Interdependent Transitions and the Recomposition of the Social

Decarbonisation. AI integration. Migration-induced transformations of identity. These are not themes arranged for convenience or range. They point to a deeper structure—an interlocking set of transitions that refuse to stay in their lanes. What we are seeing is not the sum of sectoral shocks but the reorganisation of modernity’s underlying regimes: its infrastructures of sense, value, and control.

To approach this, we need a sociology that doesn’t begin with objects—climate, code, borders—but with the systems that give these objects meaning. Not “climate change,” but the crisis of socio-technical metabolism. Not “AI,” but the shifting rationalities of delegation, prediction, and labour abstraction. Not “migration,” but transformations in the ontology of the subject—who counts as a bearer of rights, who belongs, and on what grounds.

This requires a shift away from issue-specific analysis towards what Ulrich Beck, already in the 1990s, called the second modernity: a phase in which the reflexivity of social systems—how societies respond to their own risks—becomes constitutive. Yet Beck’s diagnosis remains insufficient today unless reworked through more grounded institutional and material lenses. The infrastructures that carry these transitions—data architectures, energy systems, border regimes—operate not as neutral substrates but as actors in their own right, echoing what scholars like Sheila Jasanoff have framed as the co-production of knowledge and order.

Here, agency is not located in “actors” in the conventional sociological sense. Following theorists like Margaret Archer, we have to account for how agency is always embedded, temporally stratified, entangled with institutional reflexivity. But equally, the system is not a neutral background—it acts. Niklas Luhmann’s insistence on the autopoietic closure of social systems remains provocative here, though his allergy to normativity limits its diagnostic reach. What is valuable, however, is the idea that the system “sees” according to its own operational code—whether law, science, or capital—and that crises emerge when multiple codes collide without mediation.

The paradox, then, is not epistemic but structural. Contradiction surfaces not because we misunderstand the system, but because the system no longer understands itself in a unified way. This is particularly visible in the domain of climate governance, where the temporalities of ecological risk, market adjustment, and electoral cycles remain radically out of sync. One cannot “solve” this by better forecasting or coordination; the friction is ontological.

If there is a centre of gravity here, it lies in treating transitions not as thematic clusters but as mutually conditioning ruptures in how modernity organises life. Andreas Malm’s focus on fossil capital, Ruha Benjamin’s insistence on the social inscription of code, Étienne Balibar’s reflections on the border as both material and symbolic—all of these resist compartmentalisation. They remind us that the analytic unit is neither “problem” nor “sector,” but the shifting assemblage of institutional rationalities, socio-technical forms, and subjectivations they produce.

To do “climate” today is also to do the sociology of automation, of borders, of sovereignty, of risk. But not in an additive way. The task is to grasp the internal entanglement of these regimes—their contradictions, temporal mismatches, and points of collapse—not to impose coherence, but to map the structure of the incoherence itself.

This is not a call for interdisciplinarity in the usual bureaucratic sense. It is a demand for sociological thinking that starts where the system starts: in its paradoxes, its failures of translation, its unfinished feedback loops. What is being studied is not a set of topics. It is the condition under which “topics” even appear as such.

References

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Bratton, Benjamin. The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. MIT Press, 2016.

Foucault, Michel. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Polity Press, 1990.

Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.

Luhmann, Niklas. Social Systems. Stanford University Press, 1995.

Rosa, Hartmut. Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity. Columbia University Press, 2013.

Tuomela, Raimo. The Philosophy of Social Practices: A Collective Acceptance View. Oxford University Press, 2002.

Gilbert, Margaret. On Social Facts. Routledge, 1989.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Harvard University Press, 1993.