Research or investigation: perspectives of the sociology of higher education in the conditions of bureaucratisation and commercialisation

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of the problems that arise in connection with the definition of the prospects for the sociology of higher education in the context of the features of the current stage of development and crisis processes in sociological knowledge itself. Authors believe, even a deep “immersion” of researchers into the educational environment does not always allow to adequately represent and explain the processes developing within it, that is due not only to limitations associated with the specifics of the science itself and the attitudes of researchers, but also with the bureaucratisation of educational reality, that minimises and in a number of cases even excludes the possibility of its sociological interpretation. The empirical base of the work was: 1) studies conducted by the authors or with their participation in universities of the Belgorod region and other regions of Russia from 2005 to 2023, including those organised by the Center for Social Technologies of BelSU; 2) secondary analysis of research carried out by graduate students, doctoral students and applicants in the preparation of their work in the dissertation council in sociological sciences at the Belgorod State National Research University; 3) an expert survey of specialists in the field of sociology of education, conducted by the authors in February 2023 (N=38). Based on the analysis of theoretical and empirical sources, the authors identify several circumstances that determine the emergence of barriers in the study of processes in higher education by sociologists. They are the corporativisation of modern universities in its "economic and managerial" dimension; the specifics of the attitude to sociological diagnostics of both the university bureaucracy and other participants in the educational process - teachers and students. In many cases, their position is not complementary to attempts to clarify certain aspects of the university's self-organisation. The very possibility of discussing them is often initially perceived by the participants as undesirable. According to the authors, under such conditions, any research aimed at obtaining the most relevant to reality, and not the results set in advance by the customer, takes on a peculiar form of "sociological investigation". At the same time, we are not talking about a formal replacement of terms, but about a significant adjustment of the approach, due to the characteristics of the object and subject of cognition, the capabilities of the subject and the situation in which the diagnosis is carried out.