Sociology

Environment precedes everyday life. Therefore, society is an environmental phenomenon, and it must be examined as such.

In the digital age, organizations are not anonymous systems operating behind the backs of individuals. Instead, they are scalable actor-networks guided by network norms of connectivity, flow, communication, participation, authenticity and flexibility.

Today, global modernities interact on local grounds: a process calling for reflexive cosmopolitanism in both societies and social sciences. Prominent critical thinkers face the challenges of our time.

In the age of life sciences, the question of how nature and culture are connected is more important than ever. This volume provides a new understanding of natural and cultural history, as well as of the development of cognition.

A cultural science perspective on anti-terrorism laws after 9/11. This volume shows that these jurisdictional interventions permanently change and endanger the idea of citizenship.

This book addresses the personal and collective abysses that may open when, albeit many years after the Holocaust, but in the very country of the murderers, one examines the legacy of the National Socialist extermination of Jews. Jewish Lebenswelt in Germany entails involvement of survivors and their sons and daughters, born after the Shoah, with the non-Jewish German world of Nazi perpetrators, supporters, bystanders and their children. Love relationships probably represent the most intimate contact between former victims and perpetrators, or their supporters.
This exploration of second-generation relationships in post-National-Socialist Germany is aimed at gaining deeper insights into what Theodor W. Adorno called the »culture after Auschwitz«. The true extent and significance of the chasm that did indeed emerge during the course of this endeavour only became apparent in retrospect. Therefore, an article about the »history« of working on »Love after Auschwitz« has been included.

In this book, Natàlia Cantó Milà elaborates on Georg Simmel's relational approach to a theory of value, pointing at the heuristic possibilities that this approach offers to modern sociology and to a sociology of modernity. She does so by focusing on the theory of value Simmel developed in his »The Philosophy of Money«, delivering an alternative reading of this book that views its theory of value as its main axial point. Simmel's theory of value is depicted by Cantó Milà as including an intrinsically sociological aspect, since economic as well as moral, ethic and aesthetic values are conceived as resulting from human relations.

How can we understand the intensifying interactions of science and society? It is the interdisciplinary field called science studies that provides us with a rich inventory of analytical approaches. They help us explore science as a practice, a subsystem, a culture, and an institution. Their joint observation: Science today is part and parcel of what has come to be known as 'knowledge society'. More than ever, knowledge production and consumption are in need of incessant monitoring and sophisticated reflection.
Nine exemplary studies that inquire into, or are themselves examples of the dynamics of scientific knowledge, are included here: They cover issues as diverse as eugenics, climate research, and the role of historiography, and make use of different tools such as evolutionary reasoning, metaphor, and bibliometrics. Finally, they ponder the need for science to go public (PUS) as well as for society to regulate knowledge and to restructure universities as building blocks of our science system. Their joint message: Science studies can and should assume an active role in observing, reflecting, and communicating the intricate encounters of science and society today.