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Hanno Scholtz
Enabling sustainable institutions
Being grown up in West Berlin, from very early on I experienced the institutions of industrial society as meaningful but not sustainable: They had ended war and the Shoah and allowed for prosperity, but pressed individuals into social categories while my environment showed that individualization was possible.
After school, I first tapped into history and engineering and finally obtained an economic degree from Mannheim university although my primary interest was still social science. I wrote a political science Ph.D. dissertation about individualized democracy and later got a sociology assistantship at UZH. During varying teaching positions in Switzerland and Germany, I finally got room to develop an own understanding of contemporary social dynamics, and finally the Philosophical Faculty in Zurich granted me a “venia legendi” for my book “Two steps to modernity”.
My current research continues about these thoughts. My working hypothesis is as follows: The world is structured through institutions that have been shaped in the 20th century. In these institutions, the partitioning mapping of individuals to groups (where every individual belongs to exactly one group) plays an important role. But the social structure of the world does not comply with this partitioning logic. I hence want to understand potential institutions that are sustainable without it.
My main current question centers around network-based collective decision making. I have described some basic ideas of collective decision making procedures that allow for democracy without implicitly presuming a partitioning structure of society. But, of course, there is much more to do.
Being grown up in West Berlin, from very early on I experienced the institutions of industrial society as meaningful but not sustainable: They had ended war and the Shoah and allowed for prosperity, but pressed individuals into social categories while my environment showed that individualization was possible.
After school, I first tapped into history and engineering and finally obtained an economic degree from Mannheim university although my primary interest was still social science. I wrote a political science Ph.D. dissertation about individualized democracy and later got a sociology assistantship at UZH. During varying teaching positions in Switzerland and Germany, I finally got room to develop an own understanding of contemporary social dynamics, and finally the Philosophical Faculty in Zurich granted me a “venia legendi” for my book “Two steps to modernity”.
My current research continues about these thoughts. My working hypothesis is as follows: The world is structured through institutions that have been shaped in the 20th century. In these institutions, the partitioning mapping of individuals to groups (where every individual belongs to exactly one group) plays an important role. But the social structure of the world does not comply with this partitioning logic. I hence want to understand potential institutions that are sustainable without it.
My main current question centers around network-based collective decision making. I have described some basic ideas of collective decision making procedures that allow for democracy without implicitly presuming a partitioning structure of society. But, of course, there is much more to do.
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Question and answer are structured in five steps: (1) Politics is about counting, ever more, and the web is good in counting. (2) Politics counts evaluations, and the web is good in evaluations. (3) Political evaluations bear cognitive costs that need to be alleviated, ever more, through trust, and the web is good in employing trust. (4) Political trust relations increasinly have a general network structure, and the web is good in networks. (5) Political trust relations need to be stored, and the web is good in storing sensible data.
While the first three steps describe a type of e-democracy that would be only " nice to have " , steps 4 and 5 point to necessary improvements: The web allows for a network-based collective decision making that efficiently fits the necessities of societies that are not longer satisfied with a kind of representation that urges everyone to align to one group for all issues. Individualization and the cultural demands of non-Western societies go in the same direction in demanding a different and necessarily web-based solution for the cognitive-cost problem of democracy.
Zur Beantwortung dieser Fragen präsentiert der Artikel ein analytisches Modell der Zweistufigkeit der Moderne. Er validiert es an aus dem Modell vorhersagbaren Entwicklungen.
Der entscheidende Test des Modells steht allerdings noch aus. Denn wichtige Vorhersagen des Modells beziehen sich nicht auf gegenwärtige oder vergangene Zeitpunkte, sondern auf die Zukunft: Um dem zunehmenden Mismatch individualisierter sozialer Beziehungen mit den gruppenbasierten Institutionen aus der Zeit der Industriegesellschaft zu begegnen, lässt das Modell institutionellen Wandel hin zu individualisierter und dennoch akteursunterstützter Verantwortlichkeit erwarten, die einige bisherige Tabus bricht.
There are Two Steps to Modernity: Industrial society introduced principles of modernity as rationality and deliberation only around organizations. Examples are social innovations as the introduction of romantic love, of compulsory schooling, of bureaucratic organizations, of parties and nation states.
Modernization within organizations is a second step which started in 1968, and social innovations as the acceptance of diversity in intimate relations, the expansion of tertiary education, boundaryless organizations and careers, of advocacy organizations and multilevel governance are examples for this second part of the process.
This second transition is, however, not yet completed. But while it took World War II to secure the general acceptance of competitive organizations in democracy and labor relations which established the stable „golden age“ of industrial society and post-War growth, this time understanding the parallel nature of the two steps allows to see what will be needed to overcome the current state of a world in crisis.
Question and answer are structured in five steps: (1) Politics is about counting, ever more, and the web is good in counting. (2) Politics counts evaluations, and the web is good in evaluations. (3) Political evaluations bear cognitive costs that need to be alleviated, ever more, through trust, and the web is good in employing trust. (4) Political trust relations increasinly have a general network structure, and the web is good in networks. (5) Political trust relations need to be stored, and the web is good in storing sensible data.
While the first three steps describe a type of e-democracy that would be only " nice to have " , steps 4 and 5 point to necessary improvements: The web allows for a network-based collective decision making that efficiently fits the necessities of societies that are not longer satisfied with a kind of representation that urges everyone to align to one group for all issues. Individualization and the cultural demands of non-Western societies go in the same direction in demanding a different and necessarily web-based solution for the cognitive-cost problem of democracy.
Zur Beantwortung dieser Fragen präsentiert der Artikel ein analytisches Modell der Zweistufigkeit der Moderne. Er validiert es an aus dem Modell vorhersagbaren Entwicklungen.
Der entscheidende Test des Modells steht allerdings noch aus. Denn wichtige Vorhersagen des Modells beziehen sich nicht auf gegenwärtige oder vergangene Zeitpunkte, sondern auf die Zukunft: Um dem zunehmenden Mismatch individualisierter sozialer Beziehungen mit den gruppenbasierten Institutionen aus der Zeit der Industriegesellschaft zu begegnen, lässt das Modell institutionellen Wandel hin zu individualisierter und dennoch akteursunterstützter Verantwortlichkeit erwarten, die einige bisherige Tabus bricht.
There are Two Steps to Modernity: Industrial society introduced principles of modernity as rationality and deliberation only around organizations. Examples are social innovations as the introduction of romantic love, of compulsory schooling, of bureaucratic organizations, of parties and nation states.
Modernization within organizations is a second step which started in 1968, and social innovations as the acceptance of diversity in intimate relations, the expansion of tertiary education, boundaryless organizations and careers, of advocacy organizations and multilevel governance are examples for this second part of the process.
This second transition is, however, not yet completed. But while it took World War II to secure the general acceptance of competitive organizations in democracy and labor relations which established the stable „golden age“ of industrial society and post-War growth, this time understanding the parallel nature of the two steps allows to see what will be needed to overcome the current state of a world in crisis.