Generational interactions of educational communities in Russian universities: The subject field of research

The relevance of the study of generational relations of educational communities in Russian universities is determined by the increasing influence of the generational factor on various aspects of academic life and by the insufficient development of the theoretical-methodological foundations of such research. To understand the state of generational interactions between students, research-teaching staff and administrative-managerial personnel, it is necessary to develop the subject field of generational research in higher education. Such work will help to develop theoretical-methodological approaches, which today are reduced almost exclusively to the concept of W. Strauss and N. Howe, and to expand the list of research questions. In the sociology of higher education, there are no systematic ideas about the subject field of generational research of educational communities, its boundaries, structure and segments. The article aims at reconstructing this subject field and assessing the possibilities of extrapolating its structure to the sociology of higher education. The authors identified four fields in the generational approach: generational structure of society and the dynamics of generations; generational self-awareness; intergenerational relations and interactions; their regulation. This approach can be extrapolated to sociological studies of interactions between university educational communities. The authors proposed the following structure of the subject field of generational research in higher education: generational structure of university community (demographic, age, qualification, organizational and managerial substructures) and its dynamics; generational self-awareness (ideas about one’s generation and its differences from other generations, generational self-identity, values, interests and stereotypes); generational interactions in university community (from exchange, agreement, consensus, dialogue to conflicts, breaks, value split); regulation of intergenerational relations (social-cultural and managerial mechanisms). The conducted study contributes to the development of the sociological theory of generations and generational research in the sociology of higher education.