ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on figuration as a key transformative element of communication processes, which shape the social sphere. It argues that figurations, although chaotic at the beginning, form certain patterns and figurations are internalised, grouped, weaved in everyday media practices and then gain institutional logic through repetitiveness to establish social institutions. The chapter focuses on the processual sociology of Norbert Elias and its applications to the idea of communicative figurations. It presents the role of the triad of practice, institutions and media power in media-effected transformation processes. The key to understanding Elias’s reception in contemporary mediatization theory is the notion of figuration. Particular communicative figurations, as parts of social networks, are interdependent with other figurations and based on relations between individuals within them. Media-oriented practices depend on the specific place and functions of the actor in a certain communicative figuration, media accessibility and psychological/social needs that particular practice fulfils.
