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Dette åbne nummer af Dansk Sociologi består af to originale forskningsartikler, et mindeessay til ære for den afdøde professor i sociologi Henning Bech samt to boganmeldelser. Om end temaer og tilgange varierer betydeligt mellem teksterne, kan man hævde, at spørgsmål om vilkårene for livsudfoldelse i et senmoderne, værdipluralistisk og globaliseret samfund løber som rød tråd gennem nummeret.

Based on the authors' own research experiences, this essay discusses the potentials of a "cross-jurisdictional" comparative methodology in the sociology of professions, which aims to describe similarities and variations in patterns of inter-professional interaction across substantively different work domains. This approach, the essay shows, stands in contrast to two more prevalent comparative methodologies in the field, dubbed here "cross-national" and "intra-national," respectively. Drawing on Andrew Abbott's seminal framework, cross-jurisdictional comparisons refrain from abstracting professional groups from their wider ecologies of inter-professional relations. On this basis, and invoking the methodological suggestions of Monika Krause on qualitative comparisons, the essay spells out key axes of variation between contemporary professional jurisdictions and ecologies, including along the lines of post-national analysis. The essay ends by highlighting more general reasons as to why reflecting further on new comparative possibilities may at present constitute a key stake for the future of research on professional change.

While Bruno Latour's criticism of Ulrich Beck's cosmopolitanism helped set the stage 15 years ago for the highly productive research approach of cosmopolitics, including as concerns urban ecological politics, a nagging doubt remains that more blood was spilled than necessary in the exchange. In this short discussion piece, I re-stage the Latour-Beck debate as part of on-going inquiries into the morethan-human politics of climate adaptation in Copenhagen, exploring what exact senses of 'cosmos' might be helpful in making sense of this increasingly common-place situation. At issue, I suggest, is the question of what it means to say that 'natures', in the plural, are put at stake in such settings. Far from any synthesis, in turn, I conclude that scholars in STS and beyond might do well to extend a shared hesitation towards both sides of the debate - cosmopolitics, cosmopolitanism - and thus take the opportunity to share unresolved conceptual tensions in the service of posing better problems.

While Bruno Latour's criticism of Ulrich Beck's cosmopolitanism helped set the stage 15 years ago for the highly productive research approach of cosmopolitics, including as concerns urban ecological politics, a nagging doubt remains that more blood was spilled than necessary in the exchange. In this short discussion piece, I re-stage the Latour-Beck debate as part of on-going inquiries into the more-than-human politics of climate adaptation in Copenhagen, exploring what exact senses of 'cosmos' might be helpful in making sense of this increasingly common-place situation. At issue, I suggest, is the question of what it means to say that 'natures', in the plural, are put at stake in such settings. Far from any synthesis, in turn, I conclude that scholars in STS and beyond might do well to extend a shared hesitation towards both sides of the debate - cosmopolitics, cosmopolitanism - and thus take the opportunity to share unresolved conceptual tensions in the service of posing better problems.

AbstractBuilding on empirical research into translocal connections among world port cities in addressing shared challenges of climate risk mitigation and adaptation, in this article I review two widespread tendencies in urban studies – methodological city‐ism and methodological globalism respectively – as a springboard for articulating a methodologically cosmopolitan alternative. This alternative, I argue, involves epistemological issues of how to interrogate 'the urban' as assemblages that constitutively draw together the near and the faraway, as well as more practical issues of mobile, multisited, and comparative urban research methods. Empirically, I compare the ways in which urban actors stage global climate risks on the waterfronts of four world cities – Hong Kong, Rotterdam, Yokohama and Copenhagen – to argue that such a comparative tactic of variable 'riskscapes' helps situate Ulrich Beck's notion of urban cosmopolitan risk communities more thoroughly into urban studies. In such ways, I suggest, Beck's methodological cosmopolitanism is germane to studying ongoing and far ranging transformation in world political geography, in which transurban networks, communities, and governance arrangements come to complement nation‐state centred institutions. Such conclusions must be tempered, however, by the deployment of Beck's equally strong impetus towards comparative attention to the varieties of second modernity; and doing so, I conclude, aligns well with ongoing transformations in urban studies itself.

In this article, I engage a key claim of Ulrich Beck's theorizing of global risks, to the effect that socio-political collectivities are currently being re-imagined through the anticipation of endangered long-term futures. Such dynamics of temporal reordering are visible, the article shows, in the imaginative politics of climatic projections. To rethink the resultant political aesthetics of climate change, the article maps out the visual, experiential, and affective forms in which endangered climatic futures come to saturate public culture. Such encounters, the article suggests, constitute inter-media events, drawing on scientific, artistic, and mass media registers, and embodied in what Karin Knorr Cetina call scoping devices of information and visualization, involving particular 'fateful' time transactions. These conceptual suggestions are illustrated and elaborated by drawing on auto-ethnographic observations during a particular event of intense futurity, that of the international COP15 climate change conference held in Copenhagen during December of 2009.

Building on multisited ethnographic case studies, this paper seeks to contrastively compare the demonstration and articulation formats of two social science expert cultures—economics and anthropology—enrolled 'in the wild' of transnational environmental politics. How, the paper asks, do different social sciences come to be configured within, and do performative work upon, heterogeneous assemblages of global natures? In the first case US economists translate carbon markets into a world of Indian ecoprofessionals, across serious North–South conflicts in climate politics. In the second case a group of anthropologists, mobilized by Japanese bureaucratic elites, deploy their methods to assemble whaling cultures, as part of global biodiversity conflicts. Whereas the first case builds on existing arguments on the 'performativity of economics' (Callon), the second case expands this agenda, noting how the noneconomic social sciences (eg, anthropology) may also be consequential in enacting particular nature-cultures. Theoretically, the paper situates these inquiries at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and political anthropology, in addressing the question—important to environmental expertise and politics—of how 'local' (particular) and 'global' (universal) claims are linked in efficacious ways in 'other-than-Western' contexts? Here, the argument will be that, despite their differences, economic and anthropological performances of global natures share certain formal (aesthetic) similarities, related to credible expert demonstrations in transnational environmental contexts. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this claim for STS self-reflection on its politics of methods.

Building on multisited ethnographic case studies, this paper seeks to contrastively compare the demonstration and articulation formats of two social science expert cultures—economics and anthropology—enrolled 'in the wild' of transnational environmental politics. How, the paper asks, do different social sciences come to be configured within, and do performative work upon, heterogeneous assemblages of global natures? In the first case US economists translate carbon markets into a world of Indian ecoprofessionals, across serious North–South conflicts in climate politics. In the second case a group of anthropologists, mobilized by Japanese bureaucratic elites, deploy their methods to assemble whaling cultures, as part of global biodiversity conflicts. Whereas the first case builds on existing arguments on the 'performativity of economics' (Callon), the second case expands this agenda, noting how the noneconomic social sciences (eg, anthropology) may also be consequential in enacting particular nature-cultures. Theoretically, the paper situates these inquiries at the intersection of science and technology studies (STS) and political anthropology, in addressing the question—important to environmental expertise and politics—of how 'local' (particular) and 'global' (universal) claims are linked in efficacious ways in 'other-than-Western' contexts? Here, the argument will be that, despite their differences, economic and anthropological performances of global natures share certain formal (aesthetic) similarities, related to credible expert demonstrations in transnational environmental contexts. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this claim for STS self-reflection on its politics of methods.

This article engages the French pragmatism of Laurent Thévenot, Luc Boltanski and Bruno Latour in debates on how to forge a moral-political sociology of ecological valuation, justification and critique. Picking up the debate initiated by Thévenot on the possible emergence of a novel 'green' order of worth, the article juxtaposes the sociology of critical capacity of Boltanski and Thévenot with the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. In doing so, the article suggests that each of these three pragmatic sociologists succeeds, in characteristically different ways, in theoretically articulating an important but partial socio-political grammar of ecological worth. This claim is substantiated by invoking three case studies into environmental critique and compromise, on transnational carbon markets, urban sustainability projects, and Japanese whaling, respectively. Against this backdrop, the article concludes that – when read together as grammarians of the ecological bond – pragmatic sociology provides important insights into the bounded multiplicity of nature's worth in political modernity.