Incentives for Reading in the System of Socio-Cultural Regulation of Reading Activity

Abstract

The intensity and content of reading activity largely determine the objective processes of social development; at the same time, it is affected by the system of social regulation of reading behavior, which is carried out by institutional and non-institutional spheres. The lack of significant results testifying to the effectiveness of the program-project activity that has been intensified in recent years in Russia in support and development of reading is largely due to the lack of a system of ideas on the incentives that encourage people to practice certain actions that promote reading.Institutional regulation, represented by a system of power structures, official social and communicative institutions, is implemented through directive, regulatory, normative and legal documents, cultural policies that define the cultural landscape, as well as positioning of reading infrastructure institutions. The latter ones are currently characterized by a tendency to use soft methods of inducing reading on the basis of subject-subject interaction with real and potential readers using their specific means of influence. Advertising and propaganda technologies, methods and means of social technology and social engineering, social planning and forecasting, elements of management psychology are increasingly used. In the non-institutional sphere of regulation, the stimulation of reading activity is realized on the basis of traditions, customs, habits, moods, value representations. The dominant role is played here by the social environment: family, circle of direct communication, reference and subculture groups, networked readership communities.The institutional and non-institutional spheres interact, reflecting each other in their own way; knowledge of the processes taking place in the sphere of public initiative will enable reading infrastructure institutions to harmonize their activities, bringing it into a state corresponding to the real needs of various groups of potential or real readers on the basis of socio-psychological mechanisms of communication, recommendations of “significant others”, various manifestations of fashion in reading.The article shows that, in the system of reading support and development, it is necessary to identify and name the most effective incentives determined by the socio-cultural context; the incentives generated by the sphere of institutional regulation at the level of power structures and reading infrastructure institutions, as well as the incentives spontaneously formed in the sphere of non-institutional regulation of reading activity. What is happening in the non-institutional sphere should become an important guideline for the institutional sphere to adjust its own activities and find the most effective management decisions and means of interaction with readers.