Changes in the Understanding of Religious and Cultural Components of Human Capital

Abstract

This research identified structural differences between the religious and cultural components of human capital in Western and Russian intellectual traditions and created a specific holistic structural conceptual framework based on which further research can be carried out, or decisions can be made about determining human capital for scientific and public policy purposes. Experts selected research texts for examination, and their structural-semantic analysis was used as a research method. A group of 32 authoritative Russian university experts was formed to select the most significant and influential studies of Western scholars on human capital and changes in the attitude towards assessing its religious and cultural components. The selected works were analyzed to determine common concepts for which semantic relationships were established. As a result, a structural diagram of Western research's main ideas concerning the religious and cultural components of human capital was created. Among the totality of basic ideas that define the Western paradigm, there is a generally negative assessment of religiosity as a component of psychology that influences productive forces; a high level of religiosity is rarely correlated with economic prosperity and is not necessarily associated with high levels of morality or health. The novelty of the study is due to the fact that so far no attempts have been made to highlight the most important features of the Western paradigm of understanding the role of a religious or cultural component in the development of human capital and to apply it to determine the differences and possible strategies for the development of the individual economy (in our example, the Russian one). The paper also analyzed the essence of the contradiction between Western and Russian concepts of human capital. This study could serve as a foundation for further developing a strategy for identifying and using human potential to determine public policy for cultural and economic development.