According to statistics, men in Russia and most countries of the world are significantly more likely to cause road accidents than women. Understanding the reasons for these differences may be important for developing measures to reduce the number of road accidents. In the literature on Russia, the issue of the causes of this gender gap remains understudied. We analyse the magnitude of the gap in the odds of committing a serious crash by drivers of different genders and discuss possible reasons (...) for these differences. For this, we use a dataset of 158,000 published court decisions under Article 264 of the Russian Criminal Code for the period from 2010 to 2022. We show that 91.7% of all cases involve male drivers. But even after accounting for differences in the number of drivers of different genders and the number of kilometers they drive on average, men are 3.25 times more likely to commit crashes resulting in criminal prosecutions. One reason for these differences is driving safety. Men are also more likely to commit aggravated road accidents. In almost a quarter of cases, male drivers were driving drunk, while for women the figure is only 10 percent. Judges in turn are more likely to give men a serious sentence if it is a non-fatal offence; in more serious cases, the gender of the driver is less important. We also found a very strong variation in the odds of causing a serious road accident for men and women between Russian regions, suggesting the influence of cultural and socio-economic differences. (shrink)

This article is dedicated to investigating rationality as one of the key characteristics of Michel Foucault's concept of governmentality and to related 30 contradictions inside and outside Foucauldian theory. Using risk theory, the author explores the possibility of the existence of multiple rationalities in governmentalities and offers a solution to the contradiction within Foucauldian theory. The article focuses on the question of how it is possible to resolve both methodological, practical, as well as theoretical, contradictions in the theory of governmentality, (...) keeping its main characteristics, such as population-centeredness, intact. The author concludes that diversification is more effective within the framework of multiple rationalities, which is most consistent with the understanding of the governmentality of the population as a goal, as a mechanism of risk management. The article makes a significant contribution to the understanding of the relationship between rationality and irrationality in the theory of governmentality, putting forward new ideas for the research and development of effective forms of public administration. The author also suggests ways to solve the paradox of regulated freedom, which has practical implications for modern methods of governance and regulation in society. This more detailed analysis clarifies how Foucault's concept of governmentality can be applied in a contemporary context, and how the limitations of rationality can be overcome to achieve more flexible and adaptive forms of governance. (shrink)

This article critically examines sociology’s anthropocentricity and its current limitations in research on nonhuman beings, using animal communication and interspecies interaction as examples. The paper demonstrates, drawing on several key theoretical strands, how the focus of traditional sociology on human sociality can be extended to include nonhuman beings. To understand the state of such sociology, the notion of anthropomorphocentrism is introduced as an explanation of the field’s current position, reflecting a desire to go beyond the study of humans, but a (...) reluctance to explore non-human entities without human-like attributes. The author describes existing limitations, proposes methodological steps, and explicates the epistemological and ontological features to be considered when including animals as objects of study in sociology. It is proposed, following the example of convergence analysis as a rigorous empirical method, to replace the transfer of existing human taxonomies with the creation of new taxonomies based on data on each interaction, be it between humans and animals, between animals of the same species or between species. The author thus stresses the need for an empirical approach to research on species and interspecies taxonomies. The article concludes that a move away from anthropocentrism and anthropomorphocentrism towards an expansive study of living creature communication is necessary to generate valid data, formulate conclusions, and construct theories in sociology. However, in making this move, one must be mindful of the limitations of borrowed human concepts and mechanisms in interpreting non-human interactions, which also impinge on the process and outcome of non-human interaction research. (shrink)

Over the lifetime of Conversation Analysis (CA), scholars have discovered many systems of action organisation (machineries) describing how conversational turns occur, what actions are expected, and how intersubjectivity in conversation is maintained. However, when John Heritage proposed a new machinery that examines the knowledge orientation of participants in interactions, a debate broke out between conversation analysts in which Michael Lynch and his colleagues in radical ethnomethodology descend upon on epistemics. The controversy begins with Lynch accusing Heritage of cognitivism and the (...) extra-situational nature of epistemics, while research on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis has traditionally focused on situated action. The discussion of epistemics points to an internal tension in CA as to where the boundaries of situations lie and what, therefore, can be the focus of CA. This article reactualises the problem of situationality in CA by analysing the arguments in the debate on epistemics. The authors show that epistemics and the debates surrounding it constitute a serious test for CA, revealing a conceptual problem that has hitherto been obscured - the relation and potential hierarchy of different machineries. Turning to the origins of the concept of situationality in the writings of Goffman and Sacks, the authors demonstrate that for opposing sides, the localisation of phenomena within situations is an analytical decision about what can be seen in empirical data. In contrast, distinguishing between the position of the analyst and the participant in the interaction shifts the analyst's attention to how the machineries become relevant to the interactants, that is, how their omnirelevance is realised. The authors argue that this is a more productive formulation of the question than that of the boundaries of the situation. (shrink)