Russian Society and Russian Civil Identity (Case of the Youth)

The Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Russian Federation Kazan National Research Technological University






A. Tuzikov, R. Zinurova


            RUSSIAN SOCIETY
            AND RUSSIAN CIVIL IDENTITY


    CASE OF THE YOUTH

    Tutorial










Kazan
KNRTU Press
2018

         UDK 316.3(075) BBK 60.55я7

            Т81


Published by the decision of the Editorial Review Board of the Kazan National Research Technological University


Reviewers:
F. T. Nezhmetdinova, Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, Professor
N. H. Sharipova, Doctor of Sciences, Professor








        Tuzikov A.
Т81 Russian Society and Russian Civil Identity (Case of the Youth) : Tutorial / A. Tuzikov, R. Zinurova; The Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation, Kazan National Research Technological University. -Kazan : KNRTU Press, 2018. - 100 p.
        ISBN 978-5-7882-2611-8

       This Tutorial is aimed to help students majored in sociology, cross cultural management, marketing and for all who are interested in problems of contemporary Russian society and youth. Also this workbook is useful for MA students of such programs as Quality Management in Education, Management in Education, Public Administration and Sociology.
       The tutorial is prepared in the Institute of Innovation Management.


                                                UDK 316.3(075)
                                                BBK 60.55я7





ISBN 978-5-7882-2611-8   © Tuzikov A., Zinurova R., 2018
© Kazan National Research Technological University, 2018
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CONTENTS


FOREWORD....................................... 4
ISTRUCTIONS AND TASKS ......................... 6
Part 1. THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF THE “IDENTITY CONFIGURATION” CONCEPT IN SOCIAL SCIENCES ..... 8
Part 2. METHODOLOGY OF THE ANALYSIS OF THE RUSSIAN IDENTITY AND ITS CONFIGURATIONS UNDER THE INFLUENCE
OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC AND SOCIO-CULTURAL FACTORS . 74



















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FOREWORD


        Contemporary Russian Society and its Youth face with the serious problem of self-identification. The questions like “Who we are?”, “Who are Us and who are Them?” are of very important. Therefore without detailed analyses and research work it is impossible to work out effective projects of development.
        The phenomenon of personal social identity has been studied by researchers representing various research areas for a long time, which has helped accumulate an essential fund of knowledge on these topics. At the same time, cultural and historical changes that had resulted in scientific paradigm shifts underlay the necessity of considering the problematic area of the social identity of individuals within changing contexts, such as cultural and historical, social and psychological, social and economical, social and political, and social and cultural environments, as well as its multifactor nature and its actualization versions as affected by contextual dynamics.
        The interdisciplinary nature of the research is defined by the phenomenon of modern identity itself and by its contextual actualizations. The discourse of multiple identifications and the ‘adaptability’ of their designing becomes an increasingly greater influence. Our authoring team has prepared the present monograph on the problems in characterizing the multiple youth identity configurations at the current stage of Russia’s and global development. The multiplicity of identifications may come into focus in a simultaneous combination of national (civil) and ethnic (ethnocultural) identities, such as those of Italian Americans. With the development of technology, communication networks, and virtual space, new roles, values, and landmarks arise, which results in appearing new identities. Consumer and cyber identity coming from the proliferation of Internet-based network technologies becomes more important. The problem of multiply formatted identities is conceptualized as both a conflict and a ‘package of identities’. In our interpretation, identifications represent a phenomenon, that is, something that appears within the context of social interaction and has a configuration fan. This understanding provided the basis for choosing the empirical research methods, including questionnaire methods, such as questionnaires and focus groups, and non-questionnaire methods, such as content or discourse analyses. This allowed us to identify

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the specific versions of identity configurations in matrix form, with respect to the coordinates of political, social, consumer and cyber identities.

        This book is done within the project supported by RFFR grant № 18-011-00981 “Social mapping of ethnic, confessional and migration risks in contemporary city agglomeration”.






























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ISTRUCTIONS AND TASKS


         You should attentively read the text and have to answer the questions. Be careful that there is no simple answer only on one page of the texts!

         Task 1. Using text try to catch the main essential features of such concept as “identity”. How do you think “identity” is a thing or a phenomenon? Explain your answer.

         Task 2. What is the difference between understanding identity in psychology and sociology?

         Task 3. Is there some interrelations between concepts of Identity and Ideology? Explain your answer using texts below.

         Task 4. How could you explain the plural character of identity in contemporary societies?

         Task 5. What approach mentioned below is more functional to study identity through sociological perspective?

         Task 6. What are main features and problems of youth identity?

         Task 7. Struggle of identities or Set of identities? What is the most relevant approach to study identity?

         Task 8. According to some sociologists we live in consumer society. There is famous expression like: “Tell me who are your friends and I will tell you who you are”. Try to reformulate this proverb using logic of consumerism. Give examples.

         Task 9. “Plural” or “floating” identity? What does it mean? Give the ‘list” of identities.




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        Task 10. Try to apply the Matrix of identities to you personally. Who are you and your friends in accordance with it?

        Task 11. What means the concept of “configuration” if we discuss the identity of Russian youth?

        Task 12. What does it mean to be “netizen”? What features of cyber dimension of identity could you specify? (Use the given approaches).

        Task 13. Specify the economic factors of identity’s configuration.

        Task 14. Specify the cultural factors of identity’s configuration.

        Task 15. What types of Russians did the Public Opinion Foundation reveal in its study? Do these types depend on psychological factors or on consumer behavior? Try to give your own arguments to the old debates: “To have or to be”. What is modern interpretation of this debate?

















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Part 1


THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF THE “IDENTITY CONFIGURATION” CONCEPT IN SOCIAL SCIENCES

       During the past decade, many Russian and foreign researchers have increasingly addressed the problem of the complex composition and the multi-level nature of the identity structure, as well as its functional and destructive nature amid multiple quasi-identities, the predominance of pseudo-values, and meta-instability in all areas. Can the “Self-Identity” be formed uninfluenced by the specific, local socio-historical and sociocultural environment? Is the collective identifification so important for a person at the Positivist stage of his or her mental development, as it is at the Metaphysical or Theological stages? What actualizes the opposition of ingroups and outgroups and the “us-vs.-them” dichotomy as an opposition of dominance and marginality? What is the behavior criterion for the modern infantilized society in the age of culture virtualization?
       There is no mainstream definition of identity in the world science. The possibility of using a unified interdisciplinary definition thereof within the academic community is not very high, since every researcher, whether a sociologist, psychologist, economist, political scientist, anthropologist, or philosopher, offers his or her own interpretation. Identification, originally from Medieval Latin identifico - ‘I identify’, later from Latin identificus -‘identical’ or ‘the same’, means acknowledging the identity, identifying the objects, recognition, or recognizing the matches ¹. The problem of searching for a well-established explanation of identification is worsened by the chronic crisis of the ideology of postmodern society and by permanent referencing to new ideological determinants and identification cues at the personal, social, civil, and ethnic levels in the context of antagonism between the dominating principles of universalism and globalism, on the one hand, and those of multiculturalism, paticularism, and estrangement, on

¹ Prokhorov, A.M. (1998) Bolshoy entsiklopedichesky slovar [Great Encyclopaedic Dictionary]. In: Prokhorov, A.M. (editor-in-chief). 2nd edition, revised and amended. Moscow: Scientific Publisher “Great Russian Encyclopedia”. P. 434. (In Russian).
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the other hand. This inconsistency limits the possibility of social solidarity. The postmodern society straddles the declared cultural relativism, as well as the drive for national and cultural distinctness and unique self-awareness based on cultural and historical tradition, the national system of values, and the actual cultural pluralism, assimilation of the cultural substrates of various civilizations, peoples, and epochs, confounding the cultural development levels, and the dominance of cultural filters and ethnocentric judgements. These are the properties felt here: Consistency and unity characterize personal identity, while the sense of belonging is integral to social identity. When attempting to unify different identity configurations, it seems apparent that it plays out simultaneously and in parallel in both the exclusion, i.e. something what distinguishes a human, such as individuality, authenticity, and the person’s intention to stand out from the crowd, and the inclusion, i.e. something that allows a person to identify him or herself with others, such as similarity, sameness, and the intention to be a part of a social group. E. Erikson, the founder of the theory of identity, also interpreted it as the internal sensation of and, at the same time, the objectively observed property of self-relation linked to the confidence in the integrity of the world view shared with others.
        The basis of identification as an art was laid by A. Bertillon (1879), a French lawyer, inventor, medicolegist, forensic specialist, and the originator of ‘bertillonage’, who became famous for having introduced the classical system of police sideview-frontview photographs (‘mugshots’) and the ‘anthropometric method’ for describing characteristics identifying criminals by 14 indicators ensuring the most accurate recognition of a person. When the first system of identifying a person by external features was developed and the anthropological identity paradigm started to be formed in science in the 19th century, then it became possible to differentiate social, psychological, and neurophysiological approaches to identity in the 20th century.
        The term of ‘identity’ has especially deeply seated in neuro humanities and social studies. Approaches to understanding the identity within humanities and social studies are differentiated into philosophic and anthropologic ones, while the latter ones include, in their turn, psychological, sociological, and cultural interpretations. Where, in anthropological approaches, the identityis represented as a property of personal becoming and developing, then, in philosophical thought, it is considered as an ontological form, a basis for human existence, or a

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neurophysiological process. The conception of neurophysiological identity was developed within the framework of reductive materialism and physicalism in the philosophy of mind in the middle of the 20th century and included the type-identity theory (Place U., Feigl H., and Smart J.; 1950) and the token-identity theory assuming not the typical identification marks, but the associative flow of subjective experience.
        The socio-humanistic understanding of identity starts with the psychoanalytical structural-dynamic analysis of forming the gender identity and detecting the defense mechanisms to protect the identity stability (Freud, S.; 1894), the archetypes of collective unconscious as the psychospiritual heritage of humanity, the base of the hidden codes of memories common to all humanity, that cannot be reproduced within individual experience (Jung C.; 1936), and the theory of psychosocial development stages (Erikson E.; 1967). Later, the psychosocial knowledge in this area was increased by cognitive psychologists within the social identity theory (Tajfel H.; 1986), theory of social categorization (Turner J.; 1987), the theory of systematizing internal identities and self-schemas (Markus H.; 1977), and the theory of self-discrepancy into actual, ideal, and ought (Higgins, E.T.; 1989).
        In contrast to the psychoanalytic approach, behaviorists, such as M. Sherif or D. Campbell, who conducted manipulating group experiments provoking competitive, conflict, or collaborative social relations, proposed to pay more attention to intergroup behavior and clarified about the sociogroup component of identity, dominating the personal component thereof. M. Sherif made a breakthough of his time:
        He discovered that the process of personal identification can be managed, basically, using intergroup conflicts, real-life situations, and external factors. D. Campbell developed that idea in his situative theory of ‘guarding the group borders’, in which he had empirically proved the intensification of identifying processes due to the threat of a ‘stranger’ penetrating the self-identification group. Note that it was exactly the Skinner's classical Stimulus-Response scheme used as the basis for the experiments performed by situational behaviorists. Here we can observe the similarity to J. Marcia’s identity status model, in which the identity may be in the states of search, crisis, moratorium, achievement, foreclosure, or diffusion. Many contemporary researchers characterize this transition from the psychoanalytic understanding of identity to the social-behavioristic one as the transfer of ‘identity’ from the field of quasi-reality into the real-life

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