Social reality in the perspective of temporalism: In search of methodology

Abstract

The article aims at linking social reality with the category of temporality in the conceptual perspective based on some modifications of modernity as culture. The author explains and applies the epistemological means of the temporal turn and presents the agent-subject interpretation of social reality in a new way. The article focuses on the potential of the temporal discourse which is poorly articulated in contemporary works but is immanently inherent in the sociological science. The survey methodology provides variables related to the past and making demands on memory and the ability to reconstruct events, and also projective questions implying the respondent’s ability to extrapolate patterns from the present to the future. The author summarizes the issues of time in her early and recent works and concludes that there is the temporal turn in the studies of social problems, social policy and social reality. The idea of integrating temporality and sociality results in the new components of the proposed analytical approach which emphasizes the agency of the scientific intelligentsia and updates the intellectual-educational and temporal content of the concept and thesaurus of social reality. The relevance and fundamental nature of the proposed approach are determined by the intersection of the temporality of the social life of individuals and groups with the sociological reflection of the fundamental categories and concepts of time in the academic discourse. Post-non-classical reality allows to conceptually explicate the temporality of inclusive-bifurcation sociality which explains institutional and microsocial problems of communities as non-linear worlds. The scientific-practical meaning of the proposed approach is that the concept of temporal social reality results in the study of modifications of value-symbolic and institutional characteristics of the discourse of the scientists’ role as agents of post-non-classical reality.