The termsocial technologyis scrutinized in an attempt to identify: a) condi-tions for the appearance of the term, so popular in Russia; b) area of term use; c) reasonsfor interest to and popularity of the term in Russia; d) basis of evolution of term content; ande) factors for growing number of interpretations of its content. It is shown that attempts tounify content of the term are pointless and, in fact, we are dealing with several fundamentallydifferent types of practices applied to differing fields and genres of social actions – under asingle name.