The article attempts to characterize the problem field of scientific research of the Department of Social Technologies of the Sociological Faculty of Moscow State University as part of the study of social technologies in the management of modern Russian society, with an emphasis on the technology of modernization of the Russian society and transformation of management practices in the context of new external challenges (primarily related to the active introduction of digital information and communication technologies).Modern Russian society is developing in the context of external and internal challenges requiring the transformation of management practices and the development of new social technologies. In connection with the need to implement the task set by the authorities of choosing a way of further development and rethinking the system of spiritual and moral values, the problem of the development, selection and application of social technologies of socio-cultural, economic and political modernization of Russian society has been actualized. Looking retrospectively at the process of modernization of Russia, one can clearly see the “pendulum” of development — in the direction of borrowing “Western” experience and implementing reforms by western standards or, on the contrary, “return to the roots” and implementing counter-reforms. In the current geopolitical situation, we can state that there has been a demand not only for a return to traditional values and conservative ideology, but also for a rethinking of Russia as a “distinct civilization”.Serious challenges (socio-demographic changes, digitalization, algorithmization, robotization, development of artificial intelligence, machine learning, shering economy, etc.) facing society and its social institutions today, require rethinking management practices and social technologies. The digitalization of social management is increasingly challenging the identification and analysis of the social consequences of introducing artificial intelligence, replacing human labor with machine and algorithms. When we talk about changing the nature of management in a digitalized society, we see an increasing penetration of artificial intelligence technologies into the field of management and the development of algorithmic control. Algorithms are now used in public administration, social services and social services, education, health. The autonomy and autonomization of algorithmic solutions raise serious questions about reducing the role of the human factor in management, which is alarming, especially in spheres that have traditionally been built around the human being. In addition, machines do not just study a person, they try to push him to make certain decisions, to a given behavioral response to a given stimulus, open new possibilities for manipulation. With the active introduction of digital technologies in all spheres of public life and in the management system, there are fears of total digital control. As digital platforms gain more instrumental power and access to personal data, so does the resistance of users of digital platforms due to a lack of control over the “fate” of the data provided. All this can lead to an increase in social tensions, which cannot be ignored when implementing management practices and choosing modern social technologies of management of society.

In recent years, scientific discussions have intensified about the "special" way of development of Russia, the need to preserve the national identity and the harm of reckless copying and borrowing of "alien" practices in the political, economic, cultural spheres, about the need to return to traditional spiritual and moral values. The Russian business culture has an interesting history of formation: the pre-revolutionary period with a special business code and reliance on the values of Orthodoxy; the Soviet period with the values of collectivism, the priority of the common over the private, strict hierarchical order; the early post-Soviet period with non-systematic attempts to raise "western" companies from Soviet enterprises, "blind" copying Western business experience, privatization and the destruction of the "old order" and paternalistic system of relations with power; finally, the current period of development of Russian business culture, when as a result of the first rapid intensification of international activity and the strengthening of contacts with foreign organizations, and then forced break of business ties with "unfriendly" organizations a rather distinctive business culture with a number of specific features and characteristic "ambiguity" (at the same time collectivism and individualism, masculinity and femininity, task and human orientation, monoactivity and polyactivity, polysynchronous organization of working time, long-term and short-term orientation, combination of centralization and decentralization, orientation on individual achievement and status). Characteristic features of modern Russian business culture are high distance of authority and acceptance by individuals of the established hierarchical order, respect for status, dependence of business on power, negative attitude to risk and change on the part of the staff and calm perception of uncertainty by managers, active use of informal ties and reliance on interpersonal relations in business interaction, high context of culture, particularism, etc.

In recent decades, the Russian education system has been constantly reformed. Its current state and problems cannot be understood without identifying the subject initiating and carrying out these permanent changes. Such a subject is an innovative bureaucracy - a specific type of bureaucracy that serves innovative processes and creates social and organizational routines from them. This bureaucracy managed to make a conveyor of innovations, which often moves in a circle - without beginning or end. The reforms have become pendulum and repeat at certain intervals. The article considers numerous consequences and excesses of the innovative bureaucracy’s dominance in the higher education management, which are determined by this bureaucracy success in replacing the real, socially significant goals of the higher education system with indicators that can be quickly achieved and reported as if for the public good. The harsh administrative pressure of the innovative bureaucracy leads to the constant updating and combination of standards (although not all their content can be standardized), to an increase in reporting (including in electronic, online form) and in teaching load. The lack and ambivalence of goals and the non-stop projects of changes hinder the formation of institutional matrix to meet the contemporary challenges and determine destabilizing processes in the education system. The authors argue that an institutional approach to the higher education management can change the situation, since it focuses not on administrative orders and formal goals but on establishing norms and rules for the education system self-development. Thus, the efficiency of the education system should be evaluated by the society and the state and not by representatives of the innovative bureaucracy, who strive to preserve the innovation conveyor. The principles of post-industrial management should be applied in the higher education system, replacing the bureaucratic approach to the implementation of innovations.

“Surveillance capitalism” is not yet a sustainable term used in the social sciences, although there has long been scientific debate about the basic technologies of this economic order- digital information and communication technologies, algorithms, data, artificial intelligence, neural networks, the Internet of things, etc. At the time, Google had revolutionized the field of predictive analysis and promoted “surveillance capitalism”. The company began to pay special attention to extracting and analyzing data in translation operations, speech recognition, image processing, ranking, etc. Google began to turn data (raw materials) into intelligent products – algorithms designed to predict user behavior. These predictive products have been used for sale to other organizations that are increasing their profits by improving their predictive marketing capabilities. Smart machines are no longer just learning to know a man his behavior, they are trying to push him into making certain decisions, into programmed behavioral responses to some stimulus, which leads to an increase in the earnings of “supervising capitalists” (and, above all, the income of owners of digital platforms). That is, by automating various processes, machines set the human behavior that leads to the emergence of a new type of power – the “instrumental” power (automation of life of individuals by means of universal implementation of “smart” network devices, formation of “smart” space, “smart” houses). Algorithms penetrate into a variety of spheres, on the basis of algorithms management decisions are made and modern cities function. However, questions inevitably arise about the social consequences of widespread algorithmization and digitalization, the security of data storage, the limits of digitizing the social world.

This article is devoted to the actual problems of the organization and implementation of the educational process during the new coronavirus infection COVID-19. The authors consider two aspects of digital transformation in Russian education – from the point of view of the use of digital technologies to automate various processes of educational organizations and from the point of view of the introduction of a complex of digital technologies in order to build a learning model that will be based on the effective use of these technologies to solve professional tasks.The article emphasizes that the process of digitalization of society in our country developed evenly, without any special jumps, but the pandemic served as a catalyst for the development of digital technologies, and the process of digitalization itself was divided into “before” and “after” the beginning of the pandemic. During the pandemic, the younger generation artificially fell out of the mainstream not only of full-fledged socialization, which takes place within educational institutions and in the circle of teachers and peers, but also found themselves facing numerous problems related to the violation of the traditional educational process. In many ways, teachers and staff of the Faculty of Sociology of Lomonosov Moscow State University were able to overcome this problem by quickly and effectively rebuilding the educational process so that it did not lose its traditionally high quality.The authors of the article share their experience in organizing the educational process at the Faculty of Sociology of Lomonosov Moscow State University, which took place in the so-called mixed format for almost two years and was accompanied by the active introduction of the latest educational technologies, including synchronous (video conferences, video consultations and feedback online, chat rooms, Skype communication, virtual classes) and asynchronous e-learning, as well as project-based learning and the so-called “inverted classroom”. The results of educational monitoring are presented, which showed the high efficiency of the educational process at the Faculty of Sociology in difficult conditions.The authors also considered the key trends of digitalization of education, identified its positive aspects and analyzed in detail the negative aspects, a special place among which is occupied by the virtualization of education as a social institution.

Introduction of digital technologies in all spheres of life is a factor that radically change the social interactions and mechanisms of social control. This rising trend, that turn the various digital technologies into main form of realization of “the social” is complex and contradictory. We are confronted more and more with multiplicity of social control with simultaneous unification of its procedures, determined by digital technologies. The functions of social control are transferred from human actors to machines and algorithms. The social control is automated. Under the cover of objectivity and neutrality such automatization contains political, economical and ideological imperatives. The machine has human core, yet difficult to discern. Implementation of algorithmic forms of governance, based on Big Data, significantly increases the scope of population monitoring and shifts the “power logic” to control and construction of opinions, creation of the demands, mobilizing action in accordance with the prescribed standards of conduct. COVID-19 Pandemic enhanced the activities of national States to take advantage of digital control over the population. In fact, during few months of quarantine measures in most countries unprecedented in its global reach and universal in their technical solutions instruments of control over the population have been deployed. In doing so the digital social control generates very specific forms of social asymmetry. There remains an open question: who has access to information, generated by the machines of control. For the development of modern smart cities and digitalization of social practices relevant and correct data are needed. Сompromise between citizens’ rights to privacy and rapid development of new smart technologies is inevitable. Personal data collected not only by the State but also by private corporations, especially by owners of digital platforms. Rights to obtain and use data need to be regulated and rules set for their commercial application. COVID-19 Pandemic, accelerating implementation of digital social control, reduced “public sensitivity” to violation of private borders for the sake of security. The need for a rapid response to COVID-19 changes the rules of the game as to how сitizens, organizations and authorities in different countries deal with personal data and actualizes the question, where the balance lies between confidentiality of personal data and public health and/or security.

Through analysis of the content of social media posts, this article discusses the attitude of Russian Internet users toward the issues of poverty and wealth. Online discussion is pragmatically oriented: General issues of a socioeconomic and sociopolitical nature are not discussed there. Poverty and wealth are perceived through the prism of consumer behavior in order for people to find opportunities to meet their needs. Internet communications manifest an obviously negative assessment of poverty, while the attitude toward wealth and the wealthy and toward social differentiation involves more neutral assessments. At the forefront of discussions is the opportunity to maintain an acceptable standard of living under difficult economic realities. People share recipes for survival in the face of sharp declines in income.

В статье на материалах проведенного контент-анализа сообщений в социальных медиа рассмотрены особенности отношения российских интернет-пользователей к проблемам бедности и богатства. Общение в сети предполагает прагматическую направленность. Здесь не обсуждаются общие проблемы социально-экономического и социально-политического характера. Бедность и богатство воспринимаются сквозь призму потребительского поведения с целью поиска возможностей удовлетворения потребностей людей. В интернет-коммуникациях проявляется очевидная негативная оценка бедности, в то время как отношение к богатству и богатым, к социальной дифференциации общества представлено более нейтральными оценками. На первый план в обсуждениях выдвигается возможность поддерживать приемлемый уровень жизни в непростых экономических реалиях. Люди делятся рецептами выживания в условиях резкого сокращения доходов.

T his article deals with transformation of consumer practices, which become (and maybe have already turned into) the dominated form of social behavior and cannot be described within the model of purposeful-rational action. Utilizing the analytical distinction between “doing shopping” as routine practice, related to satisfaction of basic needs, and “going shopping” as pleasure and leasuretime social activity, this article demonstrates series of changes, resulting in generation of new consumer culture. These changes are compared with a range of transfigurations of the consumers’ spaces (trade spaces), which are at once places (scenes), where consumer practices deploy, and the structural condition of their possibility. According to the logic of the modern man, his focus on fast and diverse consumption and his desire of consuming everything in one place, “in one bottle” on the run, the shopping spaces are becoming the center of new industries-cultural, educational, recreational. The modern retail spaces become not only a place of shopping, but also closely incorporate into the social life of the community and turn into the centers of social life. Effectively combining and managing the various scenarios of consumption, the modern retail helps to feel and join the happiness of live communication in the overbounded with the online social contacts, but atomized world, to get rid of the feeling of emotional emptiness. Special design of retail space and the integration of various social technologies, which are created for manipulating the emotional sphere of the customers (non-standard architectural solutions, catchy window dressing, interior design, background music, aromamarketing, psychologically adjusted range of color, taste and tactile solutions) create a special entertainment and attraction of space, control the consumer and are ready not only to stimulate the purchase, but to form an unforgettable impressions. P roducers and retailers have effectively used knowledge about the transformation of consumer’s practices. They help consumers to feel liberty of choice and shopping, freedom of availability of goods and services (democratic character of process of consumption). Thus, today trade spaces are becoming multipurpose, not only structuring wide scripts of consumer behavior and forms of consumer experience, but also making the contribution to social order.

This review is dedicated to the problems of modern cities, which discussed on IV Moscow Urban Forum in December 2014. Participants of this Forum discussed possibilities and challengers that affect modern megacities and revealed the prospects of their development, which are considered not only in terms of efficient management, but also from the viewpoint of city residents.

This review is dedicated to the problems of modern cities, which discussed on IV Moscow Urban Forum in December 2014. Participants of this Forum discussed possibilities and challengers that affect modern megacities and revealed the prospects of their development, which are considered not only in terms of efficient management, but also from the viewpoint of city residents.

This article is dedicated to the problems of formation of Russian business culture and the influence, which exert the national culture, on functioning of modern Russian organizations and organization behavior. Doing business involves work at the management level with heterogeneous elements, reducible to a single system, where the very heterogeneity (social, historical, cultural) is one of the major management problems that require the development and application of sometimes very trivial management technologies.

This article is dedicated to the problems of formation of Russian business culture and the influence, which exert the national culture, on functioning of modern Russian organizations and organization behavior. Doing business involves work at the management level with heterogeneous elements, reducible to a single system, where the very heterogeneity (social, historical, cultural) is one of the major management problems that require the development and application of sometimes very trivial management technologies.