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The Emerging Social Structure of the New Sociology
Faculty of Political Sciences,
Belgrade,
Serbia
The emerging social structure of the new sociology
That contemporary society is changing is so obvious that it does not need special elaboration.
The social structure of the industrial society, express in its rigidity and hierarchical order (from top to bottom) dealt with social classes, social mobility, superior and inferior social strata etc. Daily life was divided in tree segments. One third was allocated to sleep, one third to work and the last third to leisure.
Today things are different. Social structures are more flexible, in some occurrence even nonexistent. Relations between social facts and specifics are not anymore dominantly linear. There are multidimensional. Prigogine states:
“What correlations are to nature, communication is to society”
More and more we are ensured that all we can know are relations, mostly information. The changing structure of society denotes that sociology should deal with trajectories and correlations when researching what social “facts” might be, and what society is composed of. For some, leisure is covering two third of their day by day life, for other it is part of their daily labor. Sociological research are studies of uncertainty. Social structure is centered on probability.
„The goals of science are not things in themselves as the dogmatists in their simplicity imagined, but it refers to relations between things. Outside of these relations one cannot comprehends the reality. “(Von Baeyer, 2003, page 24)
The study of relations, information flows correlations, as multiple as there are (always in plural), as complicated as they may be, are the fundamentals of the new emerging sociology.
Belgrade, 17 September 2013