Outlooks: A plea for a humane society

Abstract

The new generations are our most important social capital. By social capital, the editors mean the willingness of individuals in a society to contribute to it with their own resources and opportunities. Today, we live in network societies to an even greater extent than in the past. These result from the strong links via social media and platforms, which create both knowledge and political knowledge formation at lightning speed and with high scaling. Network-like organizational structures can be formed in a very short time, with regional, national and transnational nodes and links. The consequences for traditional organizational structures at the corporate and governmental levels are not yet even foreseeable.