Question

Abstract

In the problem situation of globalization research since the 1990s, the German sociologists Beck, Münch, and Willke, for example, have reacted to the changed situation of theory formation and research through the resystematization of Western modernization (Beck 1986, 1993; Beck and Bonss 2001; Münch 1998, 2001a, b; Willke 1997, 2001, 2002, 2003). Sociologists classify “basic institutions” or institutional orders with organizational principles, which are institutionalized in the course of the modernization of social support layers. They have to meet the requirement that they restabilize themselves as “structures” and a “differential order formation” under certain historical framework and initial conditions. It is not a question of the word “organizational principles,” but of the problem-related relationship with the classification of institutions, which do not vary freely in the time dimension and must be reversible. An example is the kinship system and the institutionalization of the codes of the functional systems. The authors mentioned different background assumptions and research programs in sociological theory when analyzing the basic institutions and structures. However, they share the point of reference to grasp the changed starting point that has been emerging for all social systems since the beginning of the 1990s as a result of the processes of globalization.