The third integrative wave in sociology’s development. Part II. Theories and methods for an augmented social reality

The article is analyzing positive prospects of the sociology’s development in the context of today’s fragmentation of scientific discipline under conditions of metaparadigm crisis and post-globalization. Current disintegration in sociology is provoked by the rising postcolonial discourse, by attempts to stigmatize western classics and to create theoretical alternatives to the ‘global North’ domination in knowledge production as well as by spread of conceptions opposing social reality of networks and flows to classical sociality of structures and agency (M. Castells, B. Latour, J. Urry, K. Knorr Cetina). The third in the modern sociology’s history integrative wave is expected to come in the 2020s displacing tendencies of disintegration, discrimination, growing gaps and rising barriers. Now theories are relevant as they create a coherent configuration of four types of structures: institutions, interactions, networks, and flows. The new subject matter for theorizing is constituted by their interconnections in forms of fields of structurations, scapes of assemblages, communications, platforms, projects, and events. After the ideas of the end of Modernity and multiple Modernities, the idea of augmented Modernity emarges overcoming constitutive distinctions of the last century’s sociology: local vs. global, system vs. lifeworld, material vs. symbolic, private vs. public, real vs. virtual, physical vs. digital, et ctr. Mutual penetration of different social structures stimulates elaboration and implementation of innovative hybrid methods directed towards an augmented data collecting and analysis.