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.
August 21, 2015
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.
August 18, 2015
Overall, Russians tend to be satisfied with their country's health care
system, particularly when they do not need to deal with it; however, those with
recent first-hand experience of healthcare often complain about the lack of
professionalism and the decline in free medical services, according to Sergey
Shishkin, Head of HSE's Department of Health Care Administration and Economy,
and Natalia Kochkina and Marina Krasilnikova, sociologists with the Levada
Centre, in their paper Health Care
Service Availability and Quality as Assessed by the Russian Public.
August 12, 2015
Decisions relating to student dropout often resemble a trial with students as defendants and teachers as prosecutors and judges. This approach can create barriers between students and staff and raise the issue of the university's mission, according to Ivan Gruzdev, Evgeny Terentiev and Elena Gorbunova of the HSE’s Internal Monitoring Center.
July 31, 2015
Higher education cuts the risk of poverty by more than half, according to Alina Pishnyak and Daria Popova, leading researchers at the HSE Centre for Studies of Income and Living Standards. Their findings reveal that the household incomes of families where all adults are university-educated stand at 20% above the average, and conversely, in families where none of the adults hold a degree, living standards tend to be below average by a quarter.
July 29, 2015
Age
boundaries are diminishing fast and do not influence people’s lives as much as
before. Nevertheless, age remains an important factor in social interaction.
Age self-identification for women is closely related to their appearances,
which is why beauty remains one of the main self-investment projects for women.
These are the conclusions drawn by researchers from the HSE Centre for Youth
Studies (CYS) in St. Petersburg as part of a project* entitled ‘Age under
Construction: Age Construction by Girls and Young Women’.
July 24, 2015
Free legal services are generally available in Russia, but their quality
varies widely. Court-appointed lawyers tend to be less knowledgeable and
competent than those who offer their services pro bono for reasons such as
social responsibility or professional reputation, according to a study by Anton
Kazun, Junior Research Fellow at the HSE International Center for the Study of
Institutions and Development.
July 20, 2015
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.
July 17, 2015
Over the next 20 years, death rates among working age Russian men are
expected to drop by a third due to a change in alcohol consumption
preferences – namely, the decreasing popularity of vodka, according to Yevgeny
Yakovlev, Assistant Professor at the HSE Department of Applied Economics, and
Lorenz Kueng, Assistant Professor of Finance at the Kellogg School of
Management at Northwestern University.
July 16, 2015
Abusive parents, internet and TV violence, and social exclusion are all contributing to growing violence in schools, with verbal aggression being the most common type of aggressive behaviour among young people, according to Irina Sizova, Head of the Sociology Laboratory at the HSE Branch in Nizhny Novgorod.
July 08, 2015
A predominance of women on a company's boards of directors can lead to a loss of flexibility in governance. Yet in times of change, for example during periods of rapid growth or crisis, women can make better leaders than men: they are more willing to take risks and tend to find more unconventional solutions, according to a report 'The Impact of Gender Diversity of the Board and Ownership Structure on Corporate Performance: Evidence from Western Europe' by HSE researchers Tatiana Ratnikova and Dmitry Gavrilov.
July 07, 2015
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.
July 06, 2015