Dahms' research and teaching pertains to the tensions in the modern age between economic change, on the one hand, and politics, culture and society, on the other. Interpreting the contributions of
Marx and
Weber, in particular, as foundations for a dynamic theory of modern society, he starts out from the proposition that the contradictions and paradoxes of modern society must be located within the field of tensions between “
globalization” and planetary sociology, at the intersection between identity structure and social structure. The spectrum of his theoretical reference points ranges from the critical theory of the
Frankfurt School at one end - especially
Theodor W. Adorno and
Jürgen Habermas - to
Joseph Schumpeter's social theory of
capitalism, at the other, but also includes many other social theorists, philosophers, and social scientists, including
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Max Weber,
Eduard Heimann,
Talcott Parsons,
Darko Suvin, Lawrence Hazelrigg,
Moishe Postone, and
Amy Allen. In modern society, a particular kind of social order fused with social processes tied to a new economic system combined with ongoing industrialization into an inherently irreconcilable set of force-fields. These force-fields are fraught with many different types of friction that maintains social stability by devising mechanisms designed to contain the destructive power of proliferating contradictions. As a consequence, continually deepening contradictions are viewed by individuals as entirely "normal" features of modern social life. The result is a widening gap between the categories social scientists employ to meaningfully interpret present conditions, and the categories that would have to be developed and deployed to maintain the possibility of knowledge — socially, culturally, and politically. ==Awards==