SOCIAL SECURITY CONCEPT IN FUNCTIONAL AND NEOFUNCTIONAL PARADIGM

The paper proposes a systematization of the results of the review of publications on security issues in the social sciences and humanities, which allowed several major areas of research and also deals with construction of a structural-functional model of social security as an indicator of generalized social homeostasis, created as a result of balancing the functions of basic social institutions. First, the author applied structural functionalism and neofunctionalism as dominant methodology for interpretation of social security as a social institution controlling homeostasis and social sustainability of the social environment while maintaining constancy intrasystem parameters. Second, there was determined inequivalence of different types of social security in providing social homeostasis by their correlation with the four types of social subsystems (institutions): semantic, reproductive, regulatory and transmission. The paper argued that the leading role in ensuring social homeostasis plays meaning (religious, ideological, cultural) subsystems, corresponding to the value stabilization of society and to ensure the legitimacy of the social order as a whole. At the same time, the article emphasizes that meanings and values produced by these institutions’ subjects (actors) initially embedded through socialization and communication (transmission) subsystems and are subject to secondary fixation at the level of social action through regulatory social institutions (politics, law). The final element of social security is to ensure the homeostasis of the lowest level of social order (institutes of economics and the family). The author justified the position on the understanding of the social security system as independent institution one within the framework of the two models of the social world: systematic and stochastic. The author’s opinion that we have to say about the dependence of social security as a social institution controlling homeostasis of social actors who receive leadership mapping of social reality. It is indicated that the system map of the social world meets modernist paradigm of sociological theorizing, which is characteristic for the consideration of social security as a factor of change that promotes social cohesion, rather than its decay. Whereas stochastic map of the social world corresponds to a postmodern paradigm, main characteristic feature of which is looking at and perception of social security as part of polycentric social reality.