This line of investigation aims at advancing the analysis of the contemporary plurality of societal self-understandings and related institutional structures in the current global context. It will analyze these self-understandings against the background of the historical trajectories of those societies. Going beyond standard approaches in historical-comparative sociology, particular emphasis is given to the relation between societal self-understandings and uses of biophysical resources - or what one may call resource regimes - leading to a comprehensive analysis of socio-ecological transformations.
 
In this light, the current main objectives in this line of investigation are:

• to complement the prevalent institutional analysis of modernity and capitalism with an interpretative approach that focuses on societal self-understandings, and to elaborate an understanding of how novel such interpretations emerge and how they contribute to reshaping institutions;
• to develop concepts and methodologies to explore the relation between normative principles and social imaginaries, on the on hand, and social change, on the other, with particular regard to freedom, equality, and diversity;
• to focus in particular on changing energy and resource regimes - from renewable and organic (wood and wind) to paleo-organic (fossil) to newly renewable (eolic and solar) resources - in their relation to societal self-understandings; 
• to analyze the rise and fall of socio-ecological infrastructures, tracing them from being projects to becoming ruins, and their changing social embeddedness and meaning;
• to assess and combine different modes of knowledge and presentation - not least scientific and aesthetic - for analyzing states of ecological emergency, such as threats of extinction, bringing together approaches from the environmental humanities and from environmental history and sociology all the while interrogating anthropocentrism in the human and social sciences.