Search

This article investigates the existing international hierarchy employing expert survey as its primary method. 'Authority hierarchy' and 'power status hierarchy,' the two existing research traditions of hierarchy studies, are briefly introduced. We demonstrate a gap between basic research on power status, emphasizing its social nature, and applied case studies, primarily relying on purely material indicators of a country's capabilities, such as the GDP and CINC. In times of rapid hierarchical shifts, there is a need for a more nuanced and holistic approach. The article suggests placing hierarchy studies onto the ontological foundation of Niklas Luhmann's Differentiation Theory to overcome these problems. We trace the international society's segmentary differentiation, stratificatory differentiation (status hierarchy), and functional differentiation (specialization). The paper argues that the functional roles of states and their positions in the international hierarchy are interconnected. The hierarchy of states' roles, resulting from functional differentiation, is understood in terms of authority hierarchy. In order to lay the ground for further research, three valuable insights of states in the international hierarchy. Firstly, we categorize 26 countries as belonging to one of the power status categories (small power, middle power, great power, superpower) as of autumn 2021 based on the survey results. We calculate indices operationalizing power, roles, public goods provision, and revisionism for the states in the survey. Secondly, the paper presents experts' evaluations of the importance of various valued attributes (such as the size of the economy, military might, international prestige, autonomy, etc.) for different power status categories. Thirdly, we suggest a novel approach linking a country's position in the international hierarchy to its functional roles. We use correlation analysis to test the hypothesis and compare the roles index to other popular power status indicators.

Recent computing power and storage advancements have meant more data are being collected and stored. Referred to as 'Big data', these data sources offer researchers myriad opportunities to make observations about the social world. These data can be massive, provide insight into whole populations rather than just a sample, and be used to analyse social behaviour in real time. Administrative data, a subcategory under the big data umbrella, also offers researchers abundant opportunities to conduct highly relevant research in many areas, including sociology, social policy, education, health studies and many more. This paper offers reflections on social research during the digital age by examining different forms of data, both 'big' and 'small', and their associated advantages and disadvantages. The paper concludes by suggesting that although big data has some promising elements, it also comes with some limitations and povwill not replace 'traditional' social surveys. And yet, when used in conjunction with social surveys, appropriately and ethically, big data could offer the researchers additional valuable insights.

Recent computing power and storage advancements have meant more data are being collected and stored. Referred to as 'Big data', these data sources offer researchers myriad opportunities to make observations about the social world. These data can be massive, provide insight into whole populations rather than just a sample, and be used to analyse social behaviour in real time. Administrative data, a subcategory under the big data umbrella, also offers researchers abundant opportunities to conduct highly relevant research in many areas, including sociology, social policy, education, health studies and many more. This paper offers reflections on social research during the digital age by examining different forms of data, both 'big' and 'small', and their associated advantages and disadvantages. The paper concludes by suggesting that although big data has some promising elements, it also comes with some limitations and povwill not replace 'traditional' social surveys. And yet, when used in conjunction with social surveys, appropriately and ethically, big data could offer the researchers additional valuable insights.

This paper presents a historical view of the emergence of what is known as the communicative paradigm. Through a personal reminiscence of his long career, Thomas Luckmann entangles the main sources of what was a radical shift of the role of language and communication in the humanities and social sciences. In doing so, Luckmann shows that the epistemological and ontological assumptions on which the contemporary study of social interaction and communicative processes rely were practically non-existent half a century ago. While sociology and linguistics seemed to exist in separate universes during Luckmann’s student days, a dialogical approach to language and social life eventually appeared — for example, in ethnomethodology, conversational analysis and French structuralism — and laid the foundation to the (today taken for granted) idea that social realities are the result of human activities. Human social reality and the worldview that motivates and guides interaction are mainly constructed in communicative processes. If social reality is constructed in communicative interaction our most reliable knowledge of that reality comes from reconstructions of these processes. Such reconstructions have been greatly facilitated by technological innovation, such as tape— and video-recorder, which, alongside theoretical advancements, may explain the timing of the communicative turn. Finally, this paper marks the benefits of sequential analysis in enabling us to trace step-by-step the processes by which social reality is constructed and reconstructed.

Objective: the paper aims to define the problems juridical theory and practice face with the progress of AI technologies in everyday life and correlate these problems with the human-centered approach to exploring artificial intelligence (Human-Centered AI).Methods: the research critically analyzes the relevant literature from various disciplines: jurisprudence, sociology, philosophy, and computer sciences.Results: the article articulates the prospects and problems the legal system confronts with the advancement of digital technologies in general and the tools of AI specifically. The identified problems are correlated with the provisions of the human-centered approach to AI. The authors acknowledge the necessity for AI inventors, as well as the owners of companies participating in the race to develop artificial intelligence technologies, to place humans, not machines, into the focus of attention as a primary value. In particular, special effort should be directed towards collecting and analyzing high-quality data for the organization of artificial intelligence tools development, taking into account that nowadays, the tools of AI are as practical as the data on which they are trained are effective.The authors formulate three principles of human-centered AI for the legal sphere: 1) a human as a necessary link in the chain of making and executing legal decisions; 2) the need to regulate artificial intelligence at the international law level; 3) formulating “a taboo” for introducing the artificial intelligence technologies.Scientific novelty: the article manifests one of the first attempts in the Russianlanguage scientific literature to outline the prospects of developing humancentered AI methodology in jurisprudence. Based on an analysis of special literature, the authors formulate three principles of including artificial intelligence into juridical theory and practice according to the assumptions of a human-centered approach to AI.Practical significance: the principles and arguments the article advances can be helpful in the legal regulation of artificial intelligence technologies and their harmonious inclusion into legal practices.

The research paper presents a review of the monograph devoted to the methodological and theoretical aspects of the digital societysociology. L.A. Vasilenko and N.N. Meshcheryakova introduce the digital society conceptas a new independent stage in the existence of a post-industrial society and a transitional stage to a postdigital one. The concept is constituted through the description of the digital society essential features, which qualitatively distinguish it on the general line of civilizational development. The authors submit that classical sociology, with its spectrum of theories, methods and techniques, is not enough to understand the hybrid reality, partially virtualized. The monograph lays the theoretical and methodological foundations of sociology of digital society. Its content is aimed at summing up the study resultsof the digital society as a special stage of the information society and the formation of the author’s vision of the way to solve problems. Reviews of the most significant studies have been generated in the text. A multidisciplinary approach to the review and to the presentation of one’s own positions and developments has been presented. The authors go far beyond the subject of sociological science itself, and form a three-dimensional picture of digital society as a whole. Digital society is considered from the perspective of a civilizational approach. The authors consistently concentrate their attention on the issue of the evolution of the information society formation, then move on to the main aspect of the author’s concept. They are deploying arguments in favor of proving that the digital society is the next stage in the information society development. An original scenario approach to the empirical data interpretation on the digitalisation process has been implemented. When organising the study and formulating conclusions, positive and negative consequences and scenarios of evolution are highlighted. The book is of considerable interest to sociologists, philosophers, specialists in the field of social management.

This paper analyzes Percival Lowell's (1855–1916) views on the characteristics of Japanese culture. During the period of 1882–1893, he made three scientific trips to Japan and Korea, which were the result of four books and several papers in periodicals. In his works, P. Lowell introduced a holistic image of the Japanese traditional culture, which he identified with the Far Eastern civilization as a whole system. He was a great connoisseur of Japanese landscape art and ikebana. The value of his work is that P. Lowell performed a comparative research of the highly developed traditional culture with the cultural type of modernity. He raised questions of personal identity in the traditional culture. Books and articles written by P. Lowell remain important as the primary sources for Japanese art and Shinto rituals. We have used the comparative and historical-typological methods to analyze P. Lowell's main works: “Chosön, the Land of the Morning Calm: A Sketch of Korea”; “The Soul of the Far East”; and “Occult Japan: Or, the Way of the Gods”. It is obvious from these works that P. Lowell considered Japan as a “mirror world” of the West and studied it through the prism of social Darwinism. He was the first to develop the mechanisms for investigating Japan. One of the methods was comparison of the national psychologies of the Japanese and Europeans, which was more comprehensive than M. Weber's ideal types. He pioneered in the research on the mental characteristics of traditional cultures in field conditions by focusing on esoteric (trance-like) rituals. P. Lowell raised questions of personal identity in the society dominated by archaic forms of living and concluded that it is influenced greatly by external mechanisms, mostly family, suppressing individuality. P. Lowell believed that the westernization of Japan is impossible, because the Japanese mind is unable to learn the achievements of Western science. The consequences of these views were that P. Lowell's studies on Japan were never reprinted until 2006.

The paper deals with the history of the “sociology of the occult”. It examines main stages of its development exemplified by works of C. Campbell, E. Tiryakian, M. Truzzi, J. Webb. The latest expression of ideas of this school is the theory of occulture proposed by the British religious scholar and researcher of culture C. Partridge. Partridge has combined the achievements of sociology of the occult with modern theories related to the study of Western esotericism. His concept of occulture aims at the identifi cation of traces of Western esotericism in modern popular culture. This paper shows the heuristic value of the theory of occulture and analyses main forms of occulture developed under the influence of Eastern doctrines and Christian demonology. Partridge’s theory fi ts into the general context of research into Western esotericism and is related to the conception of W. Hanegraaff. In conclusion, the theory of occulture is correlated with the four main approaches to the study of Western esotericism.

This paper presents a conceptual-discursive analysis of Immanuel Kant’s texts from the viewpoint of the ontological essence of humanity (the so-called human nature). On the basis of a functional-pragmatic methodology, the author proposes a metalanguage for a pragmatic conceptual analysis of Kant’s philosophical discourse, together with his own idea of a human as a person, human being, individual, character, and bearer of human traits. The paper consists of two parts. Part One presents the principles by which the human personality is structured, as well as the fundamental methodological questions of the essence of humanity. Part Two analyzes Kant’s notion of “human nature” in both the formal aspect and that of systematic localization. It also considers the issues of social pragmatics and the empirical motivation of “human nature,” which arise from a discursive analysis of texts by Kant. The author attempts to demonstrate that Kant was one of the first philosophers to discern the specificity of human nature in social relations of human personality, which he presented neither in a causal-deterministic form (as a spiritual substance handed down from generation to generation) nor an essentialist one (as a timeless transcendental essence), but rather as a function of social experience for a particular human being (both pragmatic-teleological and transcendental-a posteriori).

The book is constructed in the form of an interview of the famous Soviet/Russian sociologist and americanist doctor of sciences N.P. Popov with doctor of sciences B.Z. Doktorov, who developed the genre of scientific memoirs and conducted over a hundred interviews with Russian and American sociologists. The paper covers three main topics. Like any biography, this is a personal story of the author — his youth in the post-war years, the path to the profession of a journalist and sociologist, the worldview of the “sixties”. Journalism leads the author, as well as many American pollsters, to the study of public opinion, at first American, continued at the Institute of US and Canadian Studies. He like no other is closely acquainted with the work of leading American pollsters: George Gallup, Louis Harris, Warren Mitofsky, Mervin Field and other gurus. The study of American polling technology and public opinion on socio-political problems and electoral orientations of the population were used by the author in further work at Soviet and Russian centers for the study of public opinion, first of all – at the All-Union center for the study of public opinion (VTSIOM), created in 1988, where he was offered a job by Tatyana Zaslavskaya and Boris Grushin. They also recommended him later as head of the sociological department of the presidential administration right before the 1996 election. The book includes a number of articles by the author on Russian and American public opinion in different years.

In 2018, the journal Sociološki Pregled/Sociological Review celebrated its 80th anniversary. The first Serbian sociological journal Društveni Život/ Social Life was published in Belgrade in 1920 and 1921, and then renewed in 1930 in Novi Sad. The editor-in-chief and publisher of this journal was Mirko Kosić, a professor at the Faculty of Law in Subotica. After establishing Society for Legal Philosophy and Sociology in 1935 and Society for Sociology and Social Sciences in 1938, a new sociological journal - Sociological Review , edited by a professor from the Faculty of Law in Belgrade, Đorđe Tasić - began to be published. Thematically it covered various sociological disciplines and other social sciences for sociology is a multidisciplinary science. The work of the Sociological Society and the journal was interrupted by the II World War, in which Đorđe Tasić was killed. Other members of the Society for Sociology and Social Sciences and associates of Sociološki Pregled were no longer interested in sociology and sociological topics. Sociološki Pregled was renewed in 1961 by the Serbian Sociological Society, first as a collection of papers and then as a journal in 1964. Since then, the journal has been an active participant of scientific and academic life in this region providing an overview of current trends in sociology in the world and in our country. The intellectual elite of Serbia has participated in its publishing both directly and indirectly, both its oldest and prominent members and the youngest ones. About 200 issues of Sociološki Pregled with more than 30,000 pages were published from 1938 to 2018 and present a valuable material for sociological life and an irreplaceable information manual on decades of contemporary history of Serbia and Yugoslavia. Such a role could not have been played by any other journal. Sociološki Pregled is a theoretical journal, a manual, an informative newsletter, a reminder, a witness, an informer - all at the same time. That is why it is necessary to consider the journal in both historical and contemporary perspectives.

This paper presents a conceptual-discursi­ve analysis of Immanuel Kant’s texts from the viewpoint of the ontological essence of humanity (the so-called “human nature”). On the basis of a functional-pragmatic methodology, the author proposes a metalanguage of pragmatic conceptual analysis for Kant’s philosophical discourse, along with his own idea of a human as a person, human being, individual, character, and bearer of huma­nity’s traits. The paper consists of two parts. Part One presents the principles of structuralization of human personality, and raises fundamental methodological questions about the essence of humanity. Part Two analyzes Kant’s notion of human nature in both the formal aspect and that of systematic localization, and also considers issues of social pragmatics and the empirical motivation of human nature, issues which arise from a discu­rsive analysis of texts by Kant. The author aims to prove that Kant was one of the first philosophers to see the specificity of humanity in social relations, and presented it, neither in a causal-deterministic form (as a spiritual substance handed down from generation to generation), nor an essentialistic form (as a timeless transcendental essence), but in the form of a function of an individual’s social experience (both pragmatic-teleological and tran­scendental-aposteriori).

This paper presents a conceptual-discursive analysis of Immanuel Kant’s texts from the viewpoint of the ontological essence of humanity (the so-called human nature). On the basis of a functional-pragmatic methodology, the author proposes a metalanguage for a pragmatic conceptual analysis of Kant’s philosophical discourse, together with his own idea of a human as a person, human being, individual, character, and bearer of human traits. The paper consists of two parts. Part One presents the principles by which the human personality is structured, as well as the fundamental methodological questions of the essence of humanity. Part Two analyzes Kant’s notion of “human nature” in both the formal aspect and that of systematic localization. It also considers the issues of social pragmatics and the empirical motivation of “human nature,” which arise from a discursive analysis of texts by Kant. The author attempts to demonstrate that Kant was one of the first philosophers to discern the specificity of human nature in social relations of human personality, which he presented neither in a causal-deterministic form (as a spiritual substance handed down from generation to generation) nor an essentialist one (as a timeless transcendental essence), but rather as a function of social experience for a particular human being (both pragmatic-teleological and transcendental-a posteriori).

This article first presents reflections on the joint work carried out by Michael Cernea and this paper's author over 8-9 years for gaining "room, recognition and resources" within the CGIAR for sociological and socio-anthropological research on farmers, their practices and needs. The status of social research inside the CGIAR has gone through ups and downs in the uphill battle for expanding social research within this organization. Social scientists have constantly worked to feed their findings into the Centers' biophysical research. The paper documents the contribution of Michael Cernea, the first sociologist who acceded to CGIAR's top science and policy bodies, to strengthening the presence and influence of sociological and anthropological knowledge within CGIAR's institutional architecture and scientific products.The second part of this study presents the high promise of Conservation Agriculture (CA) - a new paradigm for non-tillage agricultural production that offers improved productivity and environmental protection. CA principles are universally applicable. The author offers global data on the impressive advances and distribution of CA, which covers already some 125 million ha distributed across all continents and agro-ecologies. CA is a farmer-driven socio-cultural phenomenon which has expanded at a yearly rate of 7 mil. ha during the past decade.

The article presents the experience of the Institute of Socio-Economic Development of Territories of RAS in conducting sociological research on the territory of the Vologda Oblast and the Northwestern Federal District. It describes the historical aspects of formation of the system for public opinion monitoring and examines its theoretical and methodological foundations. The author of the article analyzes the structure of monitoring indicators and provides a brief interpretation of research findings that reflect social wellbeing and social perception trends. In addition, the paper analyzes people’s attitude toward the activities of federal and regional authorities, trends in social well-being, consumer sentiment and also the complex indicator – the index of public sentiment in the region – developed by ISEDT RAS researchers. The results of sociological studies carried out at ISEDT RAS correlate with the dynamics of the all-Russian public opinion polls conducted by the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM), Levada-Center, etc. They indicate that Russian society gradually adapts to new conditions of life after the collapse of the USSR. Besides, opinion polls show the most important features of the post-Soviet Russian history at its present stage; they are associated with the intensification of international political relations, the consequences of the “Crimean spring” and the new challenges Russia’s economy is facing now. The article concludes that as global community, of which Russian society is part, is evolving, sociological knowledge begins to play an increasingly important role in administration and national security; this is associated with the greater importance attached to intangible development factors. Therefore, a necessary prerequisite for administration effectiveness in all its stages is to implement the results of sociological research on social transformation trends and factors in the system of managerial decision-making. Twenty-five years of ISEDT RAS experience clearly show that this principle is relevant, it enjoys great demand and brings actual practical results. It indicates that the system of feedback between society and government, a feedback based on sociological research, provides extensive information on social well-being, economic situation, and political attitudes, helps evaluate the effectiveness of government economic and social policy more adequately, address the rights and interests of various population groups in the development and implementation of socially important managerial decisions

This paper provides an analysis of contemporary Russian academic literature on spirituality. The authors single out key features of these texts, especially their approach to defi ning their subject. They formulate major semantic contexts within which spirituality is discussed by sociologists and psychologists, as well as practical implications of the term. The authors compare the academic usage of the term ‘spirituality’ with its usage in everyday language; the comparison is based on a mass survey conducted in 2006. In the literature that served as the material for the present study, we can observe political, cultural and religious aspects of spirituality. It can be viewed as a form of patriotism, as religious worldview, as overcoming the limitations of human nature, as erudition, as a means to fi ght the non-spiritual character of modern society, or as an aspiration towards the ideal. The overall fuzziness of the term is a consequence of its emotional and utopian connotations in the Russian language.

The paper presents the methodology and results of graduates’ monitoring that solves the problem of the evaluation of higher education institutions. The goal of the present study is to develop methodology of the effectiveness of training estimation in high school and to test it on a sample of Department of Sociology’s graduates. The wide interpretation of learning outcomes, including objective and subjective indicators of employment of graduates of formation and professional, analytical and communication skills has been proposed. The result of monitoring information is the basis of informed decisions in the management of educational processes at the university. In scientific terms, the monitoring data allows us to estimate the impact of the various components of the learning outcomes (formed skills, acquired social capital, etc.) at professional tracks. Information base of monitoring made by online alumni Sociology Department EF NSU survey, that’s materials revealed what analytical skills formed during study at the university, allow them to adapt to the diversified requirements of the labor market. Graduates sociologists are divided into two streams: a smaller consisting of working in the specialty, which is formed mainly through personalized contacts, and the bigger distributed to other segments of the labor market through a formal selection process.