Book
Informal Nationalism After Communism: The Everyday Construction of Post-Socialist Identities
Most research on the use of national identity in marketing focuses on their anticipated and actual effects, while relatively little is known about their prerequisites. Under what conditions do businesses decide when and how to play the national identity card? How do they find and verify information about the population’s national identity attitudes and translate these notions into believable manifestations of everyday nationhood? These questions are particularly hard to answer for post-Soviet countries, with their winding paths of transition prompting frequent changes of mind both on nation-building and the free market economy. In the present study, the author combines her field observation data and insider knowledge of the business environment to reveal the background of national identity-themed advertising in Russia and Belarus. The results show that in both the ex-core and ex-periphery of the former empire businesses implicitly rely on state-transmitted version of nationality as a primary source of information about the population’s attitudes. Businesses see conventional sources of marketing research, such as opinion polls, as much less trustworthy – paradoxically, because pollster organizations supposedly suffer from either censorship or control from the same government. By drawing upon a number of cases from the early 1990s to the present, the study reveals that businesses increasingly rely upon the official representations of national identity when governments become not more but less friendly to the private sector. This dynamics is due to the business owners’ view of themselves as a struggling elite minority contrary to the government following the well established notions of the post-Soviet masses. As a result, vivid images used in advertisements translate the abstract language of nationalist propaganda into specific role models and patterns of everyday nationhood. Thus, the practices of consumption of advertisements and products themselves play a crucial role in creating a post-Soviet version of banal nationalism alongside the open indoctrination.
The results of cross-cultural research of implicit theories of innovativeness among students and teachers, representatives of three ethnocultural groups: Russians, the people of the North Caucasus (Chechens and Ingushs) and Tuvinians (N=804) are presented. Intergroup differences in implicit theories of innovativeness are revealed: the ‘individual’ theories of innovativeness prevail among Russians and among the students, the ‘social’ theories of innovativeness are more expressed among respondents from the North Caucasus, Tuva and among the teachers. Using the structural equations modeling the universal model of values impact on implicit theories of innovativeness and attitudes towards innovations is constructed. Values of the Openness to changes and individual theories of innovativeness promote the positive relation to innovations. Results of research have shown that implicit theories of innovativeness differ in different cultures, and values make different impact on the attitudes towards innovations and innovative experience in different cultures.
This monograph was developed as part of a larger research project entitled Peculiarities of National Identity of Lithuania and Belarus in the Context of European Integration, the aim of which was to conduct a comparative analysis of national identity in these two proximate but very different nation-states. The work was carried out by researchers at Belarusian State University (Minsk, Belarus), Vytautas Magnus University (Kaunas, Lithuania) and the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, Minnesota, USA). The research was conducted in accordance with an agreement between the Government of the Republic of Belarus and the Government of the Republic of Lithuania on matters regarding cooperation in science and technology as determined by the State Committee on Science and Technology of the Republic of Belarus and the Ministry of Education and Science of the Republic of Lithuania.
“Empire Speaks Out” is a result of the collaborative international research project whose participants aim to reconstruct the origin, development, and changing modes of self-description and representation of the heterogeneous political, social, and cultural space of the Russian Empire. The collection offers an alternative to the study of empire as an essentialized historical phenomenon, i.e. to those studies that construe empire retrospectively by projecting the categories of modern nation-centered social sciences onto the imperial past. It stresses dynamic transformations, adaptation, and reproduction of imperial patterns of sociability and governance. Chapters of the collection show how languages of rationalization derived from modern public politics, scientific discourses of applied knowledge (law, sociology, political economy, geography, ethnography, physical anthropology) and social self-organization influenced processes of transformation of the imperial space.
In an article written on the basis of a scientific paper describes the current status of nepovezane with respect to a dispute between the "objectivist" and "subjectivity" on its essence and prospects. The author identifies key trends in the study of the new economic policy in the 2000's.: a reassessment of Soviet historiography, folding regional research schools, updating the history of everyday life of the 1920s, mass moods and behavior. It is the reference to the history of everyday life contributes to the process of formation of uniform fields of historiography bourgeoisie issues.
Russia’s Skinheads: exploring and rethinking subcultural lives provides a through examination of the phenomenon of skinheads, explaining its nature and its significance, and assessing how far Russian skinhead subculture is at the “lumpen” end of the extreme nationalist ideological spectrum. There are large numbers of skinheads in Russia, responsible for a significant number of xenophobic attacks, including 97 deaths in 2008 alone, making this book relevant to Russian specialists as well as to sociologists of youth subculture. It provides a practical example of how to investigate youth subculture in depth over an extended period – in this case through empirical research following a specific group over six years – and goes on to argue that Russian skinhead subculture is not a direct import from the West, and that youth cultural practices should not be reduced to expressions of consumer choice. It presents an understanding of the Russian skinheads as a product of individuals` whole, and evolving, lives, and thereby compels sociologists to rethink how they conceive the nature of subcultures.
Students' internet usage attracts the attention of many researchers in different countries. Differences in internet penetration in diverse countries lead us to ask about the interaction of medium and culture in this process. In this paper we present an analysis based on a sample of 825 students from 18 Russian universities and discuss findings on particularities of students' ICT usage. On the background of the findings of the study, based on data collected in 2008-2009 year during a project "A сross-cultural study of the new learning culture formation in Germany and Russia", we discuss the problem of plagiarism in Russia, the availability of ICT features in Russian universities and an evaluation of the attractiveness of different categories of ICT usage and gender specifics in the use of ICT.