Today’s business constantly has to prove its «social profitability» before the people, has to demonstrate that the businessmen take care not only of the profit, but also of general well-being of the citizens of the country (the region, the settlement), and that business development is connected directly with society development. Unfortunately, it is otherwise in Russia – for a variety of reasons. Therefore, the image of business as a whole in this country is extremely low. First on the list of these reasons is the inertia of mass consciousness. Throughout several generations, the spirit of unacceptability of market relations has been brought up. The second reason is the behaviour of domestic businessmen, resulting in the negative image of entrepreneurship. The third is a certain selectivity of Russian mass media as to the activity of domestic businessmen, which supports the widespread prejudice that private business is a “dirty thing”. Surely, in the existing circumstances we shouldn’t ignore the factor of unfair competitive struggle and the so called anti-PR. And the fourth reason is a kind of “illiteracy” of Russian businessmen, expressed in the absence of any recognition of social responsibility before the consumer, and in ignoring the severe social situation in the society.
By now, neither socialist planned economy, nor market economy, nor the noble public environmental movements have brought reliable instruments of managing ecological aspects of the quality of life. Perhaps, it would be helpful to try to use here the methods of the concept of total quality management, so popular in business management. The main aspects of the quality of life management deriving from quality management positions are: priority of consumer requirements, which in our case means that when evaluating any projects, human interests must be considered higher than any system interests; priority of quality, which means rejecting such alternative options as the “consumer society” concept and radically ecological one, and leads to considering life period expectancy as the main target index; managing processes, not product specific- quality; involvement of all the personnel of organization (the whole population); huge role of continuous training; formalization of input and output control, including standardization and certification procedures.
The market system is imperfect from the point of view of improvement of quality of life, the basic components of which are: population health, education, quality of human resources, environmental safety, etc. The market is not focused on manufacturing socially important goods, it has no perfect economic mechanism for securing environmental safety. The search of new ways of economic development has led to recognition that only quality of life can express to the greatest degree the society purposes, as well as the competitiveness of the countries in the world market. Among obvious defects, preventing to determine of problems of the quality of life in Russian Federation, there are: insufficient normative and legal space in the sphere of evaluating quality of life, poor estimation of the development purposes and directions, and poor economic support. For solving each task, it is necessary to develop a socio-economic program with a corresponding financial maintenance, as well as the criteria of estimating the advancement of these programs to the planned purpose – which is the maintenance of the quality of life.
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