Economic sociology studies the patterns of economic life using a system of categories developed within the framework of this science. She describes the development of the economy as a social process driven by the activity of social actors functioning in it, the interests, behavior and interaction of social groups and strata. It is known that new scientific directions arise in the presence of two kinds of prerequisites: social, when there is a demand for relevant knowledge in society, and scientific, when ideas, concepts, facts, methods are accumulated within science itself, providing the emerging direction with the required means of scientific analysis . For the formation of the science of economic sociology, both those and other prerequisites are currently available.
The object of economic sociology is the interaction of two main spheres of social life – economic and social and, accordingly, the interaction of two kinds of processes – economic and social. The peculiarity of this object is that it describes not individual trends observed in the sphere of economy and society, and not even the relationships between them, but something more complex: the mechanisms that generate and regulate these interrelations. Thus, distributive relations are a phenomenon of the economy, but at the heart of these relations is a certain social mechanism that regulates them – the behavior and interaction of social groups on which the nature of the distribution of goods depends.
The economic sphere is an integral subsystem of society responsible for the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of material goods and services necessary for the life of people. This sphere is formed by many systems of great complexity that are particular to it. These are the primary (industry), secondary (agriculture) and tertiary (service) sectors of the economy: legal, semi-legal, illegal types of economic relations, etc. The interaction of the functional subsystems of society is carried out in three ways: through the connection of the functions performed by them; through the partial interweaving and interconnection of their institutions; through the interaction of their respective formal organizations.
The social sphere is understood as the field of relations between groups occupying different socio-economic positions in society, differing primarily in the role in the social organization of labor, the attitude to the means of production, the sources and size of the share of social wealth received. In this understanding, the social sphere reflects the most important aspect of social life – relations associated with the nature of social inequality, differences in the position of groups in society. This aspect is cross-cutting, because differences in the position of groups do not only occur in the economy. They are also manifested in the political, family and other spheres of society, since different groups of people occupy different positions in them. Accordingly, the same group can occupy a different position within different spheres (subsystems). The social sphere is a powerful factor of “reverse influence” on the functioning and development of the social economy, which is realized through the activity of socio-economic groups that are the driving force of socio-economic processes.
The essence of the idea of the nature of the relationship between the social and economic spheres can be summarized as follows:
Under the economic sphere, we understand the sphere of the public economy, under the social sphere – the area of inequality in the position of social groups in all spheres of public life.
The relationship between the economic and social spheres is the influence of economic relations on the social structure of society and on the activity of social groups, as well as the influence of the system of social inequalities on socio-economic processes.
The method of economic sociology in the study of economic relations is characterized by two features: interdisciplinarity and consideration of the studied phenomena from the standpoint of the social mechanism of economic development. The first feature is the interdisciplinarity of economic sociology – a consequence of the features of its object: the relationship between the economic and social spheres of society. Interdisciplinarity as the first principle of research activity in economic sociology implies: consideration of the studied objects, taking into account their dual, economic and social nature, generated by their belonging simultaneously to the economic and social spheres of society; taking into account economic and social factors affecting the objects under study; taking into account the two kinds of consequences (economic and social) of the dynamics of objects; the use of economic and social information; the use of special methods of processing and analysis that allow “combining” economic and social information (for example, data from economic and social statistics and sociological surveys on the activities and behavior of different socio-demographic and socio-professional groups).
The second feature is the focus on identifying social mechanisms. Identification of social mechanisms of economic processes is a fundamental feature of research conducted in economic sociology. Why is that?
First, without resorting to the idea of the mechanisms of economic processes, it is impossible to understand the laws of functioning of such a complex object as the intersection of the economy and society. The correspondence of the category “mechanism” to the tasks of studying complex systems is indicated by many specialists in the field of system analysis. “When the subject of study is systems with deep internal integration (of organism type) … the emphasis should be on integrity… The main problems are then concentrated around two points: the search for specific mechanisms and… determination of the most essential forms of interaction of an integral object with the environment” (Blauberg I.V., Yudin E.G., 1973).
Secondly, the use of the category “mechanism” orients researchers not only to the study of complex systems, but also to improve their management. Moreover, it is this concept that allows science, not limited to the description of the external side of phenomena, to penetrate into the depth of the processes under study. In this sense, the methodology based on the analysis of social mechanisms is stronger than the traditional approach for socio-economic research, which is limited to the study of the relationships between the dependent variable and the set of conditions that determine it. In the case of the traditional approach, the question of under the influence of which social forces a particular process arises, what is its genesis, the result of which chain of events it is, most often remains open.
The subject of economic sociology is the social mechanisms on which the nature of the course of these processes depends, i.e. the nature and specific abilities of social mechanisms (the ability to regulate the course of economic processes) are in the focus of attention of economic sociology.
The social mechanism in the philosophical sense is a self-sufficient means of regulating socially significant relations that arise during the interaction of groups and communities of people, elements of the social structure, various aspects of social processes in society. Regulating socially significant relations, the social mechanism acquires the status of a means of resolving social contradictions in the mutual relations of the subjects of activity or in the dysfunctional development of social processes. The transition from the philosophical to the sociological level, which carries certain structures that are organically connected with the genesis of the whole, suggests a different view of the subject of research. Sociological analysis of social mechanisms allows us to consider them as structures with peculiar characteristics and conditioned by a specific social structure.
The social mechanism in the sociological sense is a stable structure of interaction of social subjects regarding the production, distribution, exchange and consumption of material goods and services, as well as the structure of types of economic behavior of these subjects. The regulatory properties of the social mechanism are determined, on the one hand, by the legal, economic and social institutions of society, and on the other hand, by the socio-economic position of different social subjects, the state of their economic thinking, and the interaction of economic interests. The structures of stable social ties are usually determined by the set of institutional social norms and means of social control accepted in society, which impose certain restrictions on the content and nature of social actions and interactions of people. The degree of influence of the subject on the object, the nature and volume of changes in the object depend on situational factors, personal characteristics of individuals, social norms and means of social control, features of the social system and the environment. Identification of the type and regulatory capabilities of social mechanisms involves answers to the following questions: what is the nature of social relations of the subjects of activity; what is the structure of the role expectations of the individual (social group, community); what is the structure of stable standardized norms imposed by society on the performance of roles by an individual (social group, community); to what extent the coincidence (or discrepancy) of these structures contributes to the fullest manifestation of social patterns. There are common features of social mechanisms (Zaslavskaya T.I., Ryvkina R.V., 1991).
As a rule, the function performed by social mechanisms in relation to society is considered to regulate social processes in accordance with social needs – accelerating some, restraining or overcoming others. For example, the mechanism for regulating population migration is set to achieve greater consistency between the results of this process and the personnel needs of different regions. This orientation of social mechanisms means that they must be sufficiently sensitive to societal needs, in particular to the detection of the dysfunction of the processes they regulate.
2. There is a specific subject, which is represented by certain social groups. Within the framework of each social mechanism, these groups form a specific system, the connections of the elements of which are based on the exchange of the results of any activity – material and intangible benefits, management decisions, technical projects, etc. Becoming “platforms” of interactions, they generate intergroup relationships. Social mechanisms are subjective; they function at the expense of the social; activities – the activities and behavior of social groups, regulated in turn by their interests and needs.
3. Social mechanisms are based on historically formed structures, called “social institutions” as a set of social norms and cultural patterns that determine stable forms of social behavior and action, a system of behavior in accordance with these norms. Each institution is a specific set of social norms that serve as models of individual and collective (group) social behavior in the relevant spheres of social life. To monitor the implementation of these norms, stimulate desirable and limit undesirable behavior of subjects within most institutions, formal organizations are created – state and on a voluntary basis.
Social institutions participate in the functioning of all social mechanisms. This gives grounds to assert that each social mechanism is a specific structure that encompasses several social institutions that regulate a certain social process. Thus, the elements of the social mechanism regulating the distribution of public consumption funds are the features of the political system, legal and moral norms of this society. The mechanism governing the career of personnel includes the norms of administrative law, traditional methods of administrative management, the principles of personnel policy, the adopted criteria for assessing employees of different ages, professions, nationalities.
4. The composition of social mechanisms includes phenomena of different nature: material and spiritual; relating to public existence and public consciousness. The latter covers both scientific and everyday consciousness, expressed in public opinion, social expectations and attitudes, the moods of society or individual groups. The concept of “social consciousness” to a certain extent intersects with the concept of “social institutions”, but it also exists as an independent reality. In the public consciousness (as, indeed, in social institutions) the experience of history is postponed, which has a strong impact on the functioning of all social mechanisms.
5. Social mechanisms contain both controlled, easily restructured, and weakly or not at all managed elements that have a centuries-old tradition and develop in a natural-historical way (for example, demographic processes). The mechanisms governing them have great inertia and stability, since the norms and values of the population that regulate demographic relations change slowly, over many decades.
6. The systemic nature of the mechanism is manifested in the presence, firstly, of external functional relations with society and, secondly, internal connections between the elements that form the mechanism. Orientation to these features of social mechanisms when conducting specific economic and sociological research should become the main principle determining the strategy of these studies. The available experience allows us to believe that such a path helps to “grope” the social mechanism that regulates the process studied by the researcher, to identify the causes of its dysfunctions, to diagnose “diseases”. From the characteristics of the features of social mechanisms follow the corresponding methodological procedures of analysis. If we study a particular social mechanism that regulates a certain socio-economic process, and want to organize a specific study, then the methods of working with information, the methods used to describe and explain the data should reflect the features of the mechanism under study, correspond to them. to ensure the deepening of knowledge about the object – from direct observation of the ongoing process, it is necessary to move to the regulators that generate it; from the regulators lying on the surface to deeper ones; from them to| even deeper in the search for hidden springs through which to control the course of social processes. From the second feature of social mechanisms (the presence of a subject – a social group) it follows that, studying the mechanism of a particular process, it is necessary to identify and characterize all social subjects that participate in it. At the same time, it is necessary to distinguish between those who are managed and those who manage and make the main decisions. As follows from the third feature of social mechanisms (the presence of social institutions in the form of a set of social norms and cultural patterns), among the regulators of social activity of subjects it is necessary to include all the most important social institutions for the course of the process: the nature of the policy pursued, the adopted ideological restrictions, legislative acts, etc. The entry into the structure of social mechanisms of material and spiritual values (the fourth feature) allows, along with Specific conditions for the life of social subjects to cover by research a powerful layer of everyday consciousness of respondents, expressed in public opinion, mood, social expectations and attitudes of various social groups, strata, communities. Differentiation of the structural elements of the social mechanism into controlled, weakly and completely uncontrollable (the fifth feature) allows us to form a strategy and tactics for regulating a particular phenomenon, highlighting and justifying those elements that are amenable to influence during the perestroika processes, and paying special attention to those elements whose development is of a natural historical nature and is not amenable to managerial influences. The systemic nature of the social mechanism (the sixth feature) involves the use of the basic principles of a systematic approach to the analysis of socio-economic processes. First of all, it concerns the study of the problem of the integrity of the system, the harmonization of the levels of its functioning and development; interconnection and interaction of its structural elements; the interaction of “system” and “environment”, which makes it possible to most fully reflect the features of socio-economic processes; regularities of the development of the social system in the direction of increasing structural and functional complexity. The specificity of the social mechanism is the principle of building a structure of social ties and relations in which social subjects are to each other in specific conditions of place and time within the framework of certain social forms. The study of the structure of social ties that develop in the process of life of individuals, social groups, communities necessarily involves the study of interests and value orientations, social actions and interactions. One or another principle of building the structure of social ties and relations makes it possible to identify how and by what methods the social mechanism regulates relations within a certain integrity and thereby contributes to the fullest manifestation of socio-economic laws.
The category system is the most important means of scientific research used to describe and explain the empirical objects under study. The categorical apparatus and principles of the analysis of social systems largely determine whether science manages to penetrate into the objects under study, to reflect them with the required completeness. Depending on which principles are used by certain scientific schools, different methodological traditions develop in science. Among the categories of economic sociology there are general scientific, general social and specific categories. General scientific categories (structure, functions, process, mechanism, element, connection, stability, variability, development, etc.) are borrowed from the language of general methodology. In economic sociology, they are used as a means of describing the economic and social spheres, the social mechanism of economic regulation and private social mechanisms, for the allocation and analysis of specific “subsystems” of society (such as socio-territorial, socio-professional, socio-managerial, etc.). General social categories used in other humanities are borrowed by economic sociology from their lexicon. Thus, it uses the categories of economic theory (property, productive forces, production relations, means of production, production, distribution, exchange, consumption, etc.), philosophy (social consciousness, social relations), social psychology (collective, personality, motivation; identification, adaptation, conformism, conflict”, interaction), sociology (social group, social structure, social organization, social mobility and social stratification, social status, social role and social prestige), sociology of labor (content, nature, working conditions, organization of work, attitude to work, etc.). A large number of borrowed categories is explained by the fact that economic sociology began to form in conditions when the system of humanitarian sciences (including sociological ones) existed for a long time. Naturally, many of the categories of these sciences “migrated” to economic sociology and began to be used in it. And although the names of such categories remain generally accepted, their content and interpretation within the framework of economic sociology, as already mentioned, do not remain unchanged. Thus, borrowing from general sociology the concept of “social structure”, we put into it a specific meaning of the subject of economic development, which includes groups operating at different levels of the system. Or, borrowing the term “motivation of behavior”, we associate it with those types of behavior that are studied within the framework of economic sociology, namely economic behavior, which correlates with the choice of profession, the search for a suitable job, the fundamental decision – to work or not, and if to work, where and how, etc. Specific categories of economic sociology are those that arose within itself and reflect the angle of view and approach to social life characteristic of it. The main of the categories of this group are the social mechanism of economic regulation, private social mechanisms for regulating socio-economic processes, economic consciousness, economic thinking, economic culture, economic interest, socio-economic stereotype, economic behavior (demographic, migration-mobile, educational-qualification, managerial, professional-labor, behavior in the field of income distribution, purchasing, consumer, etc.). The methodological approach to the development of the economy as a social process and the study of social mechanisms as the driving force of this process determine the category system of economic sociology. The task of economic sociology – the development of a theory, methodology and methodology for studying social mechanisms that regulate individual socio-economic processes – involves the use of both sociological and economic categories, taking into account their adaptation to the solution of the task.
The structure of specific categories of economic sociology can be represented as a multi-level hierarchy.
The first level is formed by two abstract categories – the economic sphere and the field of social relations. Their content reflects the characteristics of society that are most significant for understanding the processes occurring “at the intersection” of the economy and society as a whole.
The second level is formed by the categories “social mechanism of regulation of economic relations” and “social mechanism of regulation of socio-economic processes”.
The third level is formed by categories that specify the content of social mechanisms – economic consciousness and economic thinking, socio-economic stereotypes, economic interests, economic activity and economic behavior, economic culture as a regulator of economic behavior and others.
The definition of the range of basic concepts of economic sociology gives us the opportunity to create a methodological basis for the study of socio-economic phenomena with the help of sociological models of description and explanation. When investigating a particular phenomenon, it is necessary to clearly understand within the framework of which regularity it will be studied and, accordingly, which categorical apparatus is preferable to use.
The first stage of the study is always a description, where the researcher must decide in which terms he will describe the results of the empirical study. Description is a kind of transition from empirical experience to actual theoretical procedures. It is bringing empirical data to the form in which it is available for social explanation. Sociological description consists of three components: empirical data of economic and sociological research, a system of designations that gives the description a strict form and, in some cases, visibility (graphs, tables, etc.); conceptual apparatus of a special sociological theory related to the system of notations. So, sociological description is the fixation of the results of empirical sociological research with the help of a developed system of categories (concepts). Description does not set as its task the establishment of natural connections, the disclosure of the essence of objects and therefore does not go beyond the framework of empirical knowledge. The description answers the question in which categorical system a particular phenomenon will be considered. The most powerful method of analysis according to the descriptive plan is empirical typology, the result of which is a typology that does not yet have a specific theoretical basis.
Sociological explanation always involves the description of the object to be explained, and the analysis of the latter in the context of its connections, relations, dependencies. The explanatory structure includes, on the one hand, a position or set of positions that display the object being explained (descriptive model), and on the other hand, a set of explanatory positions (explanatory model). In the absence of one of them, there is no explanation. Any explanation is determined by at least three factors: the nature of the provisions being explained, the nature of the explanatory provisions, and the nature of the relationship between them, i.e., the mechanism of explanation. The nature of the explained provisions is determined by social facts obtained in the course of economic and sociological research, and is built as a descriptive model in a certain system of categories.
As explanatory provisions are laws, patterns, trends, in the context of which the comprehension of the object being explained takes place. According to the nature of the mechanism, explanations are divided into explanation through their own law (theory, hypothesis) and through model explanation. The latter is given to the object in cases where it cannot be explained with the help of its own laws (theories). This is the strength and weakness of the model explanation. Strength is in the ability to explain an object even before constructing a theory mapping that object. The weakness is that it is to a certain extent preliminary.
The most developed form of sociological explanation is an explanation based on theoretical laws associated with the comprehension of the object being explained in the system of theoretical knowledge. In science, a form of sociological explanation is widely used, which consists in establishing the causal, investigative and functional relationships of the object being explained with the conditions and factors that generate it. The basis of such sociological explanations are descriptive categorical schemes. Sociological explanations themselves “can serve as a starting point for the development of ordinary ideas about the object into theoretical knowledge. The deployment of the sociological explanation “through the law” proceeds from the fact that the social, regularity cannot manifest itself except in the average, social, mass regularity with the mutual cancellation of individual deviations in one direction or another.
Social actions, the specifics of which are due to the individual characteristics and life circumstances of the people who commit them, are defined in statistics as random variables. These accidents (individual deviations) are mutually extinguished within social groups endowed with homogeneous properties; they are regularly equalized and turned into so-called average equivalents. To identify the average equivalent of a phenomenon or process, it is necessary to establish the direction of actions of similar groups of people in the same conditions; to identify the structure of social ties, the framework of which these activities are conditioned; determine the degree of repetition and stability of social actions and interactions of groups in the conditions of a given social system. In the process of historical development, according to one or another of the most important indicators, it is possible to judge the direction and intensity of the manifestation of social laws-trends in different countries, depending on the type and level of development of the economy, the level and quality of life of the population of these countries. For example, the degree of manifestation in different countries of the socio-economic law of the growth of the well-being of the population in the course of scientific, technological and social progress is reflected by the index of the standard of living of the population, formed from the three most important average equivalent: the number of years of life, the number of years of study, the amount of income received. Expenditures on health and education (as a percentage of total distributed income) are intermediate averages, determining in varying degrees the core indicators. Their comparison over a number of years allows us to rank the 173 UN member states into industrialized (31), post-socialist states (15) and developing countries (127). Empirical knowledge of the nature, content and circumstances of people’s actions makes it possible to obtain an idea of the average equivalent phenomena and processes and correct them by changing the conditions of human life. If social laws express relatively stable and constantly reproducible relations between social subjects, then the social mechanism of action of these laws is the way of building social ties and relations in which social subjects are to each other in specific conditions of place and time. That is why the scientific approach to the study of socio-economic relations is to clarify the dependencies that develop within the framework of social and state forms that exist only at this time and among these peoples and by their nature transient. To study the social mechanism of economic relations means to determine: what is the state of the studied phenomena or processes; what are the trends in their development; to what extent these trends coincide (or do not coincide) with the historical development of the corresponding pattern; what are the reasons for the possible discrepancy; due to what mechanisms (changes in the way of building links between social actions, value orientations, motives, attitudes, etc.) of certain groups in specific levels of life can overcome the discrepancy between real trends in the development of phenomena (processes) and the objective characteristics of the relevant laws. The most powerful method of analysis according to the explanatory plan is theoretical typology based on laws (regularities, ideal models) according to theoretically grounded criteria. With the institutionalization of economic sociology, a variety of “market terminology” increasingly imperiously invades scientific circulation. Acquire the rights of citizenship terms: primary employment (in the main job), secondary, etc .; unemployment registered and unregistered; mobility and flexibility of the labour market; labour market segmentation; pre-market, market and pseudo-market behavior; entrepreneurial behavior, etc.