Shmerlina I.A. Social form: contours of concept. Politeia, 2019, Issue 3 (94), pp. 6-32.

Текст статьи на сайте журнала URL: http://politeia.ru/files/articles/rus/Politeia-2019-3(94)-6-32.pdf (дата обращения 27.11.2019)

Abstract

The article develops the theme of the political form, the discussion of which started on the pages of the Journal of Politeia in 2012—2016, and contains a conceptual elaboration of a more general concept of the social form. The author builds her model around the interdisciplinary concept of sociality, which treats the latter as a supraspecific phenomenon. In general terms, social form is defined as a sign complex, through which this or that type of interaction is realized. Social form represents a special class of social interactions and specifies them on such grounds as stability and repeatability of the external configuration of interactions; materiality; invariance of structural components; integrity. Social life is organized along two key types of forms. The first type includes elementary (ethological) social forms that are in principle common for a human being and other social animals. The second type includes institutional forms that are specific for human communities. In contrast to an ethological form, which is regarded as a stable way of social interactions independent of individual interpretation that are realised as a system of statuses / roles, a social institution is a system of statuses / roles that has a reflexive form. A promising area of the analysis of institutional phenomena, including political institutions, is their interpretation from the perspective of a converted form. Scientific researchers are interested in the category of social form largely due to its inherent causative force. Being a semiotic phenomenon, social form is built as one or another semantic complex and thereby is imposed upon the subject. Both elementary and institutional forms, “simple” as well as converted, possess a causative force.