The main purpose of this article is to explore the key ideas of the «existence theory», proposed by Patrick Baert, Marcus Morgan and Rin Ushiyama, as a promising, original and thought–provoking approach claiming to be a new approach to sociological theory and research. In contemporary Western sociological theory, there is even a special abbreviation for this – «model» or «scheme of BMU» (by the first letters of the surnames: Baert, Morgan, Ushiyama). They ambitiously announced that they had proposed the contours of a new theory of social behavior, which is centered around the temporality of existence in society. They emphasize that they want to focus on the key features (in the form of generalization) of their scientific efforts, developing a new approach based on the creative synthesis of influential traditions of thought: at the philosophical level – existentialism and phenomenology; at the sociological level – microand macro-perspectives, including the unity of ideas in interpretive, existentialist, functionalist, critical sociology and structuration theory. Critical judgments about the «BMU model» are presented both in the reviews of David Inglis and Simon Susan, and in the concretization of the position of the authors of this article.
«existence theory»; «model or scheme of BMU (Baert, Morgan, Ushiyama)»; existentialist sociology; functionalist sociology; interpretive sociology; critical sociology; theory of structuration.