Love and family life in the global age: grandparents in Salonika and their grandson in London speak together every evening via Skype. A U.S. citizen and her Swiss husband fret over large telephone bills and high travel costs. A European couple can finally have a baby with the help of an Indian surrogate mother.

In their new book, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim investigate all types of long-distance relationships, marriages and families that stretch across countries, continents and cultures. These long-distance relationships comprise so many different forms of what they...

Love and family life in the global age: grandparents in Salonika and their grandson in London speak together every evening via Skype. A U.S. citizen and her Swiss husband fret over large telephone bills and high travel costs. A European couple can finally have a baby with the help of an Indian surrogate mother.

In their new book, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim investigate all types of long-distance relationships, marriages and families that stretch across countries, continents and cultures. These long-distance relationships comprise so many different forms of what they...

This book presents Ulrich Beck, one of the world's leading sociologists and social thinkers, as a Pioneer in Cosmopolitan Sociology and Risk Society. His world risk society theory has been confirmed by recent disasters - events that have shaken modern society to the core, signaling the end of an era in which comprehensive insurance could keep us safe. Due to its own successes, modern society now faces failure: while in the past experiments were conducted in a lab, now the whole world is a test bed. Whether nuclear plants, genetically modified organisms, nanotechnology - if any of these...

In seinem Gedicht An die Nachgeborenen schreibt Bertolt Brecht: Was sind das fiir Zeiten, wo Ein Gesprach uber Baume fast ein Verbrechen ist Weil es ein Schweigen uber so viele Untaten einschliegt An diesen Zeilen leuchtet exemplarisch ein Problem auf, das auch rur jedes Nachdenken uber Gesellschaft, das wissenschaftliche eingeschlossen, ty pisch ist. Und dieses Problem ist das zentrale Thema dieses Buches. Ganz allgemein (vielleicht zugleich zu allgemein und zu spezifisch formuliert) meine ich das Problem, dag auch in der gegenwartigen gesellschaftlichen Situation sozialer und politischer...

Der verbreiteten Rede von der "Politikverdrossenheit" oder dem "Ende der Politik" setzt dieser Band die These entgegen, dass sich das Verstandnis und der Ort von Politik verandert haben. Die Grundlagen des gesellschaftlichen Handelns und Zusammenlebens sind in Bewegung geraten. ("reflexive Modernisierung"), die Gesellschaft hat sich energischer von Regeln befreit, als die Politik wahrhaben wollte: Eine Gesellschaft erfindet sich ihre Politik. Dieser Prozess des Wie und Wo soll in diesem Band empirisch aufgezeigt werden. Dazu bedarf es einer Forschung, die nicht nur Phanomene bestimmt, sondern...

We live in a world that is increasingly difficult to understand. It is not just changing: it is metamorphosing. Change implies that some things change but other things remain the same capitalism changes, but some aspects of capitalism remain as they always were. Metamorphosis implies a much more radical transformation in which the old certainties of modern society are falling away and something quite new is emerging. To grasp this metamorphosis of the world it is necessary to explore the new beginnings, to focus on what is emerging from the old and seek to grasp future structures and norms in...