ABSTRACT
If there is a degree of agreement amongst analysts and commentators that the present era constitutes a significant moment in history, a time of radical change, there nevertheless remain substantial differences in respect of both conceptualisation and explanation of changes identified. Of the range of terms introduced to analyse the various signs of transformation evident in the present, two sets of conceptual distinctions have become particularly prominent and influential, namely those of ‘industrial’ and ‘postindustrial’ society and the ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ respectively. As I have explained above, the controversial and ambiguous conceptual distinction between ‘industrial’ and ‘postindustrial’ society has been invoked to describe a complex range of changes in social and economic life, changes considered to be closely associated with, if not ultimately determined by, innovations in technology and the effects of their deployment, the latter, in turn, generally being analysed in abstraction from a prevailing, increasingly global, capitalist mode of production and an associated military-industrial complex. The second even more nebulous conceptual distinction, between the ‘modern’ and the ‘postmodern’, has been employed in an extensive range of analyses of changes identified in social, political, and cultural life, in aesthetics, architecture, communications, science, epistemology, morality and ethics.
