Book chapter
Глобализационные процессы и сфера культурных услуг
The article discusses the phenomenon of interconnected glocal hospitality communities which have recently spread over the world in the context of the internet development and cultural globalization processes. It focuses on a typical community of users of CouchSurfi ng.org, a major social hospitality network in St. Petersburg. The author argues that, in the framework of this web service, there occurs a transformation of virtual groups of users localized in various spots of the globe into actual interconnected glocal communities which shape shared identities, norms, values, and practices among its members.
The authors of the papers from Croatia, Italy, Mexico, Poland, Romania, and Russia look for constructive ways of contributing to harmonic development of the personality in modern information society. The common feature of the papers is that they either relate to the new scientific discipline called Cognitonics or correspond to its goals. Cognitonics emerged in the first half of the 2000s. It aims (a) at explicating the distortions in the perception of the world caused by the information and communication technologies and globalization and (b) at coping with these distortions in different fields by means of elaborating systemic solutions for compensating the negative implications of the kind for the personality and society, in particular, for creating cognitive-cultural preconditions of the harmonic development of the personality in the information society and for ensuring the successful development of national cultures and national languages.
This paper begins by outlining the two-sided ‘ethical challenge’ that international sociology faces in the 21st century. First, formulating the ethical stance of a sociologist towards the subject of disciplinary inquiry and the potentially involved social groups. Second, elaborating the adequate research tools for studying the ethical dimension of globalizing social reality. We conduct a critical analysis of the current literature on these issues from the Global Sociology perspective. We show that the ‘value-involved’ Global Sociology is the only possible mode of successful and appealing international disciplinary practice. However, existing ‘value-involved’ approaches are Eurocentric by nature and lack sensitivity to the ethically diverse global social reality. We propose the conceptual framing of ‘Ethically Responsible Global Sociology’ as a new vision of our discipline in the global world.
The present catalogue contains abstracts for some 150 volumes, among which books, periodicals, miscellanies, published by the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the principal institute in Russia for academic research in all kinds of philosophical knowledge. These works, written by eminent Russian scholars, cover such fi elds as the history of Russian, Western and Oriental philosophy, ethics and aesthetics, synergetics and epistemology, social and political philosophy and concentrate on problems that have attained particular importance in the age of globalization and growth of national self-consciousness.
This book seeks to “re-think democracy.” Over the past years, there has been a tendency in the global policy community and, even more widely, in the world’s media, to focus on democracy as the “gold standard” by which all things political are measured. This book re-examines democracy in Russia and in the world more generally, as idea, desired ideal, and practice. A major issue for Russia is whether the modernization of Russia might not prosper better by Russia focusing directly on modernization and not worrying too much about democracy. This book explores a wide range of aspects of this important question. It discusses how the debate is conducted in Russia; outlines how Russians contrast their own experiences, unfavourably, with the experience of China, where reform and modernization have been pursued with great success, with no concern for democracy; and concludes by assessing how the debate in Russia is likely to be resolved.