Article
Diversification of The “Late Soviet”: Attitudes to Mikhail Gorbachev in The Mirrors of History Textbooks
The article deals with representations of Mikhail Gorbachev, last leader of the USSR, in
textbooks on the history of three Post-Soviet countries: Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. The
personality of Gorbachev is seen in the wider framework of attitudes to the “late Soviet” and its
embedding in three histories based on the official discourses. The results of historical textbook
analysis show the ambiguity and diversification of these attitudes reflected in three “faces” of
Gorbachev changing with the pace of perestroika. It is seen that negative attitudes to the personality
of Gorbachev are connected to his representations within the framework of Machiavelist elite
theories and general fight for power, with certain manifest or latent nostalgia for the Soviet past.
The case of Ukraine is the most in contrast with a positive evaluation of Gorbachev’s personality
and activities in comparison to Russia and Belarus.
Across the industrialized world, more couples are living together without marrying. Although researchers have compared cohabitation cross-nationally using quantitative data, few have compared union formation using qualitative data. OBJECTIVE We use focus group research to compare social norms of cohabitation and marriage in Australia and nine countries in Europe. We explore questions such as: what is the meaning of cohabitation? To what extent is cohabitation indistinguishable from marriage, a prelude to marriage, or an alternative to being single? Are the meanings of cohabitation similar across countries?
The aim of this article is to describe actors’ sense of justice that they intuitively embody in everyday life situations. To make everyday meanings of justice explicit we focus on an analysis of a very particular type of situation denunciations/justifications that appeared in everyday disputes in late soviet Russia.
In an analysis of research data on three generations of Russians, it was found that the impetus prompted by the social and economic transformation in the early 1990s that opened up opportunities for social and professional growth had been practically exhausted by late 2006, and the tendency toward downward social mobility has become more pronounced. This provides evidence that the social structure of today's Russia is "stagnant" and there are no positive shifts in its dynamics.
Comparative source study considered as a method of comparative-historical research, based on theoretical understanding of the basic classification unit of source study – types of historical sources as representations of the forms of social human activities, the totality of which represents the culture system.
We compare the implementations and practices of open government and open government data in Mexico, Russia, and the US using a set of common concepts focused on policy environment and context. After providing thumbnail sketches of each country, we consider how variations among the countries are relate to context-specific historical problems, policies and politics From there we comment on the prospects for the institutionalization of open government and open data in each country.
Several approaches to the concept of fatherhood present in Western sociological tradition are analyzed and compared: biological determinism, social constructivism and biosocial theory. The problematics of fatherhood and men’s parental practices is marginalized in modern Russian social research devoted to family and this fact makes the traditional inequality in family relations, when the father’s role is considered secondary compared to that of mother, even stronger. However, in Western critical men’s studies several stages can be outlined: the development of “sex roles” paradigm (biological determinism), the emergence of the hegemonic masculinity concept, inter-disciplinary stage (biosocial theory). According to the approach of biological determinism, the role of a father is that of the patriarch, he continues the family line and serves as a model for his ascendants. Social constructivism looks into man’s functions in the family from the point of view of masculine pressure and establishing hegemony over a woman and children. Biosocial theory aims to unite the biological determinacy of fatherhood with social, cultural and personal context. It is shown that these approaches are directly connected with the level of the society development, marriage and family perceptions, the level of egality of gender order.
This article is talking about state management and cultural policy, their nature and content in term of the new tendency - development of postindustrial society. It mentioned here, that at the moment cultural policy is the base of regional political activity and that regions can get strong competitive advantage if they are able to implement cultural policy successfully. All these trends can produce elements of new economic development.