N 3 (135)

Modern history of Russian sociology

Igor Kon: «You Can’t Hide Anything From History». From Email Correspondence With I.S. Kon. Part II. 2007-2008

This article provides the second part of my six-year correspondence with I. S. Kon. It began in April 2005 and broke off on March 5, 2011, shortly before Kon's death. The first publication contained 39 letters for 2005-2006, in the period under review, 2007-2008, we exchanged 107 letters. First of all, Kon's letters provide an opportunity to get actory of Russian sociology. In addition, they show his attitude to the facts and the nature of his assessments of his colleagues' activities as well as his ethics of historical search. I emphasize that this is not about the general theoretical arguments of Kon, but about examples of his discussion of specific, very difficult scientific and ethical situations.

 

Reflections

Analyzing Habermas: Conservative Post-Marxism and New Model of Social Development

The article is dedicated to J. Habermas' 90th birthday and to analysis of his contribution to sociological theorizing with special focus on his conception of the modern society development. The neo-Marxist and post-Marxist phases in his intellectual career have been characterized. Habermas' integrative paradigm and his two-level theory of society are interpreted as a new perspective on goals and indicators of social development. Being presented as foundations of sociality, communicative rationality and communicative action correspond to current processes of social development, but in Habermas' theory they are used to deter social changes and to defend values and institutions of the previous centuries. from the past. Conception of the life-world defense against the system expansion is a kind of conservative utopia. Under today's virtualization and postvirtualization conditions the life-world is not conservative reality of everyday routine but augmented reality constructed by creative and mobile communications and supported by network and flow structures. In such augmented social reality, communicative action creates meanings, symbolic structures legitimating purposive-rational action and the system.

 

Cultural Studies

Students about Pushkin

The paper analyzes students' essays about works of Alexander S. Pushkin. These essays clarify students' perceptions of the poet heritage in their life. The article provides the list of the most kept in mind strophes. Author emphasizes the role of parents and the school in children and teenagers' acquaintance with Pushkin's legacy. The values and meanings extracted by young people from Pushkin's poetry are also considered. The main conclusion is that to some extend Pushkin's heritage is present in the life of students.

 

Sociology of religion

«Well, were going to church...»: religious socialization in family following the interviews with believers and their children

Religiosity reproduction in religious families is a new and understudied area in modern Russian sociology. Due to the growth of the number of Russian believers in second and third generation, it has become possible to study the religiosity phenomenon not merely as a result of personal religious conversion, but as a consequence of cross-generational translation within families as well. The article presents the results of the empirical study of religiosity reproduction on religious families. Following the materials of the interviews (n=25) of religious persons (Orthodox and Protestant), the article describes various factors that to one degree or another, impact the religiosity transmission from parents to their children. One may state that in process of religious socialization family plays a more significant role than peers, Sunday school attendance, etc. It has been found that the level of enchurchment of adults is also connected to how they inherited their parents' models and styles of intrafamilial relations during their childhood.

 

Methodology and methods

Conceptual generalization of sociological data

In the modern world of exponentially increasing information, it becomes more and more difficult to analyze and organize well-known data such as: texts, tables, files, networks, etc. The considerable diversity of data structures, used in numerous sociological projects, makes it hard for sociologists to be aware of the social information processing that takes place in reality. The article observes shortcomings of sociological data as a tool of social communication that could be overcome with the help of modern knowledge management methods. We propose the new graph context oriented ontological methods that allow sociologists to organize any artifacts into semantic networks. Such representation opens a new way of data organization aimed to unify sociological data structures and to facilitate creation and maintenance of data by a wider range of social actors. We demonstrate how sociological data of different types used in the study of professional links within Russian ethnographic community can be transformed into semantic network and what problems arise during this work.