Research and Scientific Advice in the Second Modernity: Technology Assessment, Responsible Research and Innovation, and Sustainability Research

The scientific and technological advance has been a major driving force of modernization for centuries. However, the 20th century was full of indications and diagnoses of a deep crisis of modernity. Currently, debates on limits to growth, pollution, and climate change indicate the serious and threatening lack of sustainability of the so-called ‘first modernity’. This crisis of modernity has motivated scholars to develop concepts of modernizing modernity, with the approach of a ‘reflexive modernization’ to reach a ‘second modernity’ being prominent. In this paper, Technology Assessment (TA), Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), and Sustainability Research (SR) are regarded as manifestations of this reflexive modernization in the field of problem-oriented and transformative research. The paper aims to (a) unfold the hypothesis regarding TA, RRI, and SR as scientific approaches within reflexive modernization, (b) clarify the respective meaning of ‘reflexive’ in these approaches, (c) identify commonalities as well as differences between the three approaches, and (d) draw conclusions for the relation and further development of TA, RRI, and SR.

Religious spaces as continually evolving modernities: Forms of encounter with modernity in Christian Orthodoxy and Islam

The present study deals with the encounter with modernity in two neighbouring religious spaces: Christian Orthodoxy and Islam. Relying on Eisenstadt’s theory about multiple modernities and on its further developments by Thomas Mergel and Kristina Stoeckl, Islamic and Christian-Orthodox dynamics in relation to the challenges of modernity are examined under two aspects: first, the decoupling between religion and culture as elaborated by Olivier Roy, and second, the development of modernist and fundamentalist currents as phenomena of modernity. The study contributes to the sketching of the profile of Islamic and the Christian-Orthodox modernities, pointing both to some of the commonalities and the differences, and inquiring the nature of their distinctiveness. Further on, it contributes to the theoretic discussion on modernity and its various, contextually shaped forms, shedding new light on the relation between the trigger of social changes and their processual character.Contribution: Inside the Christian Orthodox and the Islamic religious space the decoupling between religion and culture and the development of modernist and fundamentalist currents are analysed as markers of the second modernity that arises from the encounter of the worlds mentioned with the challenges of the first modernity.

Diversity, difference and division in later life

In the concluding chapter of the book, we summarise some of the main issues concerning social divisions and social differences in later life. First we stress the transformation of later life in second modernity, from its categorisation as a residuum, a role-less role, a residuum of a life once lived to a richer and more diverse set of social locations. It is not simply that older people have shifted from being a category of the poor to a subset of the rich. Such representations are both false and misleading. Still they constitute a partial fact, namely that older people have become more diverse and no longer capable of being categorised as a distinct class or community. This transition can be explored in terms both of classical social divisions, like class, gender, disability or ethnicity, as well as through social differences and distinctions realised through the lens of citizenship, consumption and community. We conclude by arguing that examining both divisions and differences, inequalities and identities, in later life enables both a greater understanding of the changing nature of later life and of the changing constitution of division in contemporary society.