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Following reflections by Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann, this paper is concerned with the changing meaning of the profession as a sociological category for analyzing modern society. Professions are practical academic occupational groups oriented to certain social values, to which a special significance for society was attributed in the social sciences for a long time, thus marking a connection between professions' research and theory of society. This paper now describes that the causal relationship between profession and society is limited to a historically relatively early period. In the transition to modern society, this close network of relationships begins to dissolve, and now professions operate in the context of some function systems of society whose task is the professional assistance of single clients, such as in the fields of health, law, and pastoral care. However, the professions' highlighted position in the knowledge and action structure of single function systems seems to dissolve more and more today so that one can ask whether we can speak here already of an end of the social form profession. This would correspond with the observation that actually the professions no longer appear at all in the newer theories of society and therefore their function as an important mechanism of social structure formation is no longer attributed to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multiple problems that the planet is currently experiencing—climate crisis, conventional and unconventional wars, planetary disenchantment with political systems, growth of inequality, increase in all kinds of intersectional violence, destructuring of the political economy of morality, etc.—are not a favorable scenario for thinking about hope. This paper nevertheless offers a summary presentation of the sociology of hope, presenting some of its central sources and components as well as a proposed study agenda for the future. This article seeks to foster discussion of what could be the central axes of a sociology of hope. To achieve this purpose, the following argumentative strategy was chosen: (a) the "place" of hope is explored in some classics of sociology, (b) the central components of a sociological investigation of hope are synthesized, and (c) an agenda is presented as a summary for a future development of a sociology of hope. The article seeks to draw attention to the urgency of hope as an important element for the future of sociology and social sciences in the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]