SOCIOLOGY IN TIMES OF CRISIS AND WAR: PROBLEM OF THE METHODOLOGICAL EFFICIENCY

Abstract

The article studies the Ukrainian crisis and the war in Donbas which are considered as challenges faced by sociology. In the first place, they arose as problems facing the Ukrainian sociological community. The answer to the problems was complicated by the fact that empirical studies in our country are mainly oriented to the execution of some service tasks. Most often, they are executed for one or another faction of the ruling class. Therefore, the results of empirical sociological research are used for manipulative power technologies. Ukrainian problems are a separate manifestation of global problems in the development of sociology. Due to the transformation of sociology into an instrument of democracy (election campaign support, referendum, monitoring of public opinion for government institutions and civil society), a methodological shift has occurred, which resulted in the loss of the unity of the theoretical and empirical levels. Statistics has become the general theory of empirical sociology in quantitative research, which in its turn has a mathematical justification. This provokes the proliferation of statistical functionalism and methodological nominalism. Qualitative empirical research based on theoretical preconditions has ethnography, social and cultural anthropology. In order for sociology to respond to the challenges of today's society, there should be a renewed unity of the theoretical and empirical levels with the domination of the former one. This requires a new theoretical synthesis, the basis of which should be world-system analysis, environmental sociology and the theory of the Second Modern. In this light, the Ukrainian crisis and the war in the Donbas region will be plunged into the global context and explained by the contradictions of the modern world capitalist system, and not simply by the psychological inadequacy of a particular leader or, worse, by the ethnic factors. In this case, attempts to place responsibility for social disturbances on the inhabitants of the region will even lose sight of scientific knowledge and can be classified the way they deserve, namely, as manipulative technology in favor of one of the factions of the ruling class