Rise and Demise of Industrial Modernity

Introduction

Contemporary societies are underpinned by industrial modernity: a set of commonly shared ideas, institutions, and practices related to the natural environment and technoscience. Having historically unleashed massive leaps in productivity, economic growth, and societal welfare, many traits of industrial modernity have now become maladapted to the current socio-ecological polycrisis.

As a result, science and technology promise to solve the grand challenges of climate change, resource depletion, and loss of biodiversity with one hand, only to keep intensifying them with another. There is thus a fundamental need to rethink industrial modernity.

Current State of Research

Attempts to detect signs of this fundamental shift currently remain fragmented within and between disciplines like sustainability science, innovation studies, or the history of technology.

Project Overview

RiDe will use a new Deep Transitions framework from the sustainability transitions field to provide an overarching synthesis on the acceleration, crisis, and transformative prospects of industrial societies from 1900 to the present. It focuses on three questions:

1. What are the major historical continuities and emerging ruptures in industrial modernity?
2. What are the mechanisms through which technoscience keeps blocking transformative environmental practices?
3. In which countries is major transformative change most likely to occur?

Research Methodology

RiDe will:

1. Use a mixed method research design, combining text mining, databases, stylized narrative explanation, and process-tracing.
2. Enable it to discover new empirical patterns in the evolution of industrial modernity.
3. Develop a composite index for identifying countries currently least hindered by the historical legacy of industrial modernity.

Expected Outcomes

The results will be synthesized into the first macro-level middle-range process theory in transitions studies, offering a new comprehensive, historically-informed, and empirically-backed interpretation of industrial modernization for sustainability science.