Abstract: This article examines the questions associated with the problems of social inequality. The scientific progress alongside the advancement of information and communication technologies is currently accompanied by the emergence of the new virtual social environments, which in many cases encourage the levelling of the existing types of social inequality. At the same time, different access opportunities to such technologies for various social groups is the source of appearance of the new types of social inequality. The work analyzes the most common factors: limits of physical assess to the information and communication technologies; differences of information and communication competencies of the users; physiological nuances of a person; information threats. Methodological foundation includes the system-structural method that represents a sequence of actions of establishing the structural links between the variables or elements of the explored system. For conducting the analysis were applied the secondary data of the results of the national and foreign sociological research, official documents of the state programs of the Russian Federation. The authors proposed the mechanisms for levelling the factors that lead to emergence of the new types of social inequality, as well as analyze the actions of the Russian Federation in this regard.

Abstract: This work is dedicated to the search for new mechanisms for the formation and development of leadership qualities of an individual in the area of management. The authors conduct a theoretical analysis of the key leadership qualities from the perspective of various schools, as well as describe approaches towards their formation (leadership is just a manifestation of the inherited talent; leader can be brought up through the corresponding training or creation of certain situations). Sociocultural peculiarities of the phenomenon of leadership in Russia are being discussed. The work introduces the commercial and authorial instruments on the basis of modern information and communication technologies that allow forming and development the leadership qualities. The authors consider the merits and flaws in using the Russian commercial software iSpring Suite, the proprietary information system for creating the virtual social educational environment with the preset characteristics and authorial specialized social network. The created virtual social environments are easily scalable and invariant with regards to the content, which discovers the new opportunities in terms of fast adjustment of the proposed content to the sociocultural features of a particular person, as well as the creation of individual educational trajectories.