ABSTRACT
Since the early 1990s the sociological interest in modernity has been reinvigorated, partly due to new confidence in radical modernist theorizing that rejects poststructuralist, radical difference and postmodernist arguments. The work of Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck has been especially influential in shaping new interest in what is variously characterized as ‘reflexive’, ‘late’, ‘advanced’, ‘second’, or ‘global’ modernity – which is sometimes discussed as risk society or reflexive modernization (see Beck 1992, 1999a, 1999b; Beck, Giddens and Lash 1994; Giddens 1990, 1991, 1992, 1999). Key concerns in the new theory of modernity overlap with postmodernist ones about living with uncertainty and contingency, and moving beyond the binaries that have hitherto framed social thought (such as structure/agency, domination/freedom and so on). However, the new theory of modernity rejects the idea of a postmodern era or condition. It argues instead that the current period of modernity (that will be discussed mostly as ‘late’ or ‘reflexive’ modernity in this chapter) is distinguished by the reconfiguration of modernity’s
institutions and its social, cultural and political forms through processes associated with globalization, detraditionalization and individual - ization. Poststructuralist and postmodernist analytical approaches, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4, were often accused of ignoring the social in favour of the cultural, being over-preoccupied with fragmentation and deconstruction, and promoting theoretical and political pessimism. In contrast, the new sociology of modernity tends to be concerned with radical social developments; the interconnected reconfiguring of the global and the local; the mutual shaping of the institutional and the personal; the emergence of new universalizing tendencies and commonalities in experience; and agency and politics in ‘post-emancipatory’ settings. Indeed, some commentators argue that these new theories of modernity, and especially that of Giddens, have reintroduced the theme of agency in a particularly powerful way through theorizing the heightened reflexivity (or self-awareness) of the current period of modernity.
