@article{ref1,
title="Varieties of second modernity: the cosmopolitan turn in social and political theory and research",
journal="British journal of sociology",
year="2010",
author="Beck, Ulrich and Grande, Edgar",
volume="61",
number="3",
pages="409-443",
abstract="The theme of this special issue is the necessity of a cosmopolitan turn in social and political theory. The question at the heart of this introductory chapter takes the challenge of ?methodological cosmopolitanism?, already addressed in a Special Issue on Cosmopolitan Sociology in this journal (Beck and Sznaider 2006), an important step further: How can social and political theory be opened up, theoretically as well as methodologically and normatively, to a historically new, entangled Modernity which threatens its own foundations? How can it account for the fundamental fragility, the mutability of societal dynamics (of unintended side-effects, domination and power), shaped by the globalization of capital and risks at the beginning of the twenty-first century? What theoretical and methodological problems arise and how can they be addressed in empirical research? In the following, we will develop this ?cosmopolitan turn? in four steps: firstly, we present the major conceptual tools for a theory of cosmopolitan modernities; secondly, we de-construct Western modernity by using examples taken from research on individualization and risk; thirdly, we address the key problem of methodological cosmopolitanism, namely the problem of defining the appropriate unit of analysis; and finally, we discuss normative questions, perspectives, and dilemmas of a theory of cosmopolitan modernities, in particular problems of political agency and prospects of political realization.<p />",
language="en",
issn="0007-1315",
doi="10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01320.x",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2010.01320.x"
}