The institutional approach to the study of the mediatization of religion: the experience of application to modern Orthodoxy

The article is devoted to the issue of the prospects for a sociological study of the process of mediatization of modern Orthodoxy.The relevance of the proposed study consists of several aspects.Firstly, the process of mediatization is a new topic for sociology, the theoretical field itself is very multidirectional; at the moment, there are several national and regional schools and theoretical and methodological approaches.Secondly, the concept of mediatization opens up the possibility of studying mediatization in different spheres of societyfor example, culture or politics, as well as religion.Mediatization of religion is a major area in modern world sociology, but there are practically no domestic studies on this topic.A very large layer of public life remains outside the focus of researchers, despite the growing role of new digital media in the life of religious groups.However, the application of developments from world sociology to the domestic religious field faces certain difficulties.Various methods in world experience were applied to the study of mainly Protestant and Catholic branches of Christianity, and the Orthodox direction remains almost unexplored.Domestic sociological science needs to create an original array of studies on the mediatization of the largest domestic religious tradition -Orthodoxy.The purpose of this work is to describe the experience of applying one of the most common theoretical and methodological approaches in the sociology of mediatizationinstitutionalto the study of modern Orthodoxy.Additionally, it is necessary to describe the functionality of this approach and its alternatives.The first, theoretical part of the article provides an analysis of the modern theoretical field of mediatization, theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of mediatization.Further, the problems of using the institutional approach to the study of Orthodoxy are described.In the empirical part of the study, a figurative approach is used, created within the framework of the figurative approach of Norbert Elias.The use of this approach allows us to consider modern mediatized communication through 4 components and record local features of Orthodox groups.The conclusions formulate the main functional aspects of applying the institutional approach to the study of the mediatization of Orthodoxy.A description of its dysfunctional sides is given and methodological alternatives are proposed.