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
There is not a single country in the world where all people share the
same system of values. Every society has members focused on serving others as
well as those who value personal achievement above all and rely only on
themselves. Independent altruists committed to helping others, yet expecting nothing
in return, are relatively rare in all European countries, particularly in
post-Soviet countries, where their proportion is among the smallest, according
to Vladimir Magun and Maksim Rudnev of the HSE's Laboratory for Comparative
Studies in Mass Consciousness.
June 24, 2015
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.
June 17, 2015
Once unemployed, mid-level employees suffer primarily from loss of income, while senior-level leaders mostly resent the loss of respect; of all employee categories, production and service workers are most likely to become unemployed. These are some of the findings summarized in the paper 'The dynamics of subjective social status associated with loss of employment: an analysis of occupational differences', which was presented by Anna Zudina, Junior Research Fellow of the Centre for Labour Market Studies, at the Ninth Yuri Levada Memorial Conference on Contemporary Russian Society and Sociology hosted by HSE.
June 16, 2015
For people today, a job is not only a source of revenue, but also an essential attribute of a full life. Professional work must be interesting, in demand by society, well paid, and must leave a certain level of freedom, young Russians believe. This is what researchers* from the HSE Centre for Youth Studies (CYS) in St. Petersburg found out as part of their project ‘Youth solidarities and generations of the 21st century: the values of labour and consumption’.
June 15, 2015
In Russia, access to professional development is determined by one's
occupation, as well as job position, company size, and characteristics of the
local labour market. Skilled personnel in non-physical jobs and public sector
employees are more likely to pursue professional development, while low-skilled
employees in private firms are effectively excluded from any such opportunity,
according to Vasiliy Anikin, Assistant Professor of the HSE Department of
Applied Economics.
June 11, 2015
About 40% of the Russian able-bodied population are employed in the informal sector of the economy. This is a competitive market economy. Subsistence production, distributed manufacturing, ‘garage production’, seasonal work and various cottage industries flourish in the Russian regions. The economies of many small cities feature strict specialization and developed cooperation, in the context of internal competition between families and clans. These are the findings of HSE professors Simon Kordonsky and Yury Pliusnin in their study ‘Social Structure of the Russian Provinces’.
June 10, 2015
The current crisis in Russia is different from all others in its
heightened uncertainty and unpredictable consequences, and recent events are
comparable to the transformative crisis that occurred in Russia in the 1990s, the
Director of the Centre of Development Institute, Natalia Akindinova, and HSE
Academic Supervisor Evgeny Yasin said in their paper ‘A New Stage of Economic
Development in Post-Soviet Russia.’ The researchers propose four possible
scenarios for how the Russian economy might change, the most probable of which,
they posit, is a so-called ‘mobilisation scenario.’
June 09, 2015