ABSTRACT

The short stories by the highly regarded American writer George Saunders deal with people, and especially working-class people, who live on the farthest margins of society. In the modern social sciences, postmodernism took shape in a narrative critique of sociology and its conceptual, social, and scholarly approaches. The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman takes the emergence of modern sociology in relation to modern society as his theme, but without coming to such pessimistic conclusions as Jean Baudrillard. Structuration theory, has a direct bearing on the clear Marxist premise that human action in terms of consciousness-raising and class struggle always comes down to external economic structures. Jean-Francois Lyotard describes the transition from an industrial society to a post-industrial knowledge society, in which new technology has made knowledge a commodity. Most industrial production has shifted to other parts of the global market, and the labour market in the West has instead converged on knowledge-intensive occupations and the service sector.