How reliable are online social scientific surveys in non-democratic contexts? To address this question, we compared the data from two web surveys (WSs), conducted in Russia in 2018 and 2020 using opt-in panels, to the offline data from the 7th wave of the World Values Survey (fieldwork in Russia 2017) and the 2010 Russian Census data. We found that (a) the overall quality of the data from WSs is comparable to that of the data from the offline sample; (b) online respondents express more liberal views on such issues as homosexuality, abortion, and divorce, as well as gender equality, compared to offline respondents (by about 10% of the total scale range for each domain); and (c) different survey modes produce slightly different nomological networks of value orientations. We also tested several competing explanations of (b) and concluded that the most likely one is less pronounced social desirability bias in WSs.

After Hofstede proposed individualism-collectivism (IDV-COLL) as a dimension of national culture, numerous studies have used that name to refer to individual-level psychological constructs, based on theories and empirical operationalizations that are not necessarily compatible with the Hofstede tradition. This has created confusion. In this study, we investigate whether the two revised Minkov-Hofstede dimensions of national culture - IDV-COLL and “flexibility-monumentalism” (FLX-MON) - have individual-level counterparts and if they are isomorphic (have the same structure at both levels of analysis). We find that the three main conceptual facets of national COLL (conformism, ascendancy, and exclusionism) and the three of MON (self-esteem, self-stability, and generosity) materialize as six independent individual-level dimensions in a nationally representative sample from Mongolia (n = 1500). This structure emerged in a confirmatory factor analysis, multidimensional scaling, and hierarchical cluster analyses. This is the first series of analyses of the structure of the individual-level ingredients of national IDV-COLL and FLX-MON.

Numerous studies show that prosocial behavior leads to positive emotional outcomes for the actor, yet does it matter, who the beneficiary is? The present paper explores differential effects of helping acts towards close versus distant recipients on subjective well-being and the role that basic psychological needs play in this relationship. Two studies using event-recall (N = 127) and interventional (N = 305) designs in Russian samples were conducted to test our hypotheses. Study 1 showed that performing acts of kindness towards family and friends (compared to a control condition) led to higher satisfaction of the needs for relatedness and morality, while helping strangers increased only the latter. Study 2 failed to unconditionally replicate the prosocial-happiness link; however, when the need for competence was controlled for, helping both types of recipients was shown to provide higher event-level well-being outcomes. The positive effect of prosocial acts toward strong ties was mediated by relatedness and morality satisfaction, while when the recipient was a stranger, the effect was accounted for by fulfilling the needs for morality and autonomy. No significant event-level well-being differences were detected between those helping close versus distant others and no differences in positive affect, negative affect or life satisfaction emerged between the three conditions. The paper provides support for the importance of the self-perceived impact for the success of kindness interventions. We conclude with a discussion of implications for kindness interventions towards different recipients.

Family structure is considered a particularly important predictor of social and political development; historical differences in family size and other family characteristics cast a long shadow over societal development. This paper explores the effect of differences in historical family size on political behavior based on within-country variations in this characteristic in Russia. Unlike most papers on historical legacies, we trace the effect of family size over a century of Russian history with a focus on the first competitive and free elections in Russia—to the Constituent Assembly—held in 1917 and on the presidential elections in post-Soviet Russia in 1996 and 2000. Mean family size is measured based on the census data for 1897. We find a robust and significant association between smaller family size and a voting preference for parties that are economically liberal, which holds despite differences in the political, economic, and social environment between the 1910s and 1990s.

Purpose

There is an increasing interest in the international management literature in cultural differences between in-country regions. Yet, the regions of any country may be merely political products and not necessarily cultural units. The goal of this article is to propose clear empirical criteria for deciding if a set of entities, such as a country's administrative regions, can be legitimate units of cross-cultural analysis and to test these criteria in an empirical study.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors review the literature on what constitutes a unit of cross-cultural analysis and propose empirical criteria. For instance, the regions of a given country are meaningful units of cross-cultural analysis if one can replicate (an) established dimension(s) of culture at the regional level, including some of the dimension(s)' antecedents and predictive properties. The authors apply this test in the context of the Russian Federation (RF), using an RF database (18,768 respondents from 60 administrative regions) with items borrowed from the World Values Survey.

Findings

The RF regions pass the authors’ test. At the regional level, the selected items yield an individualism-collectivism (IDV-COLL) dimension that is similar to its nation-level counterpart in the revised Minkov-Hofstede model in terms of concept and antecedents (wealth differences and geographic latitude) and outcomes that are relevant in business (innovation rates and quality of governance). The authors also find other patterns that confirm the properties of RF regions as meaningful units of cultural analysis.

Research limitations/implications

The authors’ criteria and the test based on them are suitable for large countries, with significant geo-climatic variety and ethnic diversity, but may be inapplicable in small countries with less diversity. It is questionable if the latter countries contain enough cultural variation to justify a cross-cultural analysis of their sub-national regions.

Practical implications

The authors’ criteria can be used in future research in any large country to decide if its regions justify a cross-cultural analysis in the field of management and business or any other field.

Social implications

Cultural differences within a country are important as they may inform political and management decisions. Yet, to demonstrate that those differences are real, and not imaginary, one needs a methodology like the authors’.

Originality/value

The study contributes to the discussion of the meaningfulness of in-country regions as cultural units for cross-cultural analysis in international business by focusing on the RF.

In this paper, we study a division between market corruption—impersonal bribery— and network corruption that operates through social connections. We provide a thorough theoretical discussion of this division, compare it with other categorizations of corruption, and also demonstrate diferences between market and network corruption existing in practice. Using data from the World Economic Forum in the period from 2007 to 2016 we measure market and network corruption across about 150 countries all over the globe and show that network corruption is more related to countries’ cultural backgrounds and more harmful to investments than market corruption. Overall, our paper argues that the market-network dimension, unfairly abandoned in the literature, may be useful for better understanding of such a complex phenomenon as corruption.

This paper analyses the film industry as a social phenomenon through the lens of revised modernisation theory. Revised modernisation theory implies that economic development leads to value shift which eventually results in the spread of more liberal social attitudes, including the greater acceptance of sexual freedoms, gender equality, and overall tolerance. These changes penetrate all spheres of social life, including the field of cultural production. Here, one can expect that topics and visual tools employed by filmmakers reflect the ongoing changes. This research focuses particularly on the presence of female and male nudity in films. We use the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) as a dataset that reflects changes in modern societies, as we believe that IMDB represents a vast area underexplored by social scientists. Using IMDb and European Value Study data, we juxtapose the presence of general, female, and male nudity in films and the prevalence of choice values in the given year and country. The sample consists of films produced in 40 European countries between 1960 and 2013. Relying on the IMDb data we identify 34 291 films, with approximately a quarter of them depicting nudity. Using multilevel regression analysis, we find that the probability of female nudity is associated with the prevalence of choice values, whereas male nudity is more likely to appear in films related to the topic of homosexuality. Overall, the paper shows that value changes are reflected through the depiction of female bodies, however, the spread of choice values do not lift the restrictions on the presentation of men.

Gender role attitudes are largely formed in the parental family because children see some definite distribution of gender roles. Parents with different education and social status are likely to transmit different types of values to their children: higher education and social status lead to more egalitarian gender attitudes. At the same time individual and contextual characteristics play a role. The objective of this research is to reveal the impact of parental background on gender role attitudes in across European countries with different level of societal gender inequality. The European Values Study 2017-2020 is used as a dataset. According to the results of the multilevel regression analysis, more favorable parental characteristics lead to more egalitarian gender role attitudes both in the public and in the domestic sphere. Material wealth is positively associated with gender role attitudes in the domestic sphere, whereas for gender role attitudes in the public sphere the result is mixed. Almost no interaction effects were found for parental characteristics and gender inequality level in a country for gender role attitudes in the public sphere. The association between gender role attitudes in the domestic sphere and parental background differs in countries with lower and higher level of gender inequality index (GII). In countries higher level of gender equality (low GII) all the effects are as expected. The higher parents’ cultural capital is and the more favorable situation is, the more egalitarian gender role attitudes are. Material wealth at the age of 14 leads to more egalitarian gender role attitudes. In countries with lower GDP and higher gender inequality the results are less trivial. The impact of parent’s education, employment status and material wealth is weaker, insignificant or possibly even negative.

In this essay, we first briefly recount the post-Soviet history of social science in Russia, with particular attention to the role of international collaborations in spurring its growth, and we review the accelerating attacks on university autonomy and international collaborations that preceded Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine in February 2022. Then we consider developments since the February 2022 invasion that, in our view, signal the demise of academic freedom. We consider how Russia-based social scientists have negotiated the mounting challenges to the practice of their craft. We draw on interviews with Russian and American social scientists involved in international collaborations conducted in summer 2021 and interviews with Russian social scientists carried out in spring and summer 2022, as well as scholarly and journalistic accounts of developments within Russian universities and research institutes.