Sociology of the expected future in domestic realities — in search of an epistemological basis (Part 1)

Most works on the sociology of the future, presented mainly in the fields of Western sociology, are based on the epistemology of methodological individualism and the theory of rational choice. This means that the expected image of one’s own future is only one’s own project, the implementation of which in the form of a life trajectory occurs due to one’s expected own resources (human, educational capital), as well as due to expected resources that can be designated as social capital. Expectations regarding the state of the macrosocial contour of the implementation of the life trajectory are reduced to its complete or relative stability and predictability. Possible deviations from the chosen life trajectory can be corrected due to the traditionally defined agency as a conscious and rational choice of the optimal way out of the situation. But this epistemology does not work in a situation of a large-scale macrocrisis, when systemic stability is no longer a resource for the implementation of the life project. In this case, those methodological settings and integrative models of social change that are provided by the combination of the basic provisions of critical realism and the complexity paradigm can work as an alternative epistemology. The first suggests considering the ontology of social reality as having three levels — “real”, “actual” and “empirical”. The complexity paradigm shows how the activity of the system in moments of crisis creates several variants of expected scenarios of the macro-future at the “real” level. Expectations about one’s own future in these cases depend on the scenario that will move from the “real” level to the “actual” level. In this case, each social actor must adjust the life strategies of the pre-crisis period. Three different ways of such correction are highlighted, and they primarily concern the macro-level as the main resource for their implementation. The first is to ignore the macro-level crisis, the second is to change it by physically moving to more stable regions (countries). The third, most interesting and unusual option for the previous epistemology is to put on hold all previous life plans, to identify one's life trajectory with the trajectory of changes at the system level. The life strategy in this case will consist in trying to translate the desired version of the expected scenarios of the macro-future from the level of "real" to the level of "actual". This is a special type of agent action, which cannot be considered the result of rational calculation. The topic of such agency requires both theoretical and empirical refinement, and the proposed epistemology provides certain paradigmatic heuristics for this.