Paul F. Lazarsfeld, An Empirical Theory of Action

Nico Stehr is a German cultural scientist and sociologist. From 2004 to June 2018, he held the Karl Mannheim Chair for Cultural Studies at the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen. Stehr taught and researched at American and Canadian universities from 1967 to 2000, most recently as a research professor at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Study at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In 2002-2003 he was the “Paul Lazarsfeld Professor” in the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences at the University of Vienna. From 2006 to 2009, he led a research project funded by the EU Commission on the socio-political approach to so-called converging technologies (i.e. biotechnology, nanotechnology, information science and cognitive science) and founded the European Center for Sustainability Research (ECS) in 2011. Stehr was a senior research fellow at the Sustainable Development Research Institute at the University of British Columbia (Vancouver), a fellow at the Essen Cultural Studies Institute, and co-founder and, until 2006, editor of the Canadian Journal of Sociology. A particular focus of his scientific work is the transformation of modern societies into knowledge societies and the associated consequences for areas such as science, politics, economics and globalization. Another important topic is the social causes and consequences of climate change. In 1986 he published the highly acclaimed and seminal book (with Gernot Böhme) The Knowledge Society. His most recent books include Information, Power, and Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Understanding Inequality. Social Costs and Benefits (with Amanda Machin, Springer, 2016); Knowledge. Is Knowledge Power? (with Marion Adolf, Routledge. 2017); Society & Climate (with Amanda Machin, World Scientific, 2019); Money. A Social Theory of Modernity (with Dustin Voss, Routledge, 2020); Knowledge Capitalism (Routledge, 2022). The anthology A World of Our Making: Climate, Democracy and Knowledge is scheduled for publication in 2025. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada and the European Academy of Arts and Science.

Christian Fleck is an Austrian sociologist and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS), Vienna, Austria. He was president of the Austrian Sociological Association (2005-09) and the ISA’s Research Committee History of Sociology (2006-10). His most recent publications are: A Transatlantic History of the Social Sciences: Robber Barons, the Third Reich and the Invention of Empirical Social Research (2011); Sociology in Austria (2016); Shaping Human Science Disciplines (2018);  and Meilensteine der Soziologie (2020).