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This paper addresses the events at Beslan as a crisis point at which the postmodern celebration of difference spills into unbearable chaos. However this chaos turns out to show specific, dynamic or complex, self-organizing structures. Such dynamics, instead of obeying ‘normal’ ranges exhibit widely different scales of magnitude and intensity. Central to these interactions is the formation, however loose or opportunistic, of identities that also produce others: the formation of micro-ethnicities that state how the ‘other’ or out-group can be treated, mistreated or ‘deconstructed’. At Beslan, this reaches a point of crisis which is both localized and universally challenging: it poses the problem of intolerability to a notion of democratic community and an epistemology premised on, and promising, pluralistic tolerance. The outcome is a realignment of sociology and the sociology of childhood along the axes of a model of human ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I examine various sociologies of the future. I argue that one future, of global climate change, is now exceptionally significant. This future is based upon certain sociological presumptions and thus sociology is central to its emerging contours and to its analysis. I examine one aspect of such a future, the role of travel and especially automobility within this emerging dystopia. I use some formulations from complexity theory to examine what might constitute an alternative to global heating and the scenario of ‘tribal trading’. It is suggested that one feasible alternative is a ‘digital panopticon’ and I examine some small changes that might tip the system to such a post-automobility system. But there is no free lunch here. It is argued that the world may be torn between two bleak scenarios as a consequence of the twentieth century's exceptional degree of resource use, between a Hobbesian war of all against all and an Orwellian digital panopticon. The twentieth century would seem to be reaping its bitter revenge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes issue with Stehr and Grundmann's argument in this journal that sociology's poor record of contribution to practical knowledge results from sociologists' misguided attachment to the idea that social phenomena are peculiarly complex, and so peculiarly resistant to efforts at practical knowledge formation. Stehr and Grundmann develop their thesis by contrasting sociology to economics, claiming the latter's superior methods and disciplinary cultures enable it to contribute more successfully to solving practical problems. We argue that Stehr and Grundmann's comparison of the relative success of economics and sociology as policy sciences underestimates the extent to which the complexity argument has been destructive of economics' capacity to contribute practical knowledge, and overestimates the importance of disciplinary methods and cultures in explaining the use of economics in policy making. Further, we argue that the 'complexity argument' can contribute to better policy making, by virtue of its capacity to highlight the dangers of simplistic or fundamentalist solutions to social problems with complex causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assertion about the unique 'complexity' or the peculiarly intricate character of social phenomena has, at least within sociology, a long, venerable and virtually uncontested tradition. At the turn of the last century, classical social theorists, for example, Georg Simmel and Emile Durkheim, made prominent and repeated reference to this attribute of the subject matter of sociology and the degree to which it complicates, even inhibits the development and application of social scientific knowledge. Our paper explores the origins, the basis and the consequences of this assertion and asks in particular whether the classic complexity assertion still deserves to be invoked in analyses that ask about the production and the utilization of social scientific knowledge in modern society. We present John Maynard Keynes' economic theory and its practical applications as an illustration. We conclude that the practical value of social scientific knowledge is not dependent on a faithful, in the sense of complete, representation of social reality. Instead, social scientific knowledge that wants to optimize its practicality has to attend and attach itself to elements of social situations that can be altered or are actionable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]