Scientific Supervisor and Scientific Mentor: Updating Old Roles and Meanings

This article examines the development of the scientific mentoring institute in Russian universities. The authors assume that it should be based on scientific ideas about the content and features of the professional roles of a scientific supervisor and a scientific mentor. Despite all the similarities, these roles of research and teaching staff correspond to different functional areas of their activities with their own set of tasks, results, and features of interaction with students. The purpose of this article is to compare the professional roles of a scientific mentor and a scientific supervisor of undergraduate and graduate students for the purpose of updating the meaning of mentoring activities in the field of university research work. The subject of the analysis is the features of the professional role of a student's scientific mentor. Their presence substantiates the independent nature of mentoring activities and "legitimises" it in the role repertoire of research and teaching staff of universities. The empirical basis of the article is the materials of semi-structured interviews with research and teaching staff of Russian universities, conducted within the framework of an all-Russian study (n = 30, 2024). The interpretation of the empirical data is based on the theoretical provisions of the sociological theory of roles, the theory of social identity, the concept of professional morality and ethics. The study not only substantiates the differences in the functional content of professional roles and everyday practices of a supervisor and a mentor, but also reveals the paradoxes of the professional identification of supervisors and mentors, the moral and ethical dimension of their activities. It is shown that the features of the prescriptions, expectations and performance of their roles by supervisors and mentors are manifested in the degree of formality of their rights, duties and responsibilities, the level of individualisation and the nature of the temporal organisation of interactions with students. The practical significance of the results obtained is associated with the possibility of developing university programs to support mentors as key actors in involving students in the academic profession and university science. The role differences between a scientific mentor and a scientific supervisor allow us to further specify the management requirements for different types of professional activity of scientific and pedagogical workers, as well as optimize their resource support. The practical significance of the study for academic workers is to obtain grounds for self-assessment of their readiness for the professional role of a scientific mentor and to determine the areas of professional responsibility associated with this role.