Changing Societies & Personalities, 2022
Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 5–9

https://doi.org/10.15826/csp.2022.6.1.160

EDITORIAL

The Mole of History Burrows His Way  
ever Forward and Upward 

Elena Stepanova
Institute for Philosophy and Law, Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 
Yekaterinburg, Russia

Transformations and transitions inevitably accompany the history of humankind. 
Looking backward at different periods of this course, we come to recognize those 
initially invisible symptoms that gradually merge together and eventually lead 
to tectonic shifts; as a result, a new social reality emerges. But do we think at 
such moments about how these subtle and seemingly unimportant marks could 
affect people’s daily lives? Do we understand how changing circumstances 
make people first to convince themselves that nothing special is happening, 
but then gradually force them to radically change their beliefs and habits? The 
world today is undergoing the period of widening uncertainty due to the conflicts, 
which we all are witnessing; in any case, it is becoming increasingly obvious that 
the world will not return to its previous state. No one knows what the relations 
between countries, peoples, and individuals will look like in the future. We can 
only observe and try to trace the direction of “the old mole” that burrows deep 
into the soil of history, digging ever forward and upward—a metaphor of the 
spirit of history used by Hegel and Marx. In other words, although the logic of 
historical transformations remains obscure, changes are gradually accumulating, 
eventually revealing their essence to individuals and societies as a whole. The 
articles in this issue of Changing Societies & Personalities shed some light on 
the internal causes of these transformations, considering their inevitable effect 
on the lives of a wide variety of people.

In the ESSAY Ordoliberalism Revisited, Thomas F. Remington undertakes 
two tasks: first, to clarify the concept of ordoliberalism—a legal and economic 
theory originated in the 1930s at the University of Freiburg, Germany, which still 
remains relatively unknown outside a few scholarly circles. Second, to consider 
what influence this concept had on German policies and institutions following 
World War II, presuming that a better understanding of ordoliberalism can be 
helpful in the contemporary debates about the crisis of liberal democracy and 

Received 25 March 2022 © 2022 Elena A. Stepanova 
Published online 11 April 2022 stepanova.elena.a@gmail.com 

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6 Elena A. Stepanova

capitalism. Remington argues that “for the ordoliberals […], a market economy where 
the state protected individual freedom by ensuring competition and preventing the rise 
of concentrated market power was the only guarantee both of economic prosperity and 
elementary social justice”. Consequently, the ordoliberals emphasized that the market 
economy must serve not only efficiency, but also social justice and society as a whole, 
not the other way around; for them, the basis of morality was freedom. Remington 
stresses: “It is regrettable that the architects of market liberalization in Russia and other 
post-communist countries never took Germany’s postwar reconstruction as a source 
of usable ideas”, and the state is responsible for forming and enforcing a competitive 
order, which is a basis for economic and political freedom. 

Konstantin F. Zavershinskiy and Alexander I. Koryushkin in the ARTICLE Political 
Socialization in a Changing Society: A Crisis of Value Orientations or Asynchronization 
of National Memories? address the need to analyze the emerging qualitative changes 
of societal cohesion and civic identification. According to them, “the rapid destruction 
of hierarchical distinctions between the world of ‘the youth’ and the world of ‘the 
adults’ further complicates intergenerational relations and increases the degree of 
their variability and arbitrariness”. Today, the development of digital technologies, 
which signify the emergence of a new economic and political order, forces younger 
generations to “fluctuate between apolitical consumerist survival strategies and 
occasional flares of violent anarchical protests”. The authors explore the reasons for 
the differences in value-normative positioning of the “younger” and “older” generations, 
which are substantively novel and need to be theoretically and methodologically 
explicated. They focus on young citizens from mid-teens to mid-twenties, and formulate 
the following research questions: What theoretical and methodological models of 
youth socialization are in use by contemporary researchers? What are the strategies 
for dealing with them? What is the role of symbolic structures of contemporary political 
memory, especially of the national memory legitimation profiles, in youth socialization? 

The ARTICLE Digital Fears Experienced by Young People in the Age of 
Technoscience, by Sofya B. Abramova, Natalya L. Antonova, Riccardo Campa, and 
Natalia G. Popova is focused on digital fears and anxieties. The authors substantiate 
the relevance of studying their specific forms reflected in the minds of young people, as 
well as of outlining approaches to their social diagnostics, prevention, and therapy. 
In the article, a sociological analysis of fears of young people under the conditions 
of digitalization of all spheres of social life is presented. Fear is defined as a complex 
social phenomenon, which has cultural roots and affects social behavior and social 
life: “Fear is an inbuilt instinct that serve important survival functions […], e.g., the 
activation of defensive responses […] that encourage an individual to overcome stress 
and accomplish goals”. The analysis is based on a sociological survey among young 
residents (in total, 1,050 aged 18–30) of the Sverdlovsk region, Russia, conducted 
in November–December, 2020. The typology includes the following types: fears of 
social rejection; of loss; of decision-making; of publicity; of various categories of 
people; postmodern fears; etc. The authors conclude that fear can be referred to as 
a distinctive characteristic of the social well-being of the youth, and address their 
recommendations to political representatives and civil society leaders. 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2022, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 5–9 7

In the ARTICLE From Uncertainty to Trust: COVID-19 Pandemic Responses of 
South Korea and Sweden, Andrey V. Rezaev, Natalia D. Tregubova, and Anastasia 
A. Ivanova argue that such epidemiological situations as the pandemic of COVID-19 
pose a significant threat to the manageability of the population in modern states 
(regardless of their degree of democracy or authoritarianism). That is why “the 
widespread introduction of lockdowns as a regulatory method during this pandemic 
could be associated with the need to preserve an understandable and quantifiable 
management object”. Based on an analysis of the data provided by national 
governments and international organizations, and using the approach of Swedish 
sociologist Apostolis Papakostas, who regards trust/distrust as an organizational and 
relational phenomenon, the authors consider, analyze, and compare two different 
cases of lockdown policies: those implemented in South Korea and Sweden. The 
main focus in the article is on the following two questions: (a) how do South Korea 
and Sweden construct their populations as a quantifiable and predictable object 
of regulation in the times of COVID-19 by using online technologies to control the 
population? (b) have South Korea and Sweden managed to establish trust in their 
relations with their populations and other states in coping with the pandemic?

The concept of sustainable development has been at the forefront of 
global discussions for over 30 years. In the ARTICLE Sharing Economy and 
Social Entrepreneurship for Sustainable Development, Evgeny V. Popov, 
Anna Yu. Veretennikova, and Kseniya M. Kozinskaya outline various directions 
for achieving and maintaining a certain level of sustainable development: direct 
investment in social initiatives, responsible business conduct, corporate social 
responsibility, quality management of goods and services produced according to 
modern standards. The authors examine some models “in terms of their similarity 
and suitability for stimulating sustainable development”. Two hypotheses are put 
forward: (a) sharing economy and social entrepreneurship can be used as alternative 
socio-economic models for sustainable development of a society; (b) the use of 
digital technologies in projects of the sharing economy and social entrepreneurship 
stimulates sustainable development. Based on a semantic analysis of websites of 
20 sharing organizations and 20 social entrepreneurs, the authors verify whether 
these models may form a basis for sustainable development in the future.

The ARTICLE Factors Determining Child Labor: Empirical Evidence from 
Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan, by Sikandar, Sanaullah Panezai, Shahab E. Saqib, 
Said Muhammad, Bilal, and Imran Khan argue that the primary determinants for 
child labor are poverty, income level, migration, education level, and family size. The 
authors focus on the situation in Pakistan and stress that, due to the geographical 
and cultural differences among its provinces, the determinants of child labor differ 
from one region to another. The specificity of the study is based on ranking the factors 
responsible for child labor. The developed conceptual framework considers (1) 
demographic factors (parents’ age, education, family size, the number of dependent 
family members); and (2) economic factors (family income, father’s occupation, and 
household assets) of child labor. The study was conducted in two Pakistan districts: 
Mardan (2.3 million inhabitants) and Nowshera (1.5 million) situated in the central 

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8 Elena A. Stepanova

zone of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. The respondents represented 200 households, in 
which children were involved in child labor. 

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of writing on the meaning of home 
within the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, psychology, human geography, 
history, architecture, and philosophy. Mojtaba Valibeigi, Sakineh Maroofi, and 
Sara Danay in the ARTICLE Forgotten Territories in the Iranian Home: Issues of 
Segregation, note that “critical studies into the material realm of this concept indicate 
that home is created by numerous cultural, economic, and social factors”. The authors 
formulate the research question as follows: How the traditional culture of the Iranian 
home, including the concepts of sanctity and privacy, may lead to segregation and 
gender discrimination?  They respond to that question using space syntax criteria as 
a way to analyze spatial configurations and the organization of spaces in buildings 
and settlements. The authors consider the syntax of home in relation to three 
factors: (a) activities, values, and goals (the pattern of daily activities); (b) physical 
characteristics (dividing of spaces, separations, sizes and positions, decorations, 
etc.); (c) communication (level of relationships in different spaces of the house, which 
includes a range of semi-public, semi-private, and private spaces in the house). 

Andrey B. Berzin, Aleksey V. Maltsev, and Natalia A. Zavyalova in the ARTICLE 
Conceptual Framework of Teacher Prestige and Well-Being: Regional Aspects 
study the challenges faced by teachers in the contemporary world: job satisfaction, 
professional well-being, career development, and, in particular, credibility crisis. 
According to the authors, “no longer can a teacher be expected to be the only source 
of information, the bearer of the highest wisdom or someone whose ideas are not 
subject to criticism”. They note the growing contradictions between the creative nature 
of teaching and the ever-increasing regulation of the teacher’s actions; the need to 
improve professionalism and competence levels given a lack of time resources; the 
gap between declarations of a high vocation of teaching and low social status; the 
increased contradiction within the teaching community between highly motivated 
professional teachers and those who only go through the motions of fulfilling their 
duties. The authors seek to identify the attitudes of teachers, students, and students’ 
parents toward the teaching profession, as well as the factors that affect the well-
being of teachers and their status in the Russian Federation, through surveys among 
teachers conducted in 1989, 2016, and 2021.

In the 2000–2010s, a number of new religious communities emerged in the 
Perm region. Svetlana V. Ryazanova in the ARTICLE Talking to God: Religion, Para-
Science, and Disciplinary Practices as Consolidation Tools, sets out to explore 
closed communities that are commonly characterized by permanent membership, 
limited connections with outside communities, and living within closed compounds. 
Such small religious groups, which exist in large cities like Perm, are often “invisible” 
for researchers due to their almost complete isolation from the outside world. The 
research object in the article is Pokrovskaya Obitel’ [The Holy Virgin Intercession 
Abode], which has existed as a community of Orthodox believers for over 30 years 
and undertaken a long way from a conventional Orthodox parish to an independent 
religious community with an original doctrine and cult practices. Ryazanova uses 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2022, Vol. 6, No. 1, pp. 5–9 9

private correspondence with one of the community’s founders. Her research is based 
on specific sources (anonymous personal communication with community members 
in 2008–2009, 2010–2011, and 2014–2015). 

Tigran S. Simyan in the ARTICLE “Guilty of Being Free”: An Intellectual vs. 
Soviet Penal System (Prison Letters and Drawings of Sergei Parajanov), seeks 
to address the following questions: How was the trauma of Parajanov’s prison 
experience (he was imprisoned three times) “reflected in his texts (letters), pen and 
pencil drawings and collages? What role did the prison period play in Parajanov’s 
evolution as an artist?” Simyan argues that Parajanov turned the penal cology into 
a creative laboratory; his prison letters are imbued with terror and desperation. 
At the same time, these sources also provide valuable insights into what life was like 
in Soviet penal colonies. Simyan emphasizes that there is little literature concerned 
with this problem in Russian and English, since Parajanov’s prison letters have been 
published in Russian relatively recently. 

The BOOK REVIEWS section contains two reviews. The first is of Dhingra, P. 
(2021), Hyper Education. Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior 
Are Not Enough, by Louie Giray and Jelomil Edem. According to them, the author 
of the book under review shows how Asian American parents make their children 
improve academically through hyper education, referring to the practice of extending 
education through privatized, extracurricular learning. Andrey D. Nazarov in the 
review of Bennett E., Berndt G. M., Esders St., Sarti L., (Eds.). (2021), Early Medieval 
Militarisation, observes how the authors convincingly demonstrate the impact of 
warfare on the various spheres of social and political life.

Discussions around the topics raised in the present issue will be continued 
in the subsequent issues of our journal. In planning to introduce new interesting 
themes, we welcome suggestions from our readers and prospective authors for 
thematic issues, debate sections or book reviews.

For more information, please visit our journal web-site: https://changing-sp.com/ 

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