Social Theory and Social Architecture: Towards a (New) Paradigm for Governing Socio-Political Processes in Russia

The article investigates social architecture as a concept linking the theoretical understanding of social order with the practical tasks of public administration and the coordination of socio-political processes within the Russian sociocultural context. It examines the transition from the classical problem of social order to a new governance paradigm grounded in the principles of social architecture. The focus is on the theoretical and methodological dimensions of positioning social architecture as an element of scholarly and socio-political discourse that aspires to a normative character. The article analyzes the institutional consolidation of the social architecture concept across the domains of media, education, expert knowledge, and public policy. It assesses the potential of this discourse in terms of addressing state objectives related to the formation of national (civilizational) identity. The study draws on a combination of discursive institutionalism, the ‘analytics of government’ (in the tradition of governmentality studies), and the strategic-relational approach (of neo-Marxist tradition), enabling social architecture to be examined not as a given, but as a constructed social reality aimed at ensuring the resilience and stability of state systems. The author demonstrates that the development of the social architecture discourse represents an attempt to resolve contradictions in the governance of socio-political processes — contradictions arising from the exhaustion of the previous sociocultural tradition's potential and the need to form new systems of expert support for state policy. In a broader theoretical perspective, social architecture is considered as one possible response to the fundamental problem of social order — a problem of enduring relevance to the contemporary social sciences and humanities — in conditions where interest in Russia's national political tradition and the interpretation of its historical experience of state-building is growing.

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