning youth. Authorities problematize an alleged external influence on young people, while a number of situations that could be defined as a problem such as the limited life chances of young people, HIV/AIDS, or repressive criminal policy, etc., do not have the status of the problem. The study of speeches of the president, government programs, and Russian government reports shows that the specific motifs of the authorities’ rhetoric in relation to youth are “threat,” “protection,” and “traditional values” while the permanent features of the power discourse are militarization and traditionalism. The authorities emphasize “traditional values” without specifying what these values are. These values are declared as “true” and opposed to “quasi-values,” without clarifying the principles of such division. The shifts in the interpretation of the “national idea” from the competitiveness of the country to patriotism, and in the interpretation of patriotism from the “love for Motherland” to the readiness to defend the state by military means, are revealed. |
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68–90
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This article presents a result of qualitative research aimed to determine and identify the role and functions of literary magazines in the contemporary Russian literary process. The study was conducted in four Russian cities. It included 21 semi-structured interviews with different participants of the literary process, and magazines’ staff. It also involves participant observations of the magazines’ working routine. An optional range of materials is used to triangulate data. This paper examines the interaction of literary magazines with different actors of the literary process, i.e., literary awards, literary contests, writers, aspiring authors, and regional libraries. The paper explains why an aspiring author needs to be published in such magazines at the beginning of his/her writing career. Overall, the researcher comes to the conclusion that literary magazines play a significant role in the literary process, as they perform a number of functions necessary for its normal functioning. However, the position of the magazines is ambivalent, because, on the one hand, they are financially unstable and not well-known outside the professional community, while on the other hand, the magazines have the expert function that gives the right to influence the development of modern literature process by approving, or not approving, certain texts. |
Ethnomethodology and conversation analysis
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91–121
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The article discusses the methodology of video analysis and the prospects of using it in studying the social interaction order. The distinction between the traditional understanding of visual sociology and an interactionist view on the use of video technology in the sociological study is drawn. We describe the development of video analysis and the areas where this methodology is applied. The article analyses the characteristics of video as a research tool for studying everyday interactions, and emphasizes the advantages of the method such as the naturalistic approach, a focus on the multimodality and organization of interactions, and the ability to grasp the role of material objects and environment. We outline specific traits of video, such as the possibility of replaying it, the similarities and differences of the social, scientific and “professional” methods of working with video, and the reflexivity in the process of production and handling recordings. Using video for sociological research is discussed as a space of methodological choices. Issues of where to install a camera, what software to employ for archiving files, montage and editing, how to transcribe and present data, or whether to analyze fragments on data sessions have substantive consequences. These choices are made by the researcher and formed by his interests and questions, as well as by particularities of the object. The aspects and potential of video analysis are elaborated in the example of the research of museum visitors. Besides a brief review of the recent studies of visitors’ interactions, we demonstrate how a sociologist can produce, transcribe, and make sense of a video fragment. |
Political Philosophy
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122–149
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The paper takes the problem of social order or the conditions of the possibility of modern society that consists of a multitude of rational actors who pursue their private interests while frequently having opposing goals into consideration. The paper demonstrates that the problem in question, also known as a Hobbesian problem, has been transmitted to the center of the discourse of social science long ago since being formulated for the first time in 1651 by Thomas Hobbes in his famous Leviathan. The solution of the problem of social order as proposed by Hobbes, consisting in the recognition of the necessity to constitute a dominant political authority, i.e., the state which is capable of maintaining stable social relations, caused an intensive theoretical debate that continues to this day. Social theorists have proposed a large variety of answers to the question posed by Hobbes, but none can be considered as final or comprehensive. The paper makes an attempt to reconstruct various theoretical and methodological approaches to the problem of social order, from the solution proposed by Hobbes (including its reformulation by Talcott Parsons) to the analytical concepts of social order elaborated by contemporary thinkers belonging to different theoretical orientations. The article makes the conclusion that translating the old problem of classical political philosophy of modernity into the language of actual contemporary social theory allows the problematization of the heuristic foundations of political discourse of modernity by operationalizing its key concept. |
Russian Atlantis
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150–172
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In the article, an attempt is undertaken to apply the concept of geophilosophy of G. Deleuze and F. Guattari to the main range of problems of Russian religious philosophy. Under such an approach, world development projects are put into the foreground, in particular, Vl. Solovyov’s project of universal theocracy. The authors begin with the representation that such world-organizing projects are an obligatory component of a nascent philosophical discourse. Several key themes of Russian thought, that is, such “Russian ideas” as the opposition between Russia and Europe, or the historical mission of Russia, are considered not only from the point of view of the validity or untruthfulness of their content, but as a specific intellectual experience of the reclamation of world areas by the means of philosophical thought, and the experience of geosophy. As opposition to the West failed, the sacral dimension of the expanse of Russia’s geography appears not only as a sacred geographical region or as a mystical, corporeal sphere (V. V. Rozanov), but also as an “icy desert” (K. P. Pobedonostsev), or as a tectonic break opening doors to another world (Vl. Solovyov and Sophiology). The world-development projects of Russian philosophy naturally find a universal scale, a possibility owing to specific “non-dualistic” uses of the category of the world. The experience of Russian geosophy, both positive and negative, remains a reality and deserves serious consideration. |
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173–196
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The historiosophical views of Pyotr Chaadaev (1794–1856) have been widely discussed and studied since the publication of the first Philosophical Letter to the Lady in the journal Telescope in the autumn of 1836. However, the range of the available works of Chaadaev was limited for a long time. Thus, Chaadaev’s five of the eight Philosophical Letters remained unknown until 1935, and the number of his letters that were studied was limited until the last few decades. The article aims to support the thesis of the fundamental consistency of the key provisions of Chaadaev in the last quarter of his life, from the completion of the Philosophical Letters series until his death. The author interprets the evolution of Chaadaev’s assessments of both “the future of Russia” and specific intellectual ideas of the Russian thought as a manifestation of his strong and constant principal position for the variations observed in the 1830s until the first half of 1850s which fit into the original conceptual scheme. Chaadaev’s assessments of the Slavophil intellectual movement within Russian thought and the Eastern Church (meaning only the Russian Orthodox Church) underwent the most significant changes. On the one hand, Chaadaev provided new estimates and returned to previous ones, which proves his saving of his original point of view. On the other hand, the changes in the assessment of Orthodoxy turn out to be a continuation and extension of the original approach to the interpretation of the place of Russia in world history. |
Reflections on a book
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196–212
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The edited volume Collective Memories in War (2016), published by the European Sociological Association, is released in the Studies in European Sociology series, and introduces English-speaking readers with memory research in Russia and Poland (the majority of authors is represented by these countries), as well as the Czech Republic and Ukraine. The focus of the foreign authors is the policy of history and memory of various aspects of the Second World War, while the Russian sociologists primarily analyze the collective memory of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. The theoretical and methodological bases of the research are classics of Memory Studies (M. Halbwachs, P. Nora, J. Assman), the critical theory ideas of A. Gramsci, M. Foucault, and others, some articles using the conceptions of social movements and identity, trauma, the theory of language games, habitual memory, and so on. The empirical research is made using the following qualitative and quantitative methodologies: surveys with national samples in Poland and the Czech Republic, focus groups, observation, and biographical interviews. The five sections of the book contain articles on the politics of history and historical consciousness research with an emphasis on changes since 1989, the narrating of memories, studying urban war memorials, and museums’ and veterans’ websites. Separate sections are devoted to the analysis of modern history textbooks in different countries, and to gender issues. |
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213–222
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Raewyn Connell’s book Gender and Power: Society, the Person, and Sexual Politics, published by the New Literary Observer Publishing House in Russian, presents a theory and the methodology of structural constructivist perspective for gender studies. Connell examines gender as a social structure that forms models of masculinity and femininity. The concept of the structure fixes constraints and limits of social organization (social institutions) that reflects “the rigidity of the social world.” At the same time, the structure may be a subject of purposeful practice. The mutual dynamics of the structure and practice determines the fundamental characteristic of gender relations, that of their historicity. The power structure seeks to provide a high degree of regulating the gender order. At the same time, numerous conflicts over gender and sexuality, formed social groups, and resistance movements have developed in the space of the practices. In discussing feminist ideas and theories, Connell raises the question of the involvement of the people involved in the transformation projects of gender relations based on equality criterion. One of Connell’s key ideas is “to understand the game of social forces in which gender plays a leading role,” cutting off any attempt to find a single or universal explanation. This approach has created prospects for Comparative Studies, which is able to describe and explain the forms of organization of gender relations in different cultures and societies. This conception sheds light on the exceptional importance of the role of gender in the “game of social forces” that determines the course and direction of social transformation in modern Russia. |
Book reviews
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223–233
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Review: Richard Fitzgerald, William Housley (eds.) Advances in Membership Categorisation Analysis (London: SAGE, 2015). |
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234–240
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Review: Svetlana Barsukova, Jesse o neformal'noj jekonomike, ili 16 ottenkov serogo [Essays on Informal Economy; or, 16 Shades of Grey] (Moscow: HSE, 2015) (in Russian). |
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241–246
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Review: John Abromeit, Max Horkheimer and the Foundations of the Frankfurt School (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). |
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247–254
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Review: Roger Sansi, Art, Anthropology and the Gift (London: Bloomsbury, 2015) |
In memoriam
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