Abstracts for forthcoming Sociological Review 100th Anniversary Conference

We live in a social world whose pace is accelerating. While the focus of most aspects of our intensified social life is narrowing down to the present, futures created on a daily basis cast ever longer shadows. In this situation a chasm is opening up between the production of massively expanding futures and a predictive capacity that is getting ever shorter. The paper is concerned with this drifting apart of knowledge and practice and explores that challenges this presents for social theory, ethics and political practice. Successive technological developments have hastened the pace of social life and in conjunction with economic pressures have dramatically reduced the futures horizon to a point where the present becomes the primary focus for decisions and policies 1 . This acceleration-based present orientation has a number of interdependent consequences. First, the faster the pace of social life in general and innovations in particular, the greater is the scale of the accompanying social change. Increased pace and scale of change means that the past becomes an ever less reliable guide to the future. Secondly, the faster the pace, the more energy and attention are focused on the present. At the same time, however, the effects of contemporary technologies tend to extend ever further into the long-term future. Thus, for example, products of nuclear power remain radioactive for an estimated one hundred thousand years. Synthetic chemicals move through the food chain affecting all beings for an unlimited period. Carbon dioxide emissions contribute to climate change for an unspecifiable period. Genetically modified organisms have the potential to mutate until the end of time. Accompanying these multiple temporally constituted tensions seems to be a generalised sense of disquiet about responsibility for socio-political actions: how to dispose of nuclear waste safely and responsibly, how to change the direction of energy policies to avert a worsening of climate change, how to secure food supplies for future generations without initiating irreversible environmental damage