Despite compelling scientific research that affirms the reality of climate change, including global warming, social and political engagement with the issue remains highly contested. To identify the cultural and social structurations of alternative approaches to climate change, this study draws on a temporally theorized 'structural phenomenology' of social action and organization. Through hermeneutic analysis, it examines selected prominent contemporary constructions of global climate change. The general framework of structural phenomenology, orthogonal to, yet compatible with, field theory, is used empirically to identify various wider social domains of action. The cultural structures of domain practices are described by how they operate through, span, or hybridically combine alternative registers of temporally structured meaningful action - each with its distinctive meaningful logic. The study examines cultural structures in four domains concerned with global climate change - science and policy analysis, conservative skepticism and denial, geopolitical security, and environmental movements. Climate-change constructions within these four domains differ in the ways that they compose various registers among diachronic, strategic, pre-apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic social action temporalities. The general potential of structural phenomenology for re-envisioning institutional arrangements of modern societies is considered, as are the implications of the analysis for research on and social engagements with climate change.

In December 2016, Zygmunt Bauman's self-described “recent heart failure” did not deter him from providing the author with “three pieces I have scribbled” to use in revising Bauman's chapter for the second edition of the Handbook of Cultural Sociology. The author draws from this experience working with Bauman at the end of his life to reflect on the man as a person, a scholar, and a public intellectual. He argues that Bauman had a broad methodological strategy that derived from his 1978 book, Hermeneutics and the Social Sciences. Reconciling himself to the historicist relativity of Gadamer's hermeneutic circle, Bauman proposed that the hermeneutic self-understanding of society “is the way in which history itself moves” (Bauman, 1978: 46). The author connects this hermeneutic project to Bauman's conceptualization of “liquid modernity” as the condition of contemporary society, and he draws on Bauman's three “scribbled” pieces to show how Bauman connected recent “liquid” developments -especially shifts in the character of migration- to recent political events (Brexit and the us election of Donald Trump as President). For Bauman, the goal of cosmopolitan tolerance in a global society is undercut by a lag between new worldly conditions and “outdated consciousness.”