2019 Issue №4

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 of the individual, i. e. eve­rything that can be included in the personal capital, can be used not only for the benefit of society, social groups but also against it. Negative social ele­ments can damage social connections and relations and lead to desocialisation of the individual. At the same time, the value dominants that characterize the state of society at the moment of its development play an important role. For instance, if selfishness and money as the only conditions for success begin to dominate in society, the available personal capital starts to be used in an anti­social way. The task of sociology, together with other social and human scienc­es, is to identify adverse trends not only in the process of personality for­mation but also in social processes as a whole, in order to timely redirect the creative potential of the individual, his or her social capital and use it for the benefit of society.

The topicality of this pilot study is predetermined by the necessity to op­timize cross-cultural interaction in polyethnic regions by means of revelation of its subjects’ sociological portrait. In this research, the author attempts to experimentally investigate the nature of cross-cultural interaction in master­ing a macro-mediator language in the academic discourse. A sce­nario of the standardized interview has been used as a method of research. The sce­nario features various factors of personality self-actualization during mas­tering macro-mediator language. Among many topics discussed during the inter­views, there were the following ones: “Existential orientation towards the pre­sent or the past / future”, “Aims and means of activity”, “Solidarity with soci­ety as a whole or with a particular group”, “Degree of autonomy / conformism towards cultural-group influence”, “Predominant focus on positive / negative experience”, “Detachment / involvement in the process of cross-cultural inter­actions”. Qualitative differences in the system of values of young representa­tives of the main ethnocultural groups of Crimea, Russians and Crimean Ta­tars, towards mastering the Russian language as a macro-mediator have been defined. Having analysed the data obtained during the interviews, the author described the following aspects: a) attitude to language’s norms and stan­dards, their compliance and preservation; b) culturally defined functionality and the status of the language. The author revealed the correlation of the con­tent of the examined aspects of self-actualization of respondents and their cul­tural and linguistic attitudes. The research demonstrated differences in the types of strategies for mediating cultural and linguistic environment. The identification of similarities / distinctions in the ways of self-actualization of the personality, most widespread in intercultural interaction, allows the au­thor to forecast the pragmatics of the impact of various linguistic and cultural stimuli on the character of civilisational processes in multinational regions.