About Sociology

This book is an intellectual evaluation. At the same time, it opens up new horizons for innovative and effective sociological research. This is the purpose of the updated synthesis of ideas scattered in hundreds of publications in different countries and in different languages. The publications are prepared on a variety of occasions and under different conditions. Many details in their goals and arguments are not comparable. But in each of them a common strategy of research interest and realization can be traced. Its development begins with the doctoral thesis defended in Leipzig in 1975 and goes to the monograph on global individualisation that Palgrave Macmillan published in 2018. The strategy must be justified, constructed and actively used as a new disciplinary paradigm that effectively targets and regulates sociological research. The focus of the proposed paradigm is the widely understood concept of social interaction. It is defined by the exchange of substance, energy and information between individual and collective social entities, their relations and processes at the micro-, meso- and macro-social level. Analytical parameters of social interactions, as well as the main deterministic chains, are defined.