O. Mamedov
Doct. Econ. (DSc), Professor, Southern Federal University, Rostov-on-Don, Russia

TERRA ECONOMICUS, 2017, Vol. 15 (no. 2),

p. 6-17
DOI: 10.23683/2073-6606-2017-15-2-6-17

The trend towards globalization demonstrates a one-vector approach to more or less significant trends in modern society. In the field of science, globalization has generated the phenomenon of "interdisciplinarity", which marks a qualitative leap in the production, processing and appropriation of social knowledge. Interdisciplinarity is associated with the era of the domination of creative knowledge. There are ongoing discussions on the subject and methodology of social science, on incorporation of mathematical and psychological techniques into social knowledge; interdisciplinarity emphasizes a number of new issues at that. The newest American, European, Japanese, Chinese sciences are represented today by inter-branch structures – the future dominant form of sociology. The main cause is that social problems are by their nature always interdisciplinary ones. Much attention is paid in this article to the contradictory consequences of the division of labor in the sphere of science. Interdisciplinarity is interpreted not only as an epistemological, but also as an ontological category, which requires finding the objective structures adequate to the “interdisciplinary” nature. Integration of various branches of social knowledge is transformed for social science into a kind of a pass into the “knowledge economy”. Today, the development of an interdisciplinary approach in Russian social science is constrained by three points: 1. Interdisciplinarity does not cancel, but makes the objective subordination of various branches of social knowledge more important. Established by the great social scientists of the XIX century, the priority of economic knowledge remains valid for two centuries. This means that the theoretical and methodological basis for all interdisciplinary social studies can only come from the methodological and theoretical achievements of economics. 2. Interdisciplinarity is usually interpreted as a phenomenon of cognition. But for the interdisciplinarity as such, the main question is, whether there is something in the objective social reality that can be understood only in the framework of an interdisciplinary approach? If this is so, then objective and reasonable grounds exist for the interdisciplinary approaches. 3. For a long historical period, the Russian society had no an opportunity to develop in a natural way, because the dominant ideology artificially narrowed the scope of available alternatives. Under these conditions, social processes are beginning to deform, and retrograde social dynamics occur. Therefore, the issue of the possibility and fruitfulness of applying an interdisciplinary approach to deformed social processes becomes particularly important.

Keywords: interdisciplinarity in social science; division of labor in the field of scientific creativity; specialized social knowledge

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Publisher: Southern Federal University
Founder: Southern Federal University
ISSN: 2073-6606