Nico Stehr

Die Moralisierung der Märkte

„When the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals... Of course there will still be many people with intense, unsatisfied purposiveness who will blindly pursue wealth —unless they can find some plausible substitute. But the rest of us will no longer be under any obligation to applaud and encourage them.“

The Knowledge society : the growing impact of scientific knowledge on social relations

I The Design of Knowledge Society.- The Growing Impact of Scientific Knowledge on Social Relations.- Finite Human Capacities and the Pattern of Social Stratification in a Knowledge Society.- II The Social Role of Men of Knowledge.- Demarcation as a Strategy of Exclusion: Philosophers and Sophists.- Scientists Protect Their Cognitive Authority: The Status Degradation Ceremony of Sir Cyril Burt.- The Reproduction of Objective Knowledge: Common Sense Reasoning in Medical Decision Making.- III Processes of Scientification.- The Scientification of Police Work.- The Scientification of Architecture.- Knowledge Form and Scientific Community: Early Experimental Biology and the Marine Biological Laboratory.

Practical Knowledge: Applying the Social Sciences.

Knowledge as a Capacity to Act Social Science and Practice The Science of Application Economic Policy as Applied Social Science Pragmatic Knowledge

Modern Societies as Knowledge Societies

New social realities require a new perspective. In advanced societies, the capacity of the individual to say no has increased considerably. At the same time, the ability of the large social institutions that have significantly shaped the nature of the twentieth century to get things done has diminished in the past couple of decades. Or, appropriating Lowe’s (1971: 563) astute insights, we are witnessing a change from social realities in which ‘things’, at least from the point of view of most individuals simple ‘happened’ to a social world in which more and more things are ‘made’ to happen. In this contribution, these new realities are described as representing the emergence of advanced societies as knowledge societies.

Why Is Werner Sombart Not Part of the Core of Classical Sociology? From Fame to (Near) Oblivion

The life and work of Werner Sombart poses an intellectual puzzle in the genealogy of modern social theorists. During his lifetime, Sombart was probably the most influential and prominent social scientist in Germany as well as in many other countries. Today he is among the least known social scientists. Why did he lose his status as one of the most brilliant and influential scholars and intellectuals of the 20th century? Why is his work almost forgotten today? While Webers thesis about the influence of Protestantism on the development of capitalism is widely known, even beyond sociological circles, few sociologists today know that Sombart had an alternative explanation. An obvious explanation for Sombarts fall from grace is his embrace of Nazism. As Heidegger provides a counter-example, Sombarts fate requires a more complex explanation. In addition, we explore the different reception of his work in economic and sociological circles as compared to cultural theory and history.

Climate change in perspective.

Our concerns about global warming have an age-old resonance.

Climate Change: What Role for Sociology? A Response to Constance Lever-Tracy

In a previous issue of this journal, Constance Lever-Tracy called on sociologists to become more involved in the debates about anthropogenic climate change. In this response to her article, the authors support her general argument but query four of her tenets: (1) they see other reasons for the lack of interest in climate change among sociologists; (2) they argue that the true challenge to climate change research is interdisciplinarity (as opposed to multidisciplinarity); (3) they emphasize the virtues of constructivism; and (4), while Lever-Tracy argues that climate change should be at the heart of the discipline, in the authors’ view, unless this is to be mere wishful thinking, there is a need to carefully consider the prospects of such an enterprise.

Clarifying the Attribution of Recent Disaster Losses: A Response to Epstein and McCarthy

—HANS VON STORCH Institute for Coastal Research, GKSS Research Center, Geesthacht, Germany he December 2004 issue of BAMS contains an article warning of the threats of abrupt climate change (Epstein and McCarthy 2004, hereafter EM04). The article seeks to raise awareness of the risks of an abrupt change in climate related to human influences on the climate system, but, in doing so it repeats a common factual error. Specifically, it identifies the recent growth in economic damages associated with weather and climate events, such as Hurricanes Mitch and Jeanne and tornadoes in the United States, as evidence of trends in extreme events, arguing “the rising costs associated with weather volatility provide another derived indicator of the state of the climate system . . . the economic costs related to more severe and volatile weather deserves mention as an integral indicator of volatility.” Although the attribution of increasing damages to climate changes is but one of many assertions made by EM04, the repetition of this erroneous claim is worth correcting because it is not consistent with current scientific understandings. The rising costs of disasters are important, and so too is human influence on climate. Policy makers should, indeed, pay attention to both issues. But a robust body of research shows very little evidence to support the claim that the rising costs associated with weather and climate events are associated with changes in the frequency or intensity of events themselves.1 Instead, the research that has sought to explain increasing disaster losses has found that the trend has far more to do with the nature of societal vulnerability to those events. This conclusion is borne out in literature from the natural hazards community (e.g., Mileti 1999; Tierney 2001) and the societal impacts of the climate community (e.g., Glantz 2003; Changnon et al. 2000), and is consistent with the findings of the most recent assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Houghton et al. 2001; McCarthy et al. 2001).

The Growing Impact of Scientific Knowledge on Social Relations

Despite many insightful, sophisticated and engaged inquiries into the interrelation of science and society, particularly in the 1920s and early 1930s and again in the 1960s and early 1970s, the void of a theory of society which captures the dynamics of science, technology and society remains to a significant extent. The fundamental issues of “the modes of interplay between society, culture and science are with us still” (1). Of course, we cannot hope to significantly reduce the need for such a theory here; however, we are convinced that a new approach is required. Our effort can only be seen as preliminary rather than exhaustive. Like some previous approaches, it too is based on the assumption that social change in industrial society and therefore the makeup of its social relations are increasingly tied to “advances” in scientific knowledge.

Eduard Brückner : the sources and consequences of climate change and climate variability in historical times

About the Editors. Acknowledgements. Eduard Bruckners Ideas - Relevant in His Time and Today N. Stehr, H. von Storch. 1. Groundwater and Typhus. 2. Fluctuations of Water Levels in the Caspian Sea, the Black Sea, and Baltic Sea Relative to Weather. 3. How Constant is Todays Climate. 4. Climate Change since 1700. 5. About the Influence of Snow Cover on the Climate of the Alps. 6. Influence of Climate Variability on Harvest and Grain Prices in Europe. 7. Weather Prophets. 8. An Inquiry about the 35-Year-Period Climatic Variations.