The Container Model of Society as a Research Paradigm

Abstract

The article deals with the container model of society (CMS) which has been used for a long time in disciplines dealing with the study of society, the processes of its development and change. The term CMS was introduced into the scientific circulation of foreign social sciences and humanities about twenty years ago, but it is not yet widely known in the Russian social studies. The article traces the history of the formation of the KMO and its introduction into the research apparatus of foreign social and humanitarian works, provides an overview of the monograph by U. Beck, as well as the article by N. Glik Schiller and A. Wimmer. The CMS is based on the view of society as a set of closed social groups that are “containers”. Hitherto CMS has been used as the methodological tool, which allowed reconsidering the old approaches and the concepts formed in the social and migrant studies. However, the fact that not only scientists, but also ordinary members of the community, were inclined to systematize social
reality like the puzzle of the homogeneous “containers”, was out of the re­searchers’ attention. The main peculiarity of the modern situation around CMS consists in the circumstance that CMS is reproducing itself permanently in the common discourses, in the various confrontations and conflicts. The arti­cle’s authors try to show not just the methodological, but also the theoretical pos­sibilities of CMS for the social studies in Russia. In view of the principles, which the individuals use to identify themselves and others, the socio-humanitarian studies are capable to get a fundamentally new approach toward the analysis of the social field of the human existence as well as to diverge from the method­ological dogmatism in the field of the social sciences.