Book
Время демографических перемен: избранные статьи
The articles selectedfor publication focus on the theoretical comprehension of fundamental demographic changesoccurring in the world, on their determinants and consequences. These consequences are universaland run through all levels of social reality, from the family to the global.Great attention is paid to Russian population issues. The author seeks to understand andto explain Russia’s demographic problems in the context of universal and global demographicchanges and challenges. Some articles are devoted to the history and current state of Russianpopulation studies.
The potential audience of the book are researchers representing a broad range of socialscience disciplines, teachers and students, politicians and journalists, and a wide range of readersinterested in population studies and related sciences.
The publication is timed to coincide with the 80th birthday of Anatoly Vishnevsky.
The XVIIIth April International Academic Conference on Economic and Social Development, which was organized at the Higher School of Economics, included a section on “Demography and Labor Markets”. The first day was devoted to the problems of registration and methods of analysis of population data, migrants in contemporary Russia and their integration into the Russian economy, and the use of data mining tools in demographic research. On the second day, there was a discussion of workers’ subjective well-being, unemployment, and global and regional labor markets. The list of speakers included B. Rao and P. Singh (both: Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee), A. Sulaberidze (Ilia State University, Georgia), S. Biryukova, D. Gizdatullin, D. Ignatov, E. Mitrofanova, A. Muratova, E. Papanova, E. Polyakova, A. Rezyapova, A. Shevchuk, E. Soroko, D. Strebkov, E. Vardanyan, and N. Voronina (National Research University Higher School of Economics), Y. Florinskaya and I. Kazenin (Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration under the President of the Russian Federation), Т. Blinova, K. Doronina, P. Sushko (Russian Academy of Sciences), and M. Giltman (Tyumen State University). Russian experts in labor economics, demography, and math, namely S. Roshchin, A. Vishnevsky, L. Smirnykh, V. Gimpelson, M. Denisenko, R. Kapelyushnikov, A. Makarov, and N. Mkrtchyan, also took part in the discussion.
This article discusses the implications of demographic changes for the system of private intergenerational transfers. We consider the basic demographic factors of private intergenerational transfers, including changes of the population age structure, the abundance of divorces and remarriages, the high level of migration activity, the process of nuclearization - and analyze its influence on the system of private intergenerational transfers.
The life course is becoming more flexible and more amenable to personal adjustment for contemporary youth. The process and timing of entering adulthood is expanding due to longer education and the search for oneself. Young people in contemporary Russia do not rush to acquire social statuses that were once so desirable in Soviet times, i.e. that of a parent, employee, and family person. Today, prestige is based on acquiring a good education and career, processes on which they are betting (Blum et al., 2009: 158–159).
Young people also have very specific demands for quality: quality of life, quality of intimate relations, and quality of parenting. All of this has motivated young people to ceaselessly look for an appropriate job, home, partner, and to invest in their children, preferring quality to quantity.
Efficient family-planning tools have separated marital, reproductive, and sexual behavior, transforming these into three different spheres of self-fulfillment. All of these stages, now stretched out through time, reflect individual needs and perspectives. The increasing dispersal of timing of marital relations and childbearing reveals that young people are postponing important demographic events further and further.
Russians have only recently acquired the opportunity to efficiently manage the most prolific period of their lives — youth. They attempt to start planning their lives as early as possible and to construct it sequentially in a personally tailored way.
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.