Этос университета: социологическая операционализация потенциала «неписаных правил»

Abstract

The potential of a university’s ethos as an internal resource for maintaining its institutional identity is discussed in this article. The ethos of a university is determined in the article to be a set of valuable reference points and norms which form a “cultural code” for this particular social institution. The so called “university ethos” phenomenon has a glocal specificity, determined by the fact that by its nature a university has the ability to participate in global processes and simultaneously follow local cultural traditions while maintaining its institutional identity. Highlighted are the following signs which transform the ethos of a domestic university: the discrepancy in teachers’ role repertoires; shifts in the forms of social integration and trust within the university community; reframing internal communications and self-regulatory mechanisms in the professional activity of teachers.The empirical base of the article consists of twenty semi-formalized interviews with university professors. It is established that the “unwritten rules” verbalized by the interview participants are similar in meaning to the principles of scientific ethos formulated by R. Merton.According to the author of the article, updating domestic higher educational facilities provides a strategy for their socio-cultural modernization rather than a modernization strategy on economic grounds.Socio-cultural modernization is primarily oriented towards defining and developing the internal potential for research and teaching which universities possess. On this basis, it is possible to increase the symbolic social capital of the university both on local and global levels.