Many young employees of museums, art centres and galleries, libraries and publishing houses move up the career ladder fairly fast, yet workplace success comes at a cost, forcing them to work beyond normal hours and outside formal job descriptions. Nevertheless, employees of cultural institutions are prepared to make the extra effort to help their organisations survive, according to Margarita Kuleva, lecturer at the Department of Sociology, HSE campus in St. Petersburg.

By choosing education for their children, parents tend to perpetuate social inequalities. While educated middle-class parents invest in their children's future by selecting the best possible school and becoming actively involved in the educational process, working-class families often feel they cannot afford to choose and instead, send children to the nearest school, expecting them to make it on their own, according to Larisa Shpakovskaya, Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, HSE Campus in St. Petersburg.

The politicization and commercialization of health issues in today’s Western culture have led to growing healthism – a peremptory idea of self-preserving behaviour. This approach criticizes everything that fails to fit into the glamorous standards of a beautiful, young and slim body. In extreme forms, healthism is close to eugenics, which selects a ‘correct’ heredity. But even simple concerns about the ‘standards’ of physical condition may provoke hypercorrection, such as surgery on a healthy body, said Evgenia Golman, lecturer at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences Department of General Sociology, in her article published in the Journal of Social Policy Studies.

Social workers tend to believe that society underestimates the complexity of their mission and fails to fully appreciate the gift of caring and compassion that they offer their clients. Experts warn that social work may lead to burnout, unless practitioners are taught the skills of managing their emotions in dealing with clients and equipped with standard algorithms facilitating their 'emotional work' and thus helping to alleviate stress, according to Olga Simonova, Deputy Head of the HSE Department of General Sociology.

Russian businesses have been slow in adopting new media tools. Many companies continue to rely on official websites to reach out to customers and avoid using social media and blogs, as they are not ready for an equal dialogue with external audiences, according to Iosif Dzyaloshinsky and Maria Pilgun, professors of the HSE Faculty of Communication, Media and Design.

Relations between Muscovites and migrant workers from the CIS are plagued by myths circulating in the mass consciousness. In her research, Yulia Florinskaya, a Senior Researcher with HSE’s Institute of Demography, refutes prevalent statements that migrants not only take jobs from Muscovites, but also seriously increase the burden on healthcare and intentionally maintain illegal status.

The proportion of interethnic marriages in Russia varies widely depending on ethnicity. How common mixed-ethnicity families are depends largely on couples' ability to overcome cultural, religious and social differences between their ethnic groups and also on settlement and migration patterns. In his ground-breaking research, Eugeny Soroko, Senior Research Fellow at the HSE Institute of Demography, measured the relative ‘distances’ between ethnic Russians and ten other ethnic groups using a tool he invented – the mixed family matrix.

International companies engage in social responsibility in order to to improve their reputation, be more competitive, and to gain political benefits and some degree of control over society. In Russia, however, businesses convert social investment into informal privileges granted to them by government, according to a paper by Olga Kuzina, Professor of the HSE Department of Economic Sociology, and Marina Chernysheva, postgraduate student at the same department.

Migrants from Central Asia in Moscow are often involved in hard physical work and live in bad conditions, both of which affect their health. But the access to medical aid is complicated for them due to their social isolation. As a result, foreign labourers use alternative strategies of therapy: from self-treatment, which is fraught with exacerbating the condition, to going to private ‘ethnic’ clinics. Daniil Kashnitsky, Assistant Researcher at the HSE Institute for Social Development Studies (ISDS), analyzed the medical aid for migrants in the Russian capital.

Today's big businesses in Russia may never become family dynasties. Only a few business owners have succession plans in place, but many have never considered the issue, for reasons ranging from their heirs being too young to avoiding conflict in the family to resenting the lack of institutions in Russia to support effective wealth succession. Instead, most entrepreneurs are planning to retain control of their business for as long as possible, according to researchers from the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences and the Skolkovo Wealth Transformation Centre. For the first time ever, they examined the attitudes of Russia's major capital owners towards business and wealth succession.

Young Russians are in no hurry to start living on their own. The age of moving out from the parental home has increased from 18-20 for previous generations to 23-25 for today's youth. Instead, young people are spending more time in search of themselves and taking longer to get an education and choose a partner, according to a study by Ekaterina Mitrofanova, Junior Research Fellow at the HSE Institute of Demography, and Alina Dolgova, student at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences.

Emigration from Russia has changed significantly over the last decade. The potential for ethnic repatriation has almost been exhausted, but other factors have become stronger in the population outflow, such as reunion with families and trips for education. Such emigration is largely determined by differences in the quality of life and policies in host countries, which welcome young, educated, qualified people with a certain level of income, said Mikhail Denisenko, Deputy Director of the HSE Institute of Demography, in his presentation at the XVI April International Academic Conference at HSE.