Introduction

This chapter gives an overview of the main theoretical and methodological contributions of this book, and it explains the principles when mapping European social transformations. The notion of transformation as an evolutionary outcome of the process of previous or on-going deep and multi-layered social changes, often full of internal contradictions, is ontologically inherent to social sciences. Europe, in its complex ways and ideas, provides an intriguing opportunity to approach a range of transformations from various fields of society. Besides deep change processes and transitions in Europe (including post-communist transition and its outcomes and implications), global issues that concern changing structures of space and time, media and technology, and generational mechanisms leading to societal changes are discussed. Within this chapter, we approach social changes as interplays of micro-waves of individual habits, short waves of social transitions and long waves of social transformations. We clarify the scope and multiple trajectories of European social transformations, and theoretical and methodological challenges of transformation studies. As a framework for analysis of European social transformations, we propose to use the morphogenetic approach of Margaret Archer, focusing on the interplay between three main constituents of any contemporary society – structure, culture and agency. Both the interplay between these three constituents of society and specifying the mechanisms involved are explained in the context of European social transformations where particular local and rather universal global mechanisms on various analytical levels are tightly intertwined.