Samenvatting

Hans Boutellier is giving a panoramic overview of important changes in society. As worked out in his recent book De improvisatiemaatschappij (The improvisation society) he describes that society has evaluated into a network society in which social ordering is primarily a matter of self-organizing mechanisms. The aim for self-ordering would be a possibility for a further growth of restorative practices, but at the same time we are dealing with a penal-populist culture. In that culture citizenship, dialogue and self-ordering are suspect and – paradoxically – safety is expected to be delivered only by the state.