The complexities of the global socium: The need for a non-linear humanistic sociological imagination

I. Prigogine has worked out the theory “The Arrow of the time”, according to which all the matter (this concerns as material as social worlds) is being developed increasingly quicker. So the dynamic of the global socium becomes more and more complex, including points of bifurcation and the development in the direction from complexity to hypercomplexity – to the socium in which people are loosing their ability to control their own processes.

The non-linear social and cultural dynamics has influenced the essence of the sociological imagination that has its roots in the works of C.W. Mills. Recently P. Sztompca, U. Beck, S. Fuller, G. Delanty have made the attempts  to update the sociological imagination. But today in my opinion even the newer theoretical approaches to the sociological imagination should be elaborated. We need a new type - that is a non-linear humanistic sociological imagination. Its main features are: it should recognize the validity of different types of sociological thinking and theorizing taking into consideration that sociologists work in different tempo-worlds; focus on what I have called the riskological turn - pay special attention  to interplays between analyses of physical and social worlds, to risk traps, manufactured uncertainties, ambivalent consequences of the appearance of posthuman realities; deal with discontinuities and paradoxes of modern socium, different types of rationality as well as irrationality, with the global and local; take into account the increasing influence of the cultural coding; regard human’s health as the main value, taking into consideration the complex health of the body, mind and sole.