Factors in local governments’ digitalisation in the Northwestern Federal District of Russia: social media review
With digital communication becoming a quotidian practice, social media has emerged as a common channel for personal and business communication, utilised by authorities among other actors. This article proposes an approach for measuring a territory’s digitalisation by quantifying local governments’ presence on social media. The work aims to identify digital underperformers among municipalities of Russia’s Northwestern Federal District, drawing on data from the Vkontakte social network. The empirical...
Concepts of social support: positive and negative effects of social relations in the context of subjective well-being of a human being
This article describes the basic negative and positive effects of social relations of a person in the context of their subjective well-being on the basis of international publications, which have not been translated into Russian yet and are little known in the country. The authors present their own typology of positive and negative effects of social support in situations of normal and abnormal social functioning of an individual.
1.
Berkman L., Glass T.,
Brissette
I.
, Seeman T.
From social...
Societal security in the Baltic Sea Region: the Russian perspective
This study discusses whether the concept of societal security is embedded in the Russian formal and informal discourses as well as in the Russian strategic documents on national security and the Baltic Sea region. Particularly, the paper describes four paradigms of international relations (neorealism, neoliberalism, globalism and postpositivism) and theoretical approaches to the concept of societal security formulated in them. On a practical plane, Russia has managed to develop — together with other...
Impact of remigration on the worksphere under Covid-19: the case of Lithuania
Remigration opens up the opportunity for a country to see the return of its citizens from migration, bringing with them their ideas, knowledge, values and skills. The work sphere is one of the main areas where these social remittances can be used. Still, very little attention is paid to the workplace in social remittance literature. Therefore, the first aim of this article is to explore the types of remigrants’ social remittances, the ways they are transmitted and their acceptance in the work sphere...
The Swedish institute’s scholarship policy as a soft power instrument
This paper examines how soft power, nation branding and academic cooperation came together in the scholarship policy pursued by the Swedish Institute (SI) from 1995 to 2023. An investigation of the organisation’s materials, scholarship statistics and feedback interviews with SI programme alumni suggests that the implementation of the scholarship policy was erratic during the study period. A comprehensive analysis of the Institute’s efforts was carried out to describe the relationship between nation...
Models for countering the segregation of ethnoreligious immigrant areas in Denmark and Sweden
The article explores the immigration and integration strategies of Denmark and Sweden while assessing their efficacy. The two countries, sharing historical, cultural, social and economic similarities, face a common challenge: the formation of ethnoreligious enclaves primarily inhabited by individuals with a Muslim background. Due to the recent European migrant crises, there has been a notable increase in the number of migrants, leading to stricter integration policies in the Scandinavian countries...
The Development of Russian Social Geography: Challenges, Trends, Priorities
Promoting the development of social geography (one of the most important components of present-day social sciences) is especially important for contemporary Russia. In the last 25 years Russian social geography has seen dramatic disciplinary changes. On the one hand, it has widened its scope. On the other hand, it has suffered from a growing contradiction between the popularization of the social geographic knowledge, the need to have a clear understanding of the factors and results of a multi-scale...
Social code of the Kaliningrad Region in the system of legal regulation of social relations
The authors discuss the problem of a comprehensive legal regulation of social relations. This issue is relevant due to the active social policy pursued by the state. This policy aims to develop social institutions and improve the quality of life of Russian citizens. The authors studied the state and coherence of social legislation in Russia and abroad. The correlation and regulatory features of different legal systems are analysed. Special attention was paid to the level of systematization of social...
“They call the main entrance a porch”: social meaning in semantics and metapragmatics
The paper analyzes the concept of social meaning, which has been conceptualized in lexical semantics since the 1980s and has become central in modern sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. It has been used to describe pragmatic increments in the meaning of a language unit, which it receives in context. New explanatory approaches have developed from a sociolinguistic perspective in metapragmatics, where social meaning is seen as a social index that emerges in context. Social index (the index...
Social capital: a threat of negative application
The author justifies a conceptual provision that social capital can be composed of not only positive but also negative elements. Most researchers, including economists, sociologists, and psychologists stress the importance of the formation and development of human capital in modern society. However, they focus on the positive content and application. Without rejecting this approach, the author proposes to proceed from the assumption that the inclination and abilities, education, will, value preferences...
Typographic landscape in urban space: a sociolinguistic approach
This paper suggests a sociolinguistic approach to typographic landscape analysis. Typography is discussed as a semiotic resource with meaning-making potential. The paper argues that typographic variation provides dynamic indexical links to social practice. It obtains its ‘social voice’ and becomes an integral part of the social context in which it is perceived as typical and able to generate particular socially loaded meanings. This research is in line with contemporary social semiotics, interactional...
Social and Economic Space Compression in Border Areas: the Case of the Northwestern Federal District
The so-called “compression” of social and economic space has been the subject of quite a few studies in the past decades. There are two principle types of compression: communicative, that is, associated with the development of transport and information systems, and physical, manifested in the rapid decrease of the number of new territories to explore. While physical and communicative compression are interrelated, they have different spatial expressions depending on geographical conditions, economic...
Social Facilitation: the Kaliningrad Region and Russian Mainland Regions
The authors look at the concept of social facilitation as a possible component of Russian social consolidation in the course of social reforms. The article focuses on the results of an empirical study of the levels and characteristics of competence in social facilitation, which is here understood as the ability to apply certain knowledge and systems of skills and as a success rate of actions based on experience in improving the conditions of social development. The study was conducted in the Kaliningrad...
Spatial differentiation of rural territories in the Kaliningrad region: implications for socio-economic policies
The article analyses the challenges associated with the development of rural areas in the Kaliningrad region. The author analyses trends in the development of agriculture, population dynamics, and settlement patterns, while also exploring their interconnectedness and external impacts. The research draws upon comparative-geographical, economic-statistical, and cartographic analyses utilizing official statistical data. The study reveals that since the early 2000s, agricultural production in the Kaliningrad...
Social inclusion of people with disabilities de jure and de facto: the included, the self-inclusive and the non-self-inclusive
The article presents an analysis of the social systems, in which human health is not limited to its inclusion in social relations, processes and practices. The main aim of this research work is to study the impact of self-identification of people with disabilities on their social integration and inclusion. The complexity of internal contradictions of these processes and a limited number of research works on the problem determined the need for a new integrative analysis and synthesis of the existing...
Social conflicts as seen by residents of Saint Petersburg: An empirical study
This article describes the attitudes of Saint Petersburg residents to social conflicts. The author analyses their assessments of danger associated with social tension in the Russian society. This tension becomes particularly pronounced during the time of economic, social, and political turbulence. The research aims to examine the existing threats and identify opportunities for reducing social tension. The article makes a practical contribution to the development of social policy and civil society...
The two-party tendency in Poland’s political system: manifestations, causes and prospects
The article analyses the Polish political system and the increasing role of two political parties in it. This tendency has been observed in Poland for more than 15 years. We can draw a conclusion that two-and-a-half-party system has formed in Poland. Using Duverger’s phrasing, there is a “two-party tendency” in the functioning of the Polish model. The study analyses the facts that firm up this conclusion: not only the distribution of seats in the Sejm (the main criterion) but also many other quantitative...
Studying social innovation in rural areas through the prism of sciencometics
The study examines the spatial and temporal distribution of global scientific knowledge on social innovation in rural areas. It is possible to assess the scientific productivity of a particular thematic area using the methods of scientometrics, which make it possible to compare the achievements of countries, regions and individual researchers, as well as to organize data on the information flow of scientific publications. The Scopus abstract database was taken as the data source, and the VOSviewer...
The media image of San Escobar in the space of fictional worlds: a socio-semiotic perspective
The article deals with the process of structuring the concept of the fictitious state of San Escobar from the perspective of social semiotics, including the broadly understood context and media environment for constructing the image. The creation of the internet memes was inspired by a lapsus linguae of the Polish Minister of Foreign Affairs Witold Waszczykowski. Major changes in the communicative space, the dominance of digital media resources and multimodal messages, the hegemony of visual culture...
The problem of meaning in Social Semiotics: deep semiotics as a conceptual extension of Social Semiotics
Semiotic systems are closely associated with social practices, within which the former record, store, and disseminate social experience. These systems affect the human consciousness to change the semantic picture of the world, behaviour, and the way one perceives reality. Almost all cultural artefacts perform the function of a sign. As a semiotic system develops special signs emerge to replace the artefacts by denoting them. Iconic signs are based upon resemblance, index signs upon a causal relationship...
Human Development Index as a Tool to Assess Social Development in the Baltic States
Reinvigorating Russia’s development strategy requires a comparison between the social development of the Russian Federation and other Baltic region states, some of which are world leaders in terms of living standards. The most popular tools for country comparison are composite indices that take into account various components affecting the quality of life. This article analyses the current level and changes in the social development of the Baltic States in 1990—2016. The analysis is based on the...
Individual patterns of social contact network development in adolescents
This article focuses on the interconnection between the individual and typological characteristics of an individual and the features of adolescent social contact networks. It is shown that adolescents with a high level of hostility, expressed perfectionist attitudes, low self-esteem, and insufficient perceived self-efficacy have smaller and poorly differentiated social contacts networks. These characteristics of social networks can subsequently lead to increased narcissistic tendencies in adolescents...
The thoretical aspects of analysis of economy’s potential at macro- and meso- (regilnal) levels
This article focuses on the theoretical and methodological aspects of analyzing social potential of economy. Is shown that it includes: a) certain social networks and social structure determining the appropriate social roles (statuses); b) certain public relations between the performers of these roles; c) certain social institutes as norms of behavior according to the social structure and position in the hierarchy, which determine the lifestyle of a person; d) social environment and the relevant...
Matrix Representation of the Kaliningrad Regional Accounts System: Experimental Development and Modelling Prospects
This article addresses the task of creating a regional Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) in the Kaliningrad region. Analyzing the behavior of economic systems of national and sub-national levels in the changing environment is one of the main objectives of macroeconomic research. Matrices are used in examining the flow of financial resources, which makes it possible to conduct a comprehensive analysis of commodity and cash flows at the regional level. The study identifies key data sources for matrix...
Russian Socio-Economic Geography: Status, Challenges, Perspectives
The socio-economic geography studies the processes, characteristics and patterns of spatial development. In the recent decades, however, this area of scientific investigation has failed its promise, which happened for a number of external and internal reasons. The main external reason is the development of "consumer society", which does not require the search of new space and therefore ignores the "spatial" science, geography. Internal reason is the blurring of socio-economic...
Between the Eurasian and European subsystems: migration and migration policy in the CIS and Baltic Countries in the 1990s—2020s
The article analyses migration from border countries (the so-called overlapping area) of two migration subsystems — Eurasian (centred in the Russian Federation) and European (the European Union) from 1991 to 2021 (before the recent events in Ukraine). A step-by-step analysis of the migration situation in the countries of the former USSR — Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Ukraine and Estonia was conducted. The article examines bilateral and multilateral migration processes, analyses the main factors...
Inter-organizational networks as seen by western economic sociology: An analysis of theoretical approaches
This paper analyses theoretical approaches to studying interorganizational networks offered in foreign economic sociology. The authors describe main conceptual problems, the key aspects of network form of interorganizational interaction, and embeddedness effects.
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2. Benson K. J. The Interorganizational Network as a Political Economy // Administrative Science Quarterly. 1975. Vol. 20, № 2. P. 229—249.
3. Bourdieu P. The forms...
Artificial Intelligence: a catalyst for entrepreneurship education in the Baltics
The article explores the growing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in entrepreneurship education within universities. This exploration is set against the backdrop of the rapid and widespread integration of AI technologies across economic and other domains of life. The authors aim to define the concept of ‘entrepreneurial potential’ and elucidate the contribution of AI in augmenting the entrepreneurial potential among university students in the Baltic States. To achieve this goal, the authors employ...
Immaturity and the objective of a true reform in ways of thinking. Part I.
The originality of Kant’s answer to the question of the Enlightenment in a 1784 article consisted not in addressing the words of Horace, which was commonplace in Germany of the time, but in linking it to the revised legal notion of immaturity, which is now interpreted from the philosophical and theological perspective and has become one of key philosophical notions. However, Kant’s view is fraught with certain complications: firstly, it is dominated by negative characteristics; secondly, unlimited...
Tool-Kit for Ethical Analysis of Video Games: Answer to the Challenges of the New Enlightenment
The authors of the idea of a “new Enlightenment”, Ernst von Weizsäcker and Anders Wijkman, in their 2018 report to the Club of Rome analyse the causes of the explosive development of science and technology in the Modern period and come to the conclusion that their triumph and existential threats stem in many ways from the ideals of Enlightenment, so that the future of humankind depends crucially on an ideological rethinking of man’s status in the world. They stress the need to enhance the responsibility...
The spread of the COVID-19 infection in Russia’s Baltic macro-region: internal differences
This article explores the spread of the Covid-19 infection in Russia’s Baltic macro-region. The monthly excess mortality rate in the Baltic region is analysed along with regional and municipal Covid-19 response acts to identify regional features affecting the spread of the disease. The spatial characteristics of Russia’s Baltic regions, germane to the propagation of Covid-19, were distinguished by examining selected social and economic statistical indicators. Based on the space of places/space of...
Social media interfaces as a representation of cultural meanings
A problem of the growing popularity of cross-cultural social media studies is the lack of discrimination between the effects of user characteristics and those of the architecture of a virtual platform interface. This makes the detected cultural differences unreliable. A way to solve this problem is a comparative study of social media interfaces only, seeking to identify the culturally constituted meanings embedded in the design of virtual platforms. These meanings are employed in the users’ virtual...
The problem of meaning in Social Semiotics: Max Weber today
A human activity is based on the constant creation, transmission and transformation of meanings and texts. All the forms of representation of this activity (culture, history, literature, art, politics, law, etc.) can be considered as semantic ensembles consisted from meaningful actions. The concept of “meaning” is fundamental not only in linguistics amd semiotics, but also in M. Weber's theory: thesubject of sociology is the understanding of “the meaning of behavior”. Based on the Weber’s definitions...
Paul Natorp’s social pedagogic theory and it’s relevance to modern russian education
The paper discusses Paul Natorp’s social pedagogy theory from the point of its relevance to the modern educational discussions. Natorp sees practical task of his pedagogic theory in negation of German society’s crisis tendencies. The theoretical context of social pedagogy was defined by several key factors. The first one is Natorp’s dependency on legacy of Plato, J. Pestalozzi and I. Kant, while second deals with his critic of fundamental grounds of dominant contemporary pedagogical system. The major...
An assessment of relations of an individual in the immediate social environment on the basis of social network analysis
This article examines the psychological aspect of criteria for evaluating an individual’s position within the structure of relations in the community they belong to. The author shows how statistical methods used in analyzing social networks can help obtain information on the degree and type of the individual’s involvement into the system of relations and identifies the psychological significance of the actor’s centrality within a social network as a degree of the individual’s involvement into the...