scholarly journals The mobility of Ural region company town residents: social practices and peculiarities of city spaces

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 167-189
Author(s):  
Anna V. Anikieva ◽  
Uliana S. Shvindt

The authors of this article base their reasoning on the fact that company towns are a special type of city space. In order to successfully implement programs for supporting and developing company towns, one must take into account the specific features inherent to the social-territorial community in question. Drawing attention to individual movement practices, them being activities in space, allows for identifying specifics and patterns in that particular social space where they are practiced, and the production of which they are contributing to. The study of the moving practices of industrial company town residents, which in scientific literature is represented by a very limited amount of studies, bears considerable potential for research, since it allows for tracing the entire process of space reproduction. Mobility has a systemic and routine character, being based on specific activity stereotypes and implicit “background expectations”. As a result they are rather difficult to register using classic survey methods. The authors of this article base their reasoning on the assumption that studying social movement practices requires the examination of those situations which violate the established social order. The article takes into consideration publications from the “VK” social network as a description for such “situations”. As such, the empirical base for the study consists of messages from open-access virtual territorial communities. The authors analyze communities that publish local news from three company towns in Sverdlovsky region (Pervouralsk, Krasnoturyinsk and Revda). The main distinction of the chosen data source is that publications appear upon user initiative, which rules out any influence the researcher might have on the meaning of the message. Content-analysis results allow for drawing a conclusion on the leading role of the automobile for company town residents, as well as on their dissatisfaction with public transport services. Also, the study allows for identifying the city space peculiarities inherent to Ural region company towns, which are defined by the locals’ mobility practices and also reproduced by said practices. According to the authors, these peculiarities are as follows: regarding a company town as a closed social-territorial community, perceiving such a city in the vein of outdated, unsafe space and obsolete infrastructure, as well as a certain tension existing between the population and local authorities within the city’s social space.

Purpose of the study: To investigate the sociological dimension of social space structuring under the influence of territorial movements in the era of globalization based on the example of modern Russia. As the methodology for the study, the synthesis of E. Giddens’ theory was structured, its provisions on the topography of social space in the geographical plane. The paradigm of structuralist constructivism of P. Bourdieu was used as well, in which it was relevant for us to analyze habitus as a socio-geographical environment for the formation of institutional strategies of agents of social relationship. Factors that contribute to and hinder the adaptation of personality in the new social environment, were examined based on works by O. Toffler, U. Beck, V.I. Chuprov and Yu.A. Zubok. To determine the mechanism of the genesis and functioning of meanings in the new communicative environment, the authors relied on N. Luman's approach to self-identification and self-conference. In the process of analyzing the nature of trust in the institutional order in the context of globalization, the authors used works by A.V. Ivanov and S.A. Danilova who analyze the mechanisms of formation. The empirical basis for the article was a sociological study conducted on the basis of the Sociological Center of Kutafin Moscow State Law University.The article reveals the features of personality identification in a dynamic environment of interethnic and cross-cultural interactions, structured under the influence of territorial factors. The degree of conformity of the scale, the nature and depth of self-identification in various territorial planes of the social space are determined by the example of modern Russian society. Factors of social integration in the process of the formation of territorial identity both at the institutional level and in everyday life when constructing informal social ties are disclosed. The restrictions of social identification in the regions of Russia are found that prevent the formation of civic identity and responsibility for the reproduction of the social order. The values that determine social integration in cross-cultural interaction are revealed. The results of the study make a significant contribution to the development of methods for determining the causes of the genesis of separatist sentiments and the conditions for designing constructive social participation in various regions. The article is relevant for undergraduate and graduate students, as well as lecturers, involved in the problems of the sociological study of globalization, social space and group identity. The work uses an integral methodology for measuring social processes from the perspective of the subject of action, constructing strategies in the new social environment, and from the perspective of a system that ensures the reproduction of the institutional order.


2019 ◽  
pp. 001872671988722
Author(s):  
Elham Moonesirust ◽  
Andrew D Brown

How do people living in a company town come to desire to work for the firm that controls it? Based on an in-depth case study of Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, Germany, we make two principal contributions. First, drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality we investigate the mechanisms of power within which desired identities are shaped. Desired identities, we argue, are one means by which organizations exercise control over local populations. Second, we examine the multiple interlocking discourses by which Volkswagen sought to regulate the life of Wolfsburgers and to form their desired identities. In doing so, we contribute to identity research by demonstrating how biopower and discipline work in combination in neoliberal societies to make the governmentality of employee identity possible. Our research underlines the importance of studying company towns for understanding the relations of power that shape the lives and the identities of employees.


Author(s):  
Rashid Muhaev ◽  
Yuliya Laamarti

The information and communication revolution of the late XX — early XXI century not only radically changed the modern world, but also formed a new social reality — a post-industrial society. The current stage of post-industrial development is associated with the formation of the information society, a distinctive feature of which is that in it information, the process of its production and methods of transmission, becomes more important than the thing itself. Information is a decisive factor in the social order, which has changed the ways and technologies of organizing social space and the nature of everyday practices, the life worlds of ordinary people, and the media become the main tool for the production of semantic systems.


1998 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Prandy ◽  
W. Bottero

This article describes the construction of a measure of the social order in the nineteenth century, which will subsequently be used as a basis for studying processes of social reproduction (or social mobility). The technique of correspondence analysis is used to map the ordering of groups of occupations in two time periods 1777-1866 and 1867-1913. The data are derived from the occupations at marriage of the groom, his father and his father-in-law (the occupations of brides, unfortunately, being very much under-recorded). Marriage, it is argued, is a socially significant act linking, on average, families that occupy similar positions in the social order and analyses of the patterns of social interaction involved provide a means of determining the nature of the social space within which similarity is defined. The three occupations provide three pair-wise comparisons and each comparison gives a mapping of the row occupations and the column occupations six in all. Since any one of these should provide a measure of the social order, assuming there to be any consistency in such a concept, we would expect that, at both time periods, the result of the analyses would be six closely-related estimates of the same underlying dimension. This is what is found; the inter-correlations are very high. Furthermore, there is a very strong relationship between the measures of the social order constructed for the two time periods. The analyses are presented within a framework that emphasises the value of the procedures used for understanding the nature of measurement in social science.


2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-206
Author(s):  
Anna Śliz ◽  
Marek S. Szczepański

The turn of the millennium brought an increased interest in issues of multiculturalism, which became a focal point for debates about culture, especially in liberal democracies. The question is particularly important in that most people today live in heterocultural societies. The authors thus do not approach multiculturalism as the simple coexistence in society of members of various ethnic groups but rather as a theoretical basis for the scholarly analysis of the state and of society, which implement policies in regard to internal cultural (ethnic) diversity. Multiculturalism thus defines a social space in which people who adhere to different axiological, normative, religious or moral systems, and who are aware of these differences, live together. At the same time, state policy aims to include all of them in a social order which is being modified under the influence of cultural diversity. Multiculturalism can be presented on the one hand as an idea that is not apprehended directly but is known through concepts, and on the other hand, as an entity identified by the senses. The authors illustrate the transition from an idea to a state policy in regard to a multitude of ethnic cultures by reference to Australia and the Federal Republic of Germany.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-338
Author(s):  
Hristina Popova

School is a professionally competent institution established predominantly for socializing. Its mission along with families is to form the whole personality of an individual. Through knowledge and professionalism the teachers are the main actors in the processes of socialization and education. The presence of incomplete families and due to the transformation of the family into an area of insecurity, their role is even greater. The fulfillment of the basic functions of the education depend to a large extent on the teachers’ skills, values and abilities. The educational institution is mostly associated with the transfer of knowledge, norms, values, building the cultural foundations of society. Moreover, it is also an effective place for achieving of social experience. In addition to its specific activity related to the learning process, school also performs its external function of preserving and maintaining social order. This function is largely implemented through providing school discipline and complying with the school penalty system in a fair way. To solve the problems related to the discipline, the contemporary Bulgarian school has to focus on the efforts in two directions: 1) Continuous skills improvement of the pedagogical specialists so that the educational contents are presented in an accessible and understandable language, in a way consistent with the age characteristics of the students and improvement of their skills in the class management. Teacher-student relationships need to be built on a partnership basis; 2) The active interaction with the parents as the main actors in the chain “family-school-society” is the second direction where our efforts have to be focused on. The role of parents is crucial in the adoption and support of school policies. Parents and teachers should become a model of honesty, respect, reputation, and self-control to educate and develop adequate behavioural patterns in children. Harmonizing the Bulgarian with the European school legislation is related to the adoption of different normative regulations. A step towards improving the framework and special legislation is the adopted Pre-school and School Education Act, the State Standard for Inclusive Education and the Inclusive Education Regulation. Their goal is to achieve a new and better condition of process of education. Logically, it also includes the whole penalty and encouragement system. The effectiveness of each of the regulated normative punishments is analyzed on the basis of deep interviews conducted by the author among Bulgarian teachers and psychologists.


Author(s):  
Andrew Sartori

Abstract How to conceptualize the broad dissemination of economic concepts in colonial South Asia? This article uses an essay by a mid-nineteenth-century Bengali, Peary Chand Mittra, as a point of departure to approach this problem in South Asian historiography. In the first part, the essay locates the conditions of possibility for Mittra's political-economic analysis of Bengal's agrarian social order within an imperial and commercial space of extended interdependencies. The aim is not to explain the specificity of Mittra's politics so much as to highlight his recourse to political-economic concepts to ground his analysis. In the second part, the essay suggests that the grounding of political economy's colonial histories within histories of imperial space needs to be supplemented by closer attention to new normative impulses and aspirations emerging directly from agrarian society in the region. This second emphasis provides better grounds for grasping the depth and durability of political economy's reach into political and ethical claims across social space in the Subcontinent in the twentieth century. It thus broaches the necessity of subaltern histories of political economy.


2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Alzaga

Cristina Alzaga: Indoor Prostitution: The Parlour as a Social Space This article presents a sociological hermeneutic analysis of the lived everyday working world of Danish indoor prostitutes. It draws upon observations and interviews, as well as documentary and experiential data, produced during a six-month period of ethnographic fieldwork at a Copenhagen massage parlour, where the author served as “telephone lady“. The article uncovers the social order (nomos) of this life world, its social relations and shared interpretations as well as organizational traits and practical-corporeal terms. It also discusses the variety and multidimensionality of the relations between prostitutes and clients. The article seeks to uncover the meanings of the distinct experiential dynamics and work experiences that take form within this particular working universe, and examines their contradictory relations to the dominant views and accounts of prostitution in the outside world, including the views pre¬sented by mainstream research on prostitution.


Author(s):  
Elżbieta Gaweł-Luty ◽  

Social structures include specific entities marked by both institutionalized social norms and by their own individual reflections on their role in society. Social structures are not a permanent phenomenon, because society is constantly restructuring itself. The basis of a social order is the standardization of the actions of individuals, when these activities are subject to typification, institutionalism is created. Thus, institutions define requirements for the way people function in the social space. Individuals also undertake professional roles with existing social structures, the performance of which is likewise determined by social norms.For the proper functioning of society, therefore, social and professional identities of individuals and of groups are both needed.


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