The Relationship Between Discourses and Social Change: Conceptual Foundations

Abstract

The article presents a conceptualization of the relationship between discourses and social change and proposes the author’s analytical model for studying the impact of discourses on social change. The relevance of the study is determined by the high intensity of social transformations, the acceleration of information flows, the increasing complexity of the mechanisms through which collective representations are formed, as well as the growing role of mass communication and digital media in the production and dissemination of meanings. Of particular importance in this context is the question of how social changes become thinkable, legitimate, and practically feasible through discursive constructions. In this regard, discourse is considered not only as a form of describing ongoing processes, but also as a mechanism involved in the construction of social reality. The purpose of the study is to conceptualize the relationship between discourses and social change through clarifying the concept of discourse, defining social change, and identifying the mechanisms through which discourse affects cognitive orientations, social practices, and institutional orders. The work is theoretical and conceptual in nature; it employs the methods of comparative analysis, conceptual synthesis, and analytical reconstruction of classical and contemporary sociological approaches to “discourse” and “social change.” The main results of the study are as follows: the concept of discourse is clarified as a field of meaning that includes signs and meanings reproduced within the communicative field and interpreted depending on internal and external factors; social change is defined as long-term and supra-individual shifts in rules, resources, schemes of interpretation, and forms of reproduction of social structure; it is demonstrated that the impact of discourse on social change operates at the cognitive, behavioral, and structural levels; it is substantiated that discourse becomes a mechanism of social change when a new interpretation is combined with the coordination of actions and subsequent institutional consolidation. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the theoretical clarification of the mechanism linking discourse and social change through the identification of three interrelated levels of impact. Its practical significance consists in the possibility of using the proposed conceptualization as a theoretical framework for further empirical studies of the discursive mechanisms of social change.