No 4 (2023)

The core idea of this article is that in contemporary sociological and, more generally, social theories the concept of power, and especially in such its variety as domination, plays a key role. Moreover, there is a kind of seizure of the conceptual space in theoretical sociology by power and domination concepts. These latter concepts today claim to be the main explanatory principle of all social life. The author qualifies this theoretical position as a kind of "power determinism" and "power reductionism". This trend can be traced in general theory, as well as in different particular fields of sociology. Conceptual expansion of power and domination may also be seen in the fact that concepts close to them ("force", "violence", "oppression", "coercion", "hegemony", etc.), as well as their antonyms (such as "subordination", "obedience", "subordination", "dependence", "resistance", "disagreement", etc.) are becoming increasingly important. These categories occupy an important place in a number of the most popular social theories of our time (P. Bourdieu, E. Laclau, S. Mouffe, J. Agamben, J. Butler and many others). But it was Foucault who played the main role in substantiating omnipotent and ubiquitous presence of power in social life. He tried to implement Nietzsche's call to turn sociology into a doctrine of power. The author analyzes the nature and intellectual origins of these ideas.

The article is devoted to the description and analysis of the «crosswise» and «triangular» models, pioneered in 2008 by Hong Kong statisticians Yu, Tian and Tang and belonging to the class of non-randomized survey techniques (NRRT), specifically designed to control the effects of social desirability and stimulate self-disclosure of respondents in sensitive surveys. Based on the results of foreign studies, the author made an attempt to evaluate the possibilities of these models for obtaining sincere answers from the respondents. The paper describes the design features, question-answer logic and statistical foundations of both models under study. Methods for calculating a probabilistic estimate of the prevalence of the studied sensitive behavior are presented. The results of empirical tests are presented, which make it possible to judge the validity of the two techniques. The advantages of the crosswise and triangular models compared to the Warner RRT technique and the self-report method are shown, consisting in high validity, good performance by both respondents and intervie-wers, as well as methodological versatility. The most important shortcomings and limitations of survey techniques related to the respondents' non-compliance with the prescribed instructions and the subjective preferences of the interviewees in relation to certain response options are analyzed. The mechanism of the appearance of false-positive assessments that negatively affect the validity of the final data is revealed. Possible solutions to this problem are proposed. As a result of a comparative analysis of the two studied models, the author comes to the conclusion that the advantage in choosing between these two indirect techniques in terms of practical application remains with the crosswise model due to the symmetry of its question-answer design and more effective control of social desirability effects.

The migration situation in Russia during the COVID-19 pandemic has a number of signs of a migration crisis. The understanding of this phenomenon, which has developed under the influence of the migration crisis of 2014-2015 in the EU countries, is usually associated with the influx of large masses of migrants to a limited territory for a short period of time. In Russia, the crisis phenomena in the migration sphere during 2020 – early 2022 were caused by the closure of borders and the difficult socio-economic situation in which labor migrants from Asian CIS countries who were in the Russian Federation found themselves. However, the prerequisites for this crisis were formed during at least the second half of the 2010s. In many ways, they were associated with a noticeable increase in the volume and change in the ethnic structure of migration flows in favor of immigrants from Central Asian countries. At the same time, there was a decrease in the number of labor migrants from the European CIS countries – Ukraine and Moldova, who received the opportunity to work legally in the EU countries after signing Euroassociation agreements in the mid-2010s. Due to the vast territory of Russia and the unevenness of its economic development, the features of the migration crisis were mainly local in nature and were most clearly manifested in the most attractive regions for migrants – Moscow, St. Petersburg and adjacent areas. Its manifestations were mass protests, riots and conflicts involving migrants, as well as a noticeable aggravation of their relations with employers, authorities and the local population.

According to surveys conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation, over the 10 years from 2012 to 2022, the social acceptability of divorces in Russia has increased. Residents of the country have become more likely to recognize as valid all the reasons for divorce provided in the questionnaires of both surveys. When a husband or wife demands a divorce because of the inappropriate behavior of the other spouse (adultery, drunkenness, physical violence, etc.), the reason for the divorce is objective. If someone demands to terminate the marriage due to the fact that he does not love a spouse who has not violated the rules of family life, then the reason is subjective. Divorces for objective reasons destroy many families, but the social institution of the family is destroyed only when society also recognizes the subjective reasons for divorce as valid. After that, people no longer believe that the strength of marriage depends on their behavior in the family. This leads to a decrease in the number of marriages and the birth rate. To increase the effectiveness of measures to increase the birth rate, it is necessary to influence public opinion about the reasons for which a marriage can be dissolved. In addition, the divorce laws need to be changed. In cases of a dispute between former spouses about the division of property or about which of them will have children, the courts should take into account the guilt of the husband or wife in the divorce.

The article analyzes the scale of work-related learning of recent higher education graduates, describes its main practices, determines the factors of participation in training. The empirical analysis is carried out on data from the federal survey of Russian university graduates who completed their studies in 2016-2020. The sample consists of 9325 graduates. About a quarter of recent graduates participated in job-related training in their first year of work. The probability of work-related learning is higher for full-time graduates and for those who are employed as a specialist. It does not depend on whether the graduate works in his specialty or not. Important predictors of participation in work-related learning are the lack of professional skills and the importance of personal (individual) characteristics for successful work. The results showed that work-related learning acts as a tool to overcome the gap between the knowledge and skills that graduates have and the knowledge and skills necessary for the employer, mainly professional content. It was found that participation in work-related training practices is differentiated by qualification groups and by the scarcity of different types of knowledge and skills. On the one hand, formal learning and, on the other, mentoring and self-learning are interchangeable practices. Mentoring and self-learning are in many ways complementary practices of job-related training.

In Russia, fiction in the genre of alternative history has become popular over the past ten years. Book series of this kind are actively published and have a significant readership. This genre is part of ideological and utopian landscape of the Russian mass consciousness. It helps to understand imperial historical traumas, nostalgia for the Soviet past, and a high level of anxiety about the present and future. The theoretical part of the analysis is based on the G. Rosenfeld ideas about a close connection of this genre with the experience of the present and about ontological pluralization of the past. The article also includes M. Laruelle's thesis about the ideological function of this genre and its role in ideological mobilization. The concept of E. Shatsky's utopia as a chronic escapism is an important element in the analysis of this genre in Russia. Russian science fiction in the genre of alternative history mirrors ideological and utopian unconscious, which articulates affective historical traumas of society. Alternative history novels actively experiment with genres, and it contains elements of a political detective story, adventure and spy novel, conspiracy theories, personal nostalgic memoirs about childhood and adolescence, mysticism, military action movie, romance, crypto-fiction. Many authors perceive their novels as a historical experiment, and they are concerned with problematizing the causes of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The modern Russian wave of science fiction in the genre of alternative history is a more painful reaction of a part of society to the deep historical faults associated with the collapse of the USSR. The source of the analysis is the materials of interviews with the authors of works in the genre of alternative history, readers' reviews on thematic online platforms and the content of the works.

The article is the second (final) part of the essay devoted to the analysis of social constructivist explanations of gender and ethno-national phenomena. In particular, the author refers to the ideas of the classics of ethno-sociological constructivism – B. Anderson, E. Gellner and E. Hobsbawm, including the argumentation presented in the concept of «imagined communities». A general description of the mechanisms and technologies of practical (including symbolic and discursive) «production» of ethnic identities, construction and «invention» of nations and peoples is given as procedures carried out by intellectuals and politicians in different regions of the world. A specifically «modern» (rooted in the nature of modern societies) context for the formation of nation-states and nationalism as a special political movement and ideological doctrine is revealed.