In recent years, the issue of happiness, including the practical searches for it, has become phenomenally popular. However, this trend was set many decades ago, already in the 1970s, when the first empirical studies were conducted to reveal that the personal feeling and self-identification as happy/unhappy are related to the pursuit of pleasure (i.e. to hedonism as a lifestyle). Over the past decades, happiness has become a legitimate object of conceptual and methodological research within almost all humanities, social and even natural sciences due to the fact that searches for the definition and acquisition of happiness went far beyond the limits of fiction that has always been involved in providing people with answers to questions on what happiness is and how to find one’s place in life. As a result, today every scientific discipline should outline the contours of its own interpretation of happiness albeit not a single one, not an unambiguous one and not without intersections with other disciplines’ approaches. The article aims at systematizing methodological approaches to the sociological analysis of happiness and identification of their possibilities and limitations. The authors show that sociologists can use a huge variety of works with different conceptual and operational definitions of happiness, and many methods to assess the level of happiness and the factors determining it. The presented review is not complete or final, it only systematizes the developments in the study of happiness and identifies two promising directions for further sociological searches — the “objectivist” econometric approach (happiness indexes based on social-economic indicators) and the “subjectivist” social-psychological approach (self-assessments of happiness in public opinion polls).

The article deals with Jean Gottmann’s concept of the megalopolis. In the middle of the twentieth century Gottmann fixed the beginning of a new stage of urbanization, which is characterized by the formation of vast urban regions. “Regional iconography” is the basis for his concept of the megalopolis. According to “regional iconography” borders are formed under the influence of culture and lifestyle, and so they are symbolic entities. The development of information and communication technologies, according to Gottmann, changes the daily lives of people, in particular, simplifies moving over long distances, which makes the formation of a megalopolis possible. The researcher focuses on the urbanized region of the northeast coast of the United States, which covers the territory from Boston to Washington. This urbanized region without significant differences between urban and rural areas is called “megalopolis” by Gottmann. Megalopolises, according to Gottmann, are one of the leading forms of urbanization of the 20th century and are considered as the result of the formation of a post-industrial society, with an increasing number of people employed in the service sector who are actively involved in the suburbanization process. One of the main problems is the lack of megalopolises’ effective management, because decision-making requires combined actions from the authorities of several administrative-territorial units. Nevertheless, city planning should be gradually superseded by regional planning, since it corresponds to the urbanization trends fixed in the second half of the 20th century. Gottmann’s ideas on the formation of urbanized regions become common, their continuation are the works of researchers at the Los Angeles School, for example.

International affairs specialists turn to historical sociology to explain the world political realities that remain hidden to other theories of international relations. However, in the national scientific tradition, historians, sociologists, and international affairs specialists give it unjustly little attention, despite the fact that the science of international relations is at the intersection of history and sociology. This article intended to compensate to some extent for the lack of information about this most interesting and promising approach to the study of international relations. The author formulates the concept of historical sociology and characterizes three main directions in its development. The first direction gives priority to the explanation of international relations of such factors, as types of power and methods of production. The second direction considers the events of international life through the prism of morality, culture, emotions and other spiritual components. The third direction seeks to unite the first two groups of research approaches within a single explanatory framework.

The article analyzes the features of the current stage of development of volunteerism in the Russian Federation. As the information base of the research data from online communities of the social network vkontakte are used. The total number of analyzed groups is 2894, the number of participants is 1446008 people. To extract data about online communities and participants, a script was written in the programming language Python3, which allowed to gather relevant information using the vkontakte API.

Based on the analysis, the author’s typology of volunteer communities is proposed in the article, including franchise groups, online service communities and direct action groups. The author analyzes the distribution of communities on the subject of their activities. The dominant positions in terms of the number of participants and the number of groups are occupied by communities based on the search for missing people. The least represented in the space of the social network vkontakte community of volunteers — animal advocates.

Based on the socio-demographic analysis of community members, the author draws conclusions about the features of their distribution in terms of age and sex. In particular, young people between the ages of 14 and 30 take the dominant position among group members. This is largely due to the underdevelopment of the mechanisms for including middle-aged and older people in volunteer activities. As for the gender of the participants, the main contingent of the communities are women, while their relationship with men changes with age.

The article presents an analysis of the participants’ value orientations. Conclusions are drawn about the domination of individual values and interests, which are based on the desire for self-development and personal growth. On the basis of this, a conclusion is drawn on the need to develop new social technologies for involving Russian citizens in the volunteer activity.

The article explores some dysfunctions in the development of volunteerism in the Russian Federation: the lack of mechanisms for involving middle-aged and older citizens, the imitative nature of many volunteer projects. Based on this, conclusions are drawn about the need to adjust the social, educational, youth policy in the field of volunteer development in Russia.

The importance of the phenomenon of reputation as an instrument of power and influence remains relevant from ancient times to the present day. In the era of digital technology, ways of transmitting information are taking on new forms and dynamics. This largely affects the development of social communications and the speed of opinion formation. At the same time, the issues of improving the instruments of influence on public opinion in order to increase the degree of influence by means of reputation are updated. This article discusses in detail the phenomenon of reputation as a tool to influence the target audience and a means of influencing decision-making audience. The social value of reputation, ways of its growth and strengthening are analyzed. The specificity of methods of reputation formation and methods of influence on reputation with the use of modern communication channels is taken into account. Special attention is paid to the relationship of reputation with the image, their main similarities and methods of formation, as well as differences and features of correction. Research of methods of influence on reputation for the purpose of its discredit, with the detailed analysis of components of attack on reputation is carried out. The difference between attacks on reputation and their consequences for the subject of reputation is noted. Specific examples are considered techniques for leveling the negative and reputation correction.

The article deals with the problem of intra-family intergenerational values transmission and, first of all, reproductive attitudes, the need for children, the values of family and child life. It emphasizes the importance of increasing the reproductive attitudes in the population to overcome the demographic crisis in modern Russia and the world as a whole. The complexity of correctly measuring value orientations and reproductive attitudes, the significant difference between the declared values and real reproductive behavior is noted.

To study and predict the development of value orientations of the population, reproductive attitudes characteristic of modern youth representatives, it is necessary to study the process of intergenerational values transmission. Moreover, taking into account that the basic values of a family-children lifestyle are formed within the primary intra-family socialization, it is necessary to study the process of intra-family values transmission from the generation of parents and grandparents to children.

The paper presents analysis results of three waves of the study devoted to family-children life performed in 2014–2016, based on a total base of 4500 respondents’ responses. Using correlation and multivariate analysis of variance for paired samples, it is shown that family values of parents are not fully transmitted to children, and the distortion occurs not only at the stage of acceptance of the transmitted values, but also at the level of primary communication. For respondents of different socio-demographic status, representing families with different numbers of children, the decline in the significance of the family is equally characteristic when they transfer the values to their children. In the light of this pattern, the task of working with families and young people becomes important, aimed at raising the status of the family and strengthening intergenerational intra-family interaction.

The family is one of the key factors influencing values, attitudes to work, professional self-determination and life plans of high school students. The article is devoted to the consideration of family social status role of modern high school students in formation of their competitive orientation and competitiveness.

The article analyzes results of theoretical works of Russian and foreign researchers devoted to the analysis of family social capital influence to the educational strategies of adolescents. The methodological basis of the study was a questionnaire survey of high school students conducted in the cities of Tyumen, Tobolsk, Ishim and rural areas of the Tyumen region. IBM SPSS Statistics 23 was used to analyze the data.

Considering family social status as the basis of young people “social start” in adulthood, authors note the dual nature of the role of this characteristic in the process of social adaptation of the younger generation. Based on the analysis of the data of questionnaire survey of high school students, the authors conclude differences of opinion on the importance of competitiveness as a necessary quality of personality.

According to the results of the study it is shown that in addition to the level of family income, significant characteristics in their social status that affect the competitive orientation and competitiveness of high school students are also the level of parent’s education and their composition (full or single-parent families). It was confirmed that there is a correlation between the respondents’ assessment of personal competitive potential and the socio-professional status of the family.

As possible directions for further research can be considered the study of the impact of the level of regional development on competitiveness formation process of high school students, as well as the role of teachers in this process.

Sustainable development is revealed in the direction of a new paradigm of social dynamics analysis. The transformation of the thinking and actions of governments and businesses in the blathe state — the fight against poverty — the protection of the environment calls into question the well-known formula for economic growth. The article examines the shortcomings of GDP as an indicator of socio-economic dynamics. The system of international ratings and their indicators including along with economic parameters a number of socio-environmental indicators is shown. However, it is shown that the value of GDP is not exhausted for socio-economic research. New international coordinate system for sustainable development applied on the study of forms of strategic planning of Russia Studied the problem of instability of development of Russian business, among which shows the deformation of the labor market and outdated material-technical base. These problems are factors of negative social and environmental changes. Practice is characterized by public companies in the field of sustainable development, based on the principles of the Global compact and includes the use of international standards, covering activities in environment, analysis and adjust working practices, quality management, socially responsible business.

The sociological theory of the religion of E. Durkheim, despite the past tense, remains an important source for the study. The understanding of the French sociologist of religion as the most important social institution providing social integration, led him to look for a sociological approach to the study of this social institution. In the works of E. Durkheim embodied the development of ideas about the collective consciousness, that is, collective beliefs and related moral relations, acting as a unifying force in society, as the “highest form of mental life”. An important distinction of E. Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life from his contemporary totemism literature and primitive religion in general became its methodological approach. He consistently examines, criticizes and rejects competing theories of the origin of totemism, analyzes the development of a religious phenomenon in society, examining precisely its social aspects that are available for scientific analysis. In a religious rite, a person fixes his “confused social feelings” on these clear, concrete objects, from which the physical power and moral powers of society are distinguished. E. Durkheim saw the exceptional social appearance of religious facts. Thus, the sequence of short but intense periods of religious “collective excitement” alternates with much longer periods of diffuse secular individual economic activity, and that it was this division that gave rise to belief in two special worlds — the sacred and the secular — both within man and within nature. E. Durkheim’s famous hypothesis — that a deity is nothing more than a deified society — was confirmed by many arguments of its reasoning, but at the same time it does not have any anticlerical or antireligious ideology that would strongly contradict Durkheim’s understanding of the principle of scientific objectivity.