Bøger i Sozialtheorie serien

Transport is the only sector that has not yet contributed to the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. To understand why sustainable transport has not been developed yet, Oliver Schwedes highlights the special features of the transport sector and describes the political conditions for a successful change in transport development. He makes clear that technical innovations alone will not be enough; rather, transport policy must be practised as social policy.

What are organizations? Where do they come from? How are they transformed and adapted to new situations? In the digital age and in the global network society, traditional theories of the organization can no longer answer these questions. Based on actor-network theory, this book explains organizations as flexible, open networks in which both human and non-human actors enter into socio-technical assemblies by constantly negotiating and re-negotiating programs of action. Organizations are not macro social structures or autonomous 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.

The book focuses on the modern understanding of human life-forms as constructs that followed an evolutionary history. The author thus finds science confronted with two questions: firstly, how the transgression of the virtual threshold between natural and cultural history was possible, secondly, how the socio-cultural constructs were able to develop in the course of history the way they did. The discussion concentrates on the problem of determining a processual logic in the development of societal structures as well as in the development of cognition. The focus of attention is the historico-genetic reconstruction of cognition.The book was originally published in German as Historisch-genetische Theorie der Kultur (Weilerswist 2000: Velbruck).