Identification of Social Barriers in the EthnoConfessional Space of Public Communication of Border Regions

The relevance of the study is substantiated by to the need to develop effective measures for localization and overcoming possible negative consequences of ethnoconfessional processes in the border regions of the Russian Federation, which is achieved with a developed level of the ethno-confessional space of public communication. The methodology for organizing such a space is based on the concept of public values management, which considers social development through the prism of active involvement of stakeholders in the discussion of socially significant tasks and participation in the implementation of the decisions made. The aim of the work is to determine the social barriers of this space that impede the interaction of its stakeholders. Based on systematization of relevant publications, the authors reveal the essence of the concept of “social barrier of communication” and classify them; based on the expert survey conducted by the authors in 2020 among representatives of the main stakeholders, level of manifestation of the identified social barriers is determined.

Scientific novelty of the paper consists in the introduction of the definition of social barriers in the ethno-confessional space of public communications, the author’s classification of these barriers based on the structure of two-way symmetric communication, within which communicators, message, channels, efficiency / result and situation can be distinguished. This classification made it possible to single out the following social barriers to communication: for communicators, these barriers are manifested as low activity and initiative, differences in the thesauri of communicators and their low communicative and communication competence; for messages – falsification of messages and imitation of the communication process; for communication channels – their mismatch and a feedback barrier; for the expected result – its mismatch; for a communication situation – the displacement of the actualization of events. According to the expert survey, among these barriers, the key ones are low activity and initiative of representatives of stakeholders, the desire to imitate the communication process instead of real dialogue and partnership, and the lack of feedback (lack of reaction of some stakeholders to the actions of others).

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