Research Program SFB 536

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The "Reflexive Modernization" Research Center was established in 1999 by the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Bonn and will be financed until June 30th 2009. It is an interdisciplinary social sciences partnership program, including groups based in Munich and Augsburg. Whether their expertise lies in sociology, social psychology, political science, history or philosophy, share a common experience, these groups agree that modern societies are undergoing rapid structural changes that may no longer be apprehended with the concepts developed in the 19th and 20th centuries. Even if societies can still be qualified as "modern" societies in the 21st century, a marked radicalization can be currently detected in modernization processes that can be traced back to the 18th century – a radicalization with often paradoxical consequences. What Weber already described as a gradual "disenchantment" of the world seems to have an increasing influence on the premises of modernity. It leads to a questioning of beliefs that were long considered as "natural" and self-evident components of the modern experience.

Among others, these taken-for-granted assumptions include an ever increaseing control over undepletable natural resources, social differentiation, and affiliated concepts such as technical and social progress, modern society's fixation on the nation-state, socialization through gainful employment as well as specifically modern delimitations between nature and society or the individual and the group. The central postulate of the Reflexive Modernization Research Center is that the changes that can be observed in science, politics, the economy and society can, indeed should be interpreted as a "structural break" within modernity. In the research program, this break is conceptualized as the transition from "first" to "second" modernity or from "simple" to "reflexive" modernization.

In order to analyze this "structural break" in modern societies, three steps have been undertaken by the 15 research projects. First, on the basis of selected examples, efficiency losses and transformations within the basic institutions of first modernity were singled out for the second half of the 20th century. The aim was then to explore to what extent one could observe the emergence of new concepts, structures, configurations and institutions that could only be apprehended and described beyond the eroded categories and boundaries of first modernity. Finally, the projects hope to determine what consequences the transformation of institutional premises have on the power structures of modern societies.

How can the discourse about a "structural break" and the related transition from a "simple" to a "reflexive" modernity be apprehended more precisely? If the observable structural changes seem to occur on various levels, it seems obvious that they are triggered and influenced by what can be characterized as a return of insecurity. Thus, in almost all societal domains, one can no longer detect self-evident structures, unequivocal solutions and clear differentiations. Instead, there are always contradictory models, functional alternatives and unintended side-effects. This evolution is by no means fortuitous. It actually derives from the developmental dynamics of modernity, three aspects of which should be highlighted:

• First, a sustained and increasing contingency is built into the developmental dynamics of modernity – a contingency that subsequently translates into a pluralization of options. Nothing appears fixed or self-evident any more. From the social structuring of individual relationship networks to the nation-state, everything seems possible, changeable and likely to be justified in a variety of ways.
• Another important point is that the side-effect of social behavior are becoming increasingly obvious. The fact that every conscious goal entails unintended side-effects is by no means revolutionary but in the context of reflexive modernity, the link between conscious behaviors/aims and unintended side-effects can shift in dramatic ways. Indeed, unintended side-effects frequently thwart conscious aims to the extent that dealing with side-effects often requires more attention and effort than the original implementation of a particular intention.
• Thus against this background, it is easy to distinguish a crisis in both the rationality assumptions and rationalization expectations of first modernity. For instance, one can no longer expect that more growth, knowledge and social differentiation will make societal structuring clearer and more reliable. Instead, it seems obvious that experiences of contingence and side-effects have made modernity into an ambiguous and uncertain phenomenon. And it is precisely this process that questions formerly "linear" rationalization and differentiation representations, despite of – or maybe even because of – the indisputable increase in steering knowledge or guidance.

Numerous examples display the extent to which increasing contingencies and side-effects cast doubt upon the apparently self-evident structural constructs often considered as the "basic institutions" of first modernity. These examples especially question the following aspects of second modernity:

• a nation-state organization of society and economy that is understood more as an achievement than a limitation, and that points back to the constitutive territorial reference of societal institutions in first modernity.
• against this background, the self-evident (but, linked to globalization, increasingly weak) territorial linkage between production, cooperation and enterprise, as a stage upon which the contradictions between work and capital are played out while still appearing manageable.
• a division of labor along gender lines that is often conceptualized as a "natural" characteristic. This division of labor is often correlated with a gender-specific and extremely unequal organization of gainful employment.
• linked to this aspect, the existence of functioning nuclear families as the reproduction condition and guarantor of a predominantly masculine work force.
• the relatively closed, mainly position-influenced proletarian and bourgeois milieus or life worlds that can be seen as the social precondition for class development during first modernity but also as a meso-level of social identity construction.
• the naturalized differentiation and mutual exclusion of societal sub-systems (the economic, political, administrative, cultural and scientific spheres), which thanks to their own media and behavioral rationalities can be experienced as different and separate.
• the structuring and hierarchization of societal knowledge systems that rests on a devaluation of (everyday) experiential knowledge in parallel with a revaluation of scientific theoretical knowledge, not to mention an instrumentalized use of nature and a controlling rationality.
• the enforcement of a hierarchy of experts and lay-wo/men, based on professionally generated and controlled knowledge monopolies.

The exploration of this broad spectrum of structural changes, which all point to an erosion of the basic institutions of first modernity, not only requires a broad empirical research program but also new observation categories and reference frameworks in order to make the "novelty" of these social changes empirically apprehensible. With the help of the social science concept of cosmopolitanism, the Reflexive Modernization Research Center aims to sharpen its grasp of historically new realities, interdependencies and problems – all of which lie beyond the limited perspectives of methodological nationalism to be found in the social sciences and problematize the internal differentiations to be found in individual fields. Two dimensions of cosmopolitanism can be distinguished in the center's research program:

• a methodological dimension: cosmopolitanism as a new approach to a globalized world enabling the transcendence of obsolete demarcations between inside and outside,
• a political and historical dimension: cosmopolitanism as a particular form of societal interaction with cultural difference and a way to process contingency and insecurity (which seem to be characteristic of second modernity).

Group research projects explore this basic structural break phenomenon and the return of insecurity in modern society. The projects are grouped into three areas that cover various aspects of ambiguity, structural differentiation and institutional development:

Project Area A: The Political Epistemology of Uncertainty: Knowledge, Non-Knowledge and Ambiguity

The projects in Area A focus on the side-effects of modern science and its characteristic methodological doubt, which paradoxically forms the basis of science's positivist claims during first modernity. Indeed, it is these claims that are denounced by the enforcement of methodological doubt, thus seriously impairing self-assured cognitive and normative behavior. A new "conscious uncertainty" and the pluralization of rationality criteria it entails can be seen as the catalysts of this development, even if their consequences have hardly been ascertained until now.

Project Area B: Towards a Political Sociology of Ambiguity: Social Situations, Identities and their Design

Projects in Area B are more concerned with social than cognitive ambiguities, ambiguities that emerge as a consequence of the pluralization of options – be it in terms of individual biographies or social structuring. Former representations of existential security, social positioning, intra-familial division of labor or the impact of gainful employment on the development of identity are denounced as increasingly contingent. Thus, the aim in this area is to theoretically and empirically uncover a "social structuring of ambiguity".

Project Area C: The Political Economy of Uncertainty: Institutional Restructuring and Redefinition of Boundaries

In contrast with the argumentation developed in Area B projects – centered on social situations and individual perspectives – Area C projects focus on the complementary transformations in institutional and organizational arrangements. First modernity is characterized by two decisive inclusionary factors: the nation-state and the corporate/capitalistic architecture of the labor market. Both combine two fundamental organization principles of modernity, namely the organization of inequality and the be-stowal of equality. In the context of reflexive modernity, related institutions are being questioned since nation-state and capital boundaries are either shifting or dissolving. Novel restructuring processes thus arise and the aim of the projects is to systematicly clarify their significance.

Selected Literature:

Ulrich Beck/Anthony Giddens/Scott Lash (1994): Reflexive Modernization. Politics, Tradition, and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Beck, Ulrich/Bonß, Wolfgang (Hg.) (2001): Die Modernisierung der Moderne. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Beck, Ulrich/Bonß, Wolfgang/Lau, Christoph (2003): The Theory of Reflexive Modernization: Problematic, Hypotheses and Research Programme. In: Theory, Culture & Society 20(2), 1-34.

Beck, Ulrich/Grande, Edgar (2004): Das kosmopolitische Europa. Gesellschaft und Politik in der Zweiten Moderne. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Beck, Ulrich/Lau, Christoph (Hg.) (2004): Entgrenzung und Entscheidung: Was ist neu an der Theorie reflexiver Modernisierung? Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Beck, Ulrich/Lau, Christoph (2005): Second Modernity as a Research Agenda: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations in the 'Meta-Change' of Modern Society. In: British Journal of Sociology 56(4), 525-558.

Beck, Ulrich/Sznaider, Natan (2006): Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences. In: The British Journal of Sociology 57(1), 1-23.

Böschen, Stefan/Kratzer, Nick/May, Stefan (Hg.) (2006): Nebenfolgen. Analysen zur Konstruktion und Transformation moderner Gesellschaften. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft.

Grande, Edgar (2006): Cosmopolitan Political Science. In: British Journal of Sociology 57(1), 87-111.

Soziale Welt (Zeitschrift für sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung und Praxis) (2005) 56(2/3): Sonderheft: Theorie und Empirie reflexiver Modernisierung.