Articles

In the memory of Vitis Kazisovich Vilyunas.

In the memory of Chingiz Abilfazovich Izmailov.

To the 60th anniversary of Olga Alexandrovna Karabanova.

To the 60th anniversary of Marina Sergeevna Egorova.

The article discusses the specifics of the phenomenon of commitment or loyalty of consumers to various goods and services. Brand is considered to be a primary object of loyalty of modern consumers and is defined as a complex social construct, carrying all consumers’ representations of products and product groups. The results of the study have demonstrated the linkage of membership in internet communities and consumer brand loyalty (CBL). It is concluded that CBL can become a forming factor of new social groups. 

The article discusses the cognitive paradigm of socio-psychological studies of consumer behavior, which is based on: the idea of K. Gergen on the construction of the social world, ethnomethodology G. Garfinkel and the theory of social representations S. Moscovici. A generalized conceptual framework of the socio-psychological theory of consumer behavior was offered. The perspectives of social psychology of consumer behavior were outlined. 

The article is devoted to the problems of event management for organizational and transorganizational development programs. The authors analyze opportunities and restrictions of conference and game models for event producing and event enlarging. There is a cultural background, which determines the aria of application (implementation) and amount of effectiveness for concrete models.

The article is dedicated to a description of the author’s approach to management consulting. The author considers the object of consulting as a system with three elements: client—organization—environment. The alignment of interaction in this system is considered to be the main goal of consulting process. Values basis of the approach, principles of interaction with a client, special consultant’s position are described in the article. 

In this paper we study the connection between corporate and personal competence model of interpersonal perception constructs which describe the category of natural human perception and unconscious appeal to which allows managers to evaluate employees. On research involving 204 managers at different levels of a major telecommunications company identified and described four key factors in interpersonal perception: “professionalism”, “influence”, “decency” and “ambitious”. These factors are compared with the typical models of competence, demonstrated that the two factors of 4 (“decency” and “professionalism”), usually poorly reflected in the corporate competency model. A phenomenon ambivalent attitude of staff to the factor of “ambition” is marked. 

The article reviews the researches about decision making in small groups and group dynamics in virtual groups. We describe a number of phenomena that distinguish problem solving in virtual groups (VG) and in the real groups (RG). We present the results of empirical studies of the problem solving in the VG, formed from students of the Faculty of Psychology at Moscow State University. 

The article discusses the perception of social groups, in particular, their entitativity. Different approaches to determining the entitativity of the social group are reviewed. A parallel between the perception of the entitativity of the group and assignation of different levels of activity to the group is declared. 

The aim of this paper is to review basic ideas about the relationship between personality and organization. Particular attention is paid to the concept of person-organization fit. The specific areas of research are considered the study of organizational commitment and identification of personnel with the organization. Constructionist critique of traditional theoretical concepts that underlie the concept of person-organization fit is given. The concept of organizational culture as a modern trend in the study of organizations is described. Analysis of the literature shows that in modern organizational theory and the classical concepts, the philosophy of instrumental rationality and control continues to occupy a dominant position.

This article proposes an approach of the research certain kind of large social stable groups — socio-territorial communities, selected by the person’s residence criterion. The importance and necessity of accounting socio-territorial communities in psychological research are substantiated. The research material about the problems that incorporates the effect of membership in a particular regional group (urban and rural society) is systematized. Possible directions of further research socio-territorial communities as large social groups are discussed. The main results of the empirical research (how MSU students perceived the differences between urban and rural societies) are presented. 

The results of the study concerning the image of Russia are presented in this article. Representations of students from three countries which have been perceived as centers of influence in the modern world — Russia, USA and China — were analyzed. The data of all samples indicates the ethnocentrism tendency in the choice of influential countries. The image of Russia in all three countries contains geopolitical connotations. The culture does not play a key role in the representations, but it is an important element of the emotional part of the image of Russia. The largest cross-cultural differences are found in the analysis of representations of Russia as an international conflicts participant. 

The concept of “multipolar world” is analyzed in the presented article; some perspectives of social-psychological research of forming multi-polarity in the present world are outlined. The students’ representations of multipolar world and of the countries-centers of influence in the modern world were analysed from the social representations theory perspective.