Originally from Ontario in Canada, Jesse Campbell has been Assistant Professor at the School of Public Administration since the fall 2014. HSE English News asked him to look back over his first year in Moscow and share his impressions.
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On October 9, the Public Policy Department presented a new book entitled ‘Policy impact of civil society in BRICS countries: best practices influencing policy-making’, which was published by HSE with support from Oxfam under the EU funded project ‘Empowering CSO Networks in an Unequal Multi-Polar World’.
Ian Lowrie, visiting PhD-student from Rice University spent last academic year at HSE doing anthropology of Russian Science & Technology. Ian research project has focused on elite efforts to restructure work and education in the Russian data sciences in order to build a more robust Russian information economy.
The lower a person's resilience, the greater their alienation from themself, other people, and society. In turn, self-alienation and a lack of personal relationships can cause one to approve of military action as a solution to international conflicts, according to Olga Gulevich, Associate Professor of the HSE School of Psychology, and Andrey Nevruyev, postgraduate student of the same department.
Ambiguous attitudes held by the heirs of Russian moguls may affect the future of the country's big businesses. On one hand, the children of wealthy Russian business owners have an excellent headstart – they are well-educated and generally share their parents' values. Yet on the other hand, they are not likely to become selfless workaholics. Instead, they tend to be more hedonistic than their parents and less inclined to devote their entire life to building the family business. Most Russian business heirs expect to retire early and switch to hobbies, recreation and entertainment in their mid-life. Elena Rozhdestvenskaya, professor of the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences, is the first Russian researcher to study the mindsets of heirs of biggest Russian fortunes.
The First International Summer Workshop on Alternative Methods in Social Research, which took place from July 13th to 19th 2015, in Barcelona, was dedicated to hybrid methods of evaluation in the arts and life sciences. Anna Paukova, lecturer at the HSE School of Psychology (Department of Psychology of Personality) participated in the event.
The Baltic Practice International Summer School, held by the HSE Public Policy Department, has celebrated its 15th anniversary. Its organizers and participants recently spoke about what’s most important for people to know about the Baltic Practice, and about why, after 15 years, the school is changing direction.
More than twenty years after the collapse of the socialist bloc, virtually none of the post-communist countries have attained the level of socioeconomic development characteristic of advanced democracies. Likewise, none of the post-communist countries have emerged as successful autocracies with high-quality public institutions, such as those found in Singapore or Oman. Professor Andrei Melville, Dean of the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences, and Mikhail Mironyuk, Associate Professor of the HSE School of Political Science, examine possible reasons why it is so.
Over the past three years, the business climate in Russia has improved for companies with a long planning horizon and for those receiving government support. State-owned companies, however, have been worse off after losing their privileges and facing a level playing field, according to Andrei Yakovlev, director of the HSE Institute for Industrial and Market Studies, Irina Levina, research fellow at the same Institute, and Anastasia Kazun, postgraduate student at the HSE Faculty of Social Sciences.
