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The following chapter analyses the ways in which unequal patterns of time develop effectiveness in childhood and adolescence. Central is the focus of the taken-for-granted experiences in the phase of growing up, the developing ways of life and value attitudes. In this context, questions arise about the extent to which children and adolescents help to shape the time patterns that are relevant to them and how an “equitable distribution” of “temporal resources” could be promoted.

Before starting research in the field of ethics, a few common assumptions need to be cleared up. The first is so common that it needs very little space at all: Ethics is a scientific discipline. This accurately describes its location and the problems it covers in a modern, functionally differentiated society. As a branch of philosophy and a normative science, its frame of reference is initially located in a world of possible competing reasons. The basic problem is that of trying to explain good reasons – and the horizon is the sayability of ethical sentences which, even when they reflect an ethical practice, open up a scientific horizon. Ethics is therefore a science – and like every science it can only solve scientific problems (see Luhmann, 2002, pp. 79–93). Practical problems are also the scientific problems of ethics – and that is not a deficiency, but rather a consequence of the basic structures of modern society. A modern society cut loose from political, economic, legal, scientific, artistic, educational and medical problems, on the one hand, allows these disconnected spheres to relate radically to each other, while on the other hand making them logically incompatible. A modern society could not exist any other way (see Luhmann, 1998, pp. 1–21; Nassehi, 2005a). This should first be understood before venturing into research on ethics.

The four papers in this section offer a sociology of ‘bioethics at work’, the ways that bioethics as a discipline or approach comes into medical care. One of the concerns we, as editors of this volume, bring to the issue is the appropriateness of the export of American ‘bioethics’ both in its form and its content. It is not only the creation of ‘ethics committees’, but also the rewriting of practice in accord with American principles that we find troubling. One of the nurses in Kohlen's study talks about ‘learning the language of bioethics’. Brought into committee rooms to ‘do ethics’ requires of practitioners a certain way of defining both biomedical practice and ethics, reflected in the ‘language’ one has to learn.

Undoubtedly, digital transformation is permeating all domains of business and society. We envisage this volume as an opportunity to explore how manifestations of digital transformation require rethinking of our understanding and theorization of institutional processes. To achieve this goal, a collaborative forum of organization and management theory scholars and information systems researchers was developed to enrich and advance institutional theory approaches in understanding digital transformation. This volume’s contributions advance the three institutional perspectives. The first perspective, institutional logics, technological affordances and digital transformation, seeks to deepen our understanding of the pervasive and increasingly important relationship between technology and institutions. The second perspective, digital transformation, professional projects and new institutional agents, explores how existing professions respond to the introduction of digital technologies as well as the emergence of new professional projects and institutional agents in the wake of digital transformation. The third perspective, institutional infrastructure, field governance and digital transformation, inquires how new digital organizational forms, such as platforms, affect institutional fields, their infrastructure and thus their governance. For each of these perspectives, we outline an agenda for future research, complemented by a brief discussion of new research frontiers (i.e., digital work and sites of technological (re-)production; artificial intelligence (AI) and actorhood; digital transformation and grand challenges) and methodological reflections.

According to popular belief, transparency is a versatile tool for the governance of organizations: it is supposed to help in mitigating problems such as corruption, economic deficiencies, and a lack of legitimacy. However, is it a truly effective panacea, as it has been envisioned by its advocates? Empirical research gives reason to doubt, indicating that there is a wide gap between the idealized expectations of transparency and its practical merits. Organizations face severe difficulties when they try to implement such measures, especially because their daily activities often deviate significantly from societal expectations. Putting a combination of Erving Goffman’s frontstage/backstage theory and Niklas Luhmann’s sociological systems theory to use, this chapter conceptualizes organizations as social entities constantly engaged in boundary-maintenance, which not only comprises – in Luhmannian terms – “operative closure” (the autonomy of a system from direct influence of its environment) but also boundaries of visibility. It is thus not at all surprising that organizations regularly try to circumvent the implementation of transparency and develop new practices of secrecy. This chapter outlines an integrative conceptualization that enables researchers to reject mundane visions of how transparency ought to improve organizations, and suggests new pathways for empirical research.

This chapter looks at a new form of a hybrid perpetrator within the field of individualized political violence. We reveal, that the new thing about (transnational) terrorism overcomes current oppositions and contradictions regarding terrorists and persons running amok, which (strategically) leads to an individualization of terrorism and thereby to a hybridization of a terroristic warfare.

By outlining organizational and structural changes in terroristic strategy within the framework of using both modern and antimodern elements, economic thinking, acting global as well as local, and by using network structures, the individualization of terror to the point of hybrid perpetrators is presented.

The new thing about (transnational) terrorism is the evolution of individualized perpetrators, radicalizing themselves without a clear connection to terroristic organizations. This leads to a hybridization of terroristic warfare, and within individualized single perpetrators it can be described as terrok. A terrorist running amok or a gunman on rampage with a radicalized mindset, equipped with his very individual ideology, who carries out his attacks logistically and operatively on his own while accepting his own death constitutes a new strategic way of irritating western society.

Currently, terrorists and persons running amok are separated into sharply distinguished categories. But regarding new tendencies in terroristic attacks committed by single perpetrators, this separation seems to be no longer able to capture the individualization of terrorism and thereby the linked hybridization of a terroristic warfare adequately. But in combining findings from both approaches, the new concept of terrok is able to do so.