On the face of it, there is no connection between the social theory developed by Ulrich Beck under the name of `second modernization' and the post-ethnomethodological argument developed by Bruno Latour and his colleagues under the name of actor-network theory. Yet they are both concerned with empirical evidence of a major shift in modernity. Hence the idea of elaborating an empirical test to probe the extent to which `second modernization' is a real phenomenon, or rather, as is suggested here, a (...) shift in our interpretation of what modernity has always been about. (shrink)