ABSTRACT
The transition from the traditional to the modern is understood as a decline from a Golden Age, a frame of thinking which Stauth and Turner have named “the nostalgic paradigm”, related to the critique of modernity. Problems arising in the field of immigration are generally seen as backdrops of a presumed confrontation between traditional and modern forms of life. In contrast to tradition, which is imagined as order, modernity is conceived of one-sidedly as a metaphor of normlessness, fragmentation and the loss of simplicity, authenticity and spontaneity. The chapter argues that tradition, modernity and postmodernity as perspectives can and do coexist in contemporary societies. Concepts of ambivalence and order are useful to differentiate between some views of tradition, modernity and postmodernity and to point out some continuities as well as discontinuities among them. The tension in postmodern sociology and society seems to be between modernity-as-order and the ambivalence postmodernization imposes.
