Hedonism versus Harmony: Wrong Image of Happiness in Commercials
Happiness and harmony are the two mantras of most commercials. "Buy this stuff, and it'll make you happier," they promise. Yet they do not always succeed in increasing sales. One of the reasons may be that advertisers and their audiences have different views on happiness. While the former tend to reduce happiness to hedonism, pleasure-seeking and satisfying one’s desires here and now, the latter often refuse to limit happiness to simple enjoyment.
Values Evolution: East Still to Catch Up with West
Since World War II, people in many countries have enjoyed a better sense of wellbeing, which has resulted in survival values giving way to emancipation values. Threats no longer lurk at every turn, and each new generation sees more opportunities and fewer barriers to empowerment. The book Freedom Rising by LCCR Chief Research Fellow Christian Welzel offers some ideas on how widespread this process is, whether it is irreversible and where human emancipation can lead.
What Russians Tell Tourists about their Towns
Residents of provincial Russian towns put it differently when talking about their towns to Muscovites, foreigners, and tourists from other Russian regions. Such an ‘individual approach’ is spontaneous and may be useful in creating city tourist brands, concluded Nadezhda Radina as a result of her experiment, which involved over 800 residents of Russian provinces.
Running a Comparative Empirical Programme in Social Research
Christian Fröhlich is Assistant Professor at the School of Sociology who has been at HSE since 2014. He also supervises an English-taught Master’s Programme ‘Comparative Social Research’. Christian Fröhlich has talked to HSE University bulletin, The HSE Look, about programme design, partnerships, and lessons learned from running the programme.
Research Internship at Laboratory of Sociology in Education and Science in St. Petersburg
Since the beginning of this academic year, Marika Sharashenidze has been a research intern at theLaboratory of Sociology in Education and Science (LSES) in St. Petersburg.
Sociologists Outlined Institutional Landscape of Russian Physics
Social scientists from National Research University Higher School of Economics (NRU HSE) measured scientific capital of 39 physics institutions of Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). More detailed information about research results can be found in the journal Scientometrics.
Hobbies and Clubs Can Keep Youth Away from Alcohol
Youth in medium-sized and small towns who engage in after-school activities such as hobby clubs are less likely to drink alcohol. Generally, school-age youth in communities with higher educational levels, social and professional status are less vulnerable to alcohol abuse.
Learning about Sociology from a Global Perspective
Master’s programme in Comparative Social Research was launched in 2014 and has been rapidly developing since. Its Academic Supervisor Christian Fröhlich talks about what the programme offers the applicants and what makes it unique.
HSE Scholar Publishes Article in the European Sociological Review
An article by Director of the Centre for Culture of Sociology and Anthropology of Education (CCSAE), Dmitry Kurakin has been published in Oxford University Press’s leading international sociology journal the European Sociological Review. Dr. Kurakin co-wrote the article Horizontal and 'Vertical Gender Segregation in Russia — Changes upon Labour Market Entry before and after the Collapse of the Soviet Regime' with fellow researchers at the European University Institute on the eduLIFE project.
How Are Human Sciences and Sociology and the Humanities Related? The Debate Continues
The Poletayev Institute for Theoretical and Historical Studies in the Humanities (IGITI) held an international conference on 29-30 October 2015 on ‘Biological Concepts, Models, and Metaphors in Social and Human Sciences’. For two days, Russian, European and American researchers discussed the relations between social sciences and the humanities and various life sciences. This topic arises largely in the light of the recent boom in genetics, medicine and biology which have led academics to reconsider previous concepts of boundaries and connections between disciplines.