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This article discusses changes that actually occur in the Russian Higher Education in the process of reform. The thesis that the functioning of the educational system increasingly detects formal rationality, not focused on the senses, and their imitation. It is noted that the Russian system of higher education refers to a specific type, which can be rightly defined as "culture-centric". This type have a number of traits: dominance conception of education as a complex of practices, with the aim of translation of cultural codes from older to younger generations; the idea of the sacred nature of the educational process as a student-deterministic; installation of universality, according to which university graduates must be not only professionally prepared and fully developed; priority of content and semantic aspects of education in relation to formal, often even to the detriment of the latter; belief in the special position of the higher education sector, as well as education in general in relation to other spheres of activity. It is emphasized that the logical consequence of the transition to the formal rationality becomes a management simulation in which real values and meanings are replaced and replaced by a formal reproduction of operations and procedures, followed by their demonstration, declaration and decoration. It is proved that the main source of formal rationalization is a corporate bureaucracy. What evidence, unwarranted expansion of the administrative apparatus of the university, which is a logical consequence of the formalization of the educational process, excessive standardization and regulation of educational activities, as well as the deformation of the controlling function.

The paper considers key risks of cultural and civilizational integration of the Russian-Ukrainian border region. Proceeding from the sociological surveys conducted, the following typical cultural and civilizational identities of the population of border regions of Russia and Ukraine are singled out: Russian, Ukrainian, Slavic, European, mondialist and Eurasian. The first of the risks found is discrete perception of social time and space. For the bulk of representatives of the regional communities, social time breaks down into parts acting like periods that are devoid of the shared logics and are contrasting towards each other. The second is associated with chronotope pattern structure consisting in the presence of cognitive and value-related dissonance which characterizes the consciousness of the population--this is expressed in acceptance of value attitudes not only mismatching but even opposing each other frequently. The third risk consists in incongruity and controversy of heterostereotypes that are emotionally colored set ideas of communication subjects about their counterparties. Irrelevance of ideas about the future acts as the last risk that is caused by asynchrony of social processes in the area which used to be united that is manifested both at interstate and regional levels.

This present article mainly intends to evaluate conjunctive and disjunctive trends in modern urban culture development within the context of augmented social reality, which is characterized by hybridity, saturation with machinery and technology, the availability of communicators. The methodological foundation of the study is the materials of the sociological study carried out by the authors over the course of 2020 in three areas of Belgorod, including a) the questionnaire survey of the urban people (500 individuals) on the basis of a quota (by age and sex), multistage and zoned sampling; b) the expert surveys; c) Focus groups (urban youth, and mass media staff). Given the results of the conducted sociological study, the authors state the presence of a dynamic balance between disjunctive and conjunctive tendencies in the cultural sphere growth, at least in towns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]