Suchergebnisse

The article was initially intended as a review of Carolyn Steel's book Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. However, the author's foreword on the reasons and variations of the sociological interest in food turned the review into the reflections on the ways of (or a kind of) sociological analysis of food's role in the contemporary consumer society, a role that cannot be simply reduced to a "fuel" necessary for the trouble-free operation of man as a biological creature. There are several clearly-defined contexts of the scientific analysis of food that can be of interest and importance for sociologists. These contexts include the macroeconomic approach (such as various interpretations of food security from the social-economic to the (geo)political, such as the Russian state's politicized discourse of import substitution that ignores the population's real food practices and access to food); the gender-economic approach (a 'feminized' version of economic history); the culinary-ideological approach (when the recipes of the usual cookbook or the model of public catering development hide the ideological didactic instructions on the mandatory way of life, i.e., "political dietology"); and the historical-cultural-anthropological approach (the attempts to reconstruct the social-cultural codes of food and its role in the epoch-making events of the past). Such wide boundaries of today's scientific interpretations of food allowed the presentation of the Hungry City as an almost ideal example of the sociological analysis of the social life of food in all its diverse manifestations (such as the production and transportation of food, urbanization and food markets, the transformations of home kitchens' design, the development of the public catering system, social meanings of the joint meal-and-wastes recycling, social justice and utopias), even though the book focuses on only the culinary culture of England.

The article considers trust as one of the most teasing and vague notions in sociology for it is widely used in both everyday language and scientific discourse as taken for granted and not presuming any special interpretations or situational definitions. In the first section the author identifies key elements of the sociological study of trust (causes and effects; determinants and practical implications of different "types" and "levels" of trust; the prevailing definition of trust as a means of coping with uncertainty, etc.). The second and the third sections consider the empirical study of trust within quantitative and qualitative approaches pointing briefly to their focus of interest, which is social and political trust measured in large-scale surveys, often in the comparative perspective, in the former case; while the latter seeks to understand what trust means for people and why they prefer to speak about trust using specific words in particular situations. The fourth section discusses the discursive construction of trust; the author believes that narrative analysis is a perfect methodological decision (provided there is enough "quantitative" and "qualitative" data to contextualize its findings for correct interpretation) to identify the typological discursive constitution of trust in everyday practices; and illustrates such a potential of narrative analysis on a small example of semi-structured interviews with the Russian rural dwellers. The article ends with a few concluding remarks to summarize key findings and challenges of the trust research for now, which is justly enough considered to be at the crossroads. © Centre for Fundamental Sociology, 2016.

This article was initially intended to be a review of War, a book by Arkady Babchenko published in 2015, but turned out to be more of an essay. On one hand, the purpose in publishing a book in 2015 about the two Chechen military campaigns may be questioned especially since Babchenko had previously published numerous texts about his recent experiences as a war journalist. On the other hand, War is full of sociological issues, which eliminates any doubt about the possibility of writing a review of this definitely non-sociological book for a sociological journal. In fact, such books revive a new round of debates on two topics important for the sociological discourse. The first considers the status of the "stories" of ordinary witnesses of the events, and their logic of narration has obtained the same legitimate status as scientific narratives; that is why sociologists are interested in the everyday "testimonies" within the "micro-" approach to the study of war. The question that underlines the second topic of the debates is central for contemporary society in general, that is, who has the right to write about war and to suggest linguistic, thematic, discursive, and implicit ideological formats to speak and to think about it? Certainly, there are adequate, institutionalized methodological models to study and to write about war. However, the macro-optical perspective inevitably misses the substantial meanings and emotions that turn wars into the most epiphanic moments of our lives expressed in biographical narratives. To overcome this limitation, we turn to the narratives of those who happened to witness wars from "within", either to fictional narratives (represented by The Kindly Ones, authored by Jonathan Littell), or to non-fictional stories (represented by Pathologies, written by Zakhar Prilepin). The latter are more typical for contemporary Russian tradition and, thus, are considered on the example of War. However, both fiction and non-fiction narratives allow us see the "human dimension of war"; they differ, perhaps, only in the power of conviction, and the level of trust.

This article considers the reasons and consequences of the increased attention from politicians and scholars to the challenges of national and global food security. First, the authors focus on the contradictory definitions of food security in intellectual and ideological debates which determine the development of national and global doctrines of food security (and 'food sovereignty' as its critical alternative). Secondly, the authors consider past and present attempts to ensure food security and identify the historical zigzags of food policies in Russia (from the Soviet autarchic policy of food self-sufficiency to attempts to liberalize food security definitions in the 1990s, and the new protectionist and autarchic food security doctrine of the 2000s). The authors also present a range of common indicators of food security, and emphasize that the gross growth in the production of various types of food is insufficient to assess the quality of national food policies. The key indicators of food security include the effectiveness of agricultural production, access to quality food for all social groups, and the potential of consumers to control the issues of national food security. Finally, the authors consider the sociological approach to the study of food security and present data from a series of sociological monitoring developed and conducted by the Center for Agrarian Studies of RANEPA 2015-2017. The analysis identified the 'double autarchy' in the responses of respondents: on the one hand, they support the general political course on food protectionism and nationalism (state autarchy), while, on the other, they strive to implement a micro-policy of autonomous food sovereignty (family autarchy) by intensifying household efforts to ensure natural self-sufficiency. © 2018 National Research University Higher School of Economics.

The authors consider cooperation as a specific, alternative form of economic organization to the standard business firm within a market economy, and focus on agricultural cooperation in Russia. First, the article engages with the key milestones of the history of cooperation in Russia: (1) the first attempts to establish cooperative organizations before the Russian Revolution (agricultural societies, agricultural partnerships and credit cooperatives) which gave the poor rural population a chance to improve living standards and ensured promising prospects for the long-term development of cooperation in all forms; (2) the dependent forms of consumer and production cooperation under the Soviet regime that deprived all collective forms of their true cooperative nature. In the second part of the article, the authors describe the current state of the cooperative movement in the Russian countryside and identify its basic features, such as opposition to family farming and the state capitalist tendencies of the concentration and vertical integration in the form of agroholdings; state rural cooperation policies which aim to promote and financially support small farming including the development of rural cooperatives; the number and types of cooperatives in the countryside; the reasons for debates on cooperation legislation; the viability of the main types of agricultural cooperatives (production, consumer, credit cooperation). Finally, the authors emphasize that cooperation in contemporary Russia does not fit the classic Western scheme of cooperative development and still has to overcome a number of substantial challenges (the soviet legacy, lack of bottom-up initiatives, the ideological and economic dominance of large-scale farming, poor academic expertise in the field of cooperation studies). © 2018 National Research University Higher School of Economics.

Russia's political leaders have a different understanding of food security than traditional usage. The traditional usage of the term food security refers to access, availability, and nutritional aspects of food. According to the conventional application of food security, the vast majority of the Russian population is not food insecure by traditional measures. The Russian variant of food security connects food trade to national security. The Russian political leadership argues that Russia is food insecure based on food imports. Survey data are used to assess support for the government's food security policy, and to analyze the impact of the self-imposed food embargo on Russian consumers. Copyright © 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

In recent years, the issue of happiness, including the practical searches for it, has become phenomenally popular. However, this trend was set many decades ago, already in the 1970s, when the first empirical studies were conducted to reveal that the personal feeling and self-identification as happy/unhappy are related to the pursuit of pleasure (i.e. to hedonism as a lifestyle). Over the past decades, happiness has become a legitimate object of conceptual and methodological research within almost all humanities, social and even natural sciences due to the fact that searches for the definition and acquisition of happiness went far beyond the limits of fiction that has always been involved in providing people with answers to questions on what happiness is and how to find one's place in life. As a result, today every scientific discipline should outline the contours of its own interpretation of happiness albeit not a single one, not an unambiguous one and not without intersections with other disciplines' approaches. The article aims at systematizing methodological approaches to the sociological analysis of happiness and identification of their possibilities and limitations. The authors show that sociologists can use a huge variety of works with different conceptual and operational definitions of happiness, and many methods to assess the level of happiness and the factors determining it. The presented review is not complete or final, it only systematizes the developments in the study of happiness and identifies two promising directions for further sociological searches — the "objectivist" econometric approach (happiness indexes based on social-economic indicators) and the "subjectivist" social-psychological approach (self-assessments of happiness in public opinion polls).