Untitled - socium.ge

The Russian network society 85but should be characterized primarily as a mosaic and chaotic one (Pokrovsky,2001).There is an evident gap between theoretical knowledge and an empiricalanalysis of the transformations occurring in Russia, and it is impossible toanalyze the Russian transition only through an opposition of conflictingdriving forces. For contemporary Russia, the concept of a network society isespecially valuable because it adds new perspectives to the analysis of continuinginternal changes by placing them in a global environment and underliningthe significance of changes in the economy, politics, the cultural milieu,and the social strategies of the states inspired by progress in information technology.For Russian scholars, the network society is also a concept that allowsthem to avoid the transitional specifics of the post-Soviet period and includeRussia in the general context of globalization (Semenov, 2002).The network society applied to Russian circumstances could promote betterunderstanding of the existing complexity of modern Russian society. One ofthe key conflicts has emerged from a contradiction between the centralizationof state governance and surveillance dictated by the size, economic inconsistencies,multi-dimensional structure, and multi-ethnicity of Russian societyand the decentralizing tendencies of the country, brought on by the logic ofcontemporary economic life and technological development. From this pointof view, a network society, understood by Russian intellectuals as an interactionof social and economic groups – clusters in a new telecommunicationsenvironment – permits us to reconsider the role of traditional centers of power(Semenov, 2002: 272).The idea of decentralized and non-hierarchical societal communicationimplied in the concept of the network society might also help us to understandsome national peculiarities, which have paved the way to the present reality.In this context it is worth remembering a particular Russian tradition of creatinginformal networks in the economy and in social life as a form of individualor group opposition to legitimate structures of the Soviet nomenklaturastate. As a form of informal group unity, opposed to state bureaucracy andlegal power constructions, unofficial networks represented a challenge, thoughsemi-legal, to hierarchical institutions of the state or business. Paradoxically,the informal exchange of favors, known in the Soviet Union as blat, and otherforms of informal arrangements popular among Soviet people (Ledeneva,2000), promoted the philosophy of a horizontal society much wider than anyrecent political decisions by the Russian state or government on e-society.Certainly, there are no direct links between the informal networks for theexchange of favors and the concept of a network society, but the traditions offlexible social relations, the superiority of interpersonal contacts over establishedsocial links, allows Russians more easily to adapt to the new corporateand social mentality emerging within the framework of a network society.