The Two-Step Nature of Modernity

Over the last decades, the discourse over the end of industrial society and the coming of a second modernity has found evidence in recent phenomena that resemble parallels between 1860 and 1945, as globalizations, economic crises, democratizations, violence, social inequality, and global shifts in resource distributions. An understanding of the mechanisms behind these phases of crisis would be socially helpful since it is rather probable that the current one has not yet ended. The rational choice theory of institutions offers the tools to do so, but has not yet been applied to this question. The proposed paper (part of a larger book project) intends to fill the gap.

The paper develops a model of the two step nature of modernity by concentrating on the following arguments: 1. Modernity increases the availability of resources. 2. This results in changes in information relations, i.e. between positional and situation-specific information. 3. Multi-actor decisionmaking has two focal points of either relying on positional (domination / authority) or on situation-specific information (deliberation / argument). 4. A rational-choice understanding of tradition and modernity hence equates the two with applying the two focal points. 5. Not all games of human interaction are created equal, since organizations offer social structure and the transformation of situation-specific in positional information. 6. Hence an intermediate phase arises, with authority within and argument between organizations. This modelled intermediate phase is equated with the historical phase "industrial society".

Additional arguments analyze the nature of institutional innovations in the transitions between the phases, allowing for the confrontation with empirical evidence and for the prediction of upcoming institutional changes.