Book
Актуальные проблемы социальной коммуникации: материалы второй Международной научно-практической конференции
The questions considered in this review of the recently published book "There Is No Such Thing as a Social Science" by Phil Hutchinson, Rupert Read, and Wes Sharrock, pertain to the philosophy of the methodology of social sciences: what research problems can sociology study? is it possible for sociology to study social world as an empirical world, and what consequences will this sociologists' empirical attitude toward their subject have? The review explores how the authors of the book, with the help of Peter Winch's philosophy of the social sciences, criticize the project of sociology as an empirical enterprise. Then their own project of sociology is critically examined.
A joint research project carried out by an interdisciplinary group of Russian and Swedish linguists, sociologists and educators-psychologists (the Swedish Institute grant), besides solving pragmatic tasks of finding out relative quantitative-qualitative specificity of national cognitive representations of values, first of all, had methodological goals. They were to check the efficiency of the linguistic methods developed in this study (and, thus, to prove the theoretical ideas that served the basis for it) of getting factual data that allow reconstructing and comparing of the corresponding areas of cognitive representations.
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.