How to manage public opinion: theoretical and applied tasks of the sociology of public opinion

The article deals with theoretical and applied problems that exist today in the field of interaction between government bodies and public opinion. At the end of the last century, the existence of the sociology of public opinion was questioned by many Russian sociologists, who considered public opinion to be a kind of state of public consciousness that did not have specific scientific categories. Such a theoretical paradigm made it difficult to find ways to effectively interact with public opinion. At the same time, many problems of the sociology of public opinion about which the many authors spoke at one time still exist today. In particular, the problem of determining the role and place of the subject of public opinion remains important, especially in the field of interaction between power, management structures and the population. Today, in the era of digital communication, the importance of an innovative approach to building a representative sample is growing, when surveys are increasingly conducted online and the results of such a survey cannot always serve as the basis for making effective management decisions. And, finally, there remains an important problem of improving the professionalism of public opinion researchers (pollsters) working in the fields of both political and industrial marketing. The author makes an attempt to draw the attention of management specialists to the need to take these problems into account in cooperation with specialists representing the field of sociology of public opinion.