Book chapter
Профессиональные культуры и социальная память на примере дискурса о советских и постсоветских технических специалистах
This article is based on the findings of the Political Ideas of Russian Society project realized by the Laboratory for Political Studies since 2008. The Laboratory has already conducted about 1000 in-depth interviews with respondents of various age cohorts and various social–economic statuses. All respondents demonstrated the Great Power pathos formed by two basic components d Russia is a great power and/or nostalgia of the lost Soviet might d serves the leitmotiv of authoritarian sentiments.
The internet is not understood in the same way by all people, everywhere. This statement seems to be common sense, and frankly speaking, it does not actually challenge the basic understanding of what the internet is in a universal sense. We attempt to challenge it, introducing the alternative understanding of what the internet might mean if we take into account its world-wide history. In our fieldwork we have interviewed a group of early internet pioneers. These people (men) were the first to encounter and use the internet in Russian cities. And their description of the relationships with the internet don’t match what Markham (1998, 2003) describes as ‘tool, place, or way of being’. In this piece we, firstly, turn to a historical and cultural context to describe some of the fundamental principles of ‘human+technology’ relationships in USSR (Soviet Union) and post-Soviet culture. Secondly, we identify three features of the narratives about the internet used by internet pioneers in Russia. Focusing on what they say (metaphorical expressions), how they say it (linguistic constructions), and in what situation they say it (local Russian contexts), we propose that despite similarities between Western and Russian metaphors (ie. Markham’s conceptual framework of tool, place, and way of being), different histories and cultures of technologies create marked distinctions in what meaning is conveyed (Markham, 1998, 2003).
Postcommunism as an object of study has produced a wide literature, focused mainly on theoretical matters, with a considerable stress on "democratization" theory and analyses of political economy. In this volume, Rainer Matos suggests that postcommunism can be seen through another lens: nostalgia for the old regime, for massive subsidies, public order, international prestige, financial certitude, the welfare state and even the security apparatus of communist regimes.
The author does not only look at European countries, as is common in the incipient literature on postcommunist nostalgia; he also touches upon other cases in different latitudes (the Middle East, Asia, Africa) to discover a kind of longing expressed in varying degrees in the contemporary world, and in a manner as modern as the new liberal values claim to be. While Russia is the main interest of the book, nostalgia for socialism is revealed as a unifying thread of several political, economic, social, and cultural processes that otherwise would not have much in common.
Through an anthropological focus, primary and secondary sources, as well as interviews, Rainer Matos contributes to the study of a phenomenon which is more common than we usually think, expressed for the first time in the Spanish language and that helps to question the legitimacy of liberal political mythology by giving voice to nostalgic actors who find themselves in a limbo between past and present.
The world is changing. From shopping malls to transport terminals, aircraft to passenger ships, the infrastructure of society has to cope with ever more intense and complex flows of people. Today, more than ever, safety, efficiency and comfort are issues that must be addressed by all designers. The World Trade Centre disaster brought into tragic focus the need for well-designed evacuation systems. The new regulatory framework in the marine industry, acknowledges not only the importance of ensuring that the built environment is safe, but also the central role that evacuation simulation can play in achieving this.
An additional need is to design spaces for efficiency – ensuring that maximum throughput can be achieved during normal operations – and comfort – ensuring that the resulting flows offer little opportunity for needless queuing or excessive congestion. These complex demands challenge traditional prescriptive design guides and regulations. Designers and regulators are consequently turning to performance-based analysis and regulations facilitated by the new generation of people movement models.
Technical competencies and specific engineering skills alone are not sufficient in the modern labor market but employers expect engineers to actively promote the products they create. Engineers often perceive their skills differently than employers do. Insufficient university training in a number of fields including the development of social, management and communication skills leads to an objective and understandable gap between the perceived and the required levels of such competencies. Based on the results of a survey of 3158 engineers conducted in 2011 in the Russian Federation, the study shows a number of deficits in the perception of innovation skills and the respective demand for these.
This article analyzes the phenomenon of folk museification recent Soviet past - the emergence of proactive thematic Internet resources and the "folk museum" dedicated to the nostalgic representation of Soviet everyday life of the late thaw and stagnation. This article uses the theoretical concepts and explanatory models on the forms of social memory, narrative truth about the past and nostalgia.