David Sarpong recently joined the HSE Research Laboratory for Science and Technology Studies as a senior research fellow. In this interview with the HSE News Service, he shares his first impressions of Moscow and HSE, as well as his expectations for the future.
of Russians who know or who at least have heard about public, nonprofit organizations and initiatives in their city, village or settlement, learned about them through ‘word of mouth’.
Relations between Muscovites and migrant workers from the CIS are plagued by myths circulating in the mass consciousness. In her research, Yulia Florinskaya , a Senior Researcher with HSE’s Institute of Demography, refutes prevalent statements that migrants not only take jobs from Muscovites, but also seriously increase the burden on healthcare and intentionally maintain illegal status.
The annual foresight courses which have been running at Manchester University since 1999 are considered some of the most prestigious and important for researchers of the future. In July 2015 two researchers at the Foresight Centre at ISSEK who have been students on the courses themselves have been invited this year to come and teach.
The proportion of interethnic marriages in Russia varies widely depending on ethnicity. How common mixed-ethnicity families are depends largely on couples' ability to overcome cultural, religious and social differences between their ethnic groups and also on settlement and migration patterns. In his ground-breaking research, Eugeny Soroko , Senior Research Fellow at the HSE Institute of Demography, measured the relative ‘distances’ between ethnic Russians and ten other ethnic groups using a tool he invented – the mixed family matrix.
International companies engage in social responsibility in order to to improve their reputation, be more competitive, and to gain political benefits and some degree of control over society. In Russia, however, businesses convert social investment into informal privileges granted to them by government, according to a paper by Olga Kuzina, Professor of the HSE Department of Economic Sociology, and Marina Chernysheva, postgraduate student at the same department.
On June 15 the new international laboratory, Centre for Health Economics, Management and Policy, was opened at HSE in St. Petersburg. The head of the laboratory Christopher Gerry tells us about the laboratory, its plans and prospects.
Thomas Remington, Leading Research Fellow at the International Center for the Study of Institutions and Development (ICSID), told The HSE Look about the projects at ICSID and involvement of students into research.
Today's big businesses in Russia may never become family dynasties. Only a few business owners have succession plans in place, but many have never considered the issue, for reasons ranging from their heirs being too young to avoiding conflict in the family to resenting the lack of institutions in Russia to support effective wealth succession. Instead, most entrepreneurs are planning to retain control of their business for as long as possible, according to researchers from the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences and the Skolkovo Wealth Transformation Centre. For the first time ever, they examined the attitudes of Russia's major capital owners towards business and wealth succession.
