ABSTRACT
This chapter explores contemporary approaches to late modernity, identity and globalisation and assesses their potential for developing new understandings of difference and identity. It develops a framework for theorising social divisions and identities that points to the existence of socially constructed ontological spaces on the one hand, and locates the understanding of social relations of difference and inequality in their intersections, on the other. There has been a great deal of debate on the structure-agency problematic that has motivated Giddens' construction of the self-reflexive self. For Giddens, such orientations no longer depend on consonance with given social roles: the self is oriented to others in terms of his or her own personal growth and in a self-reflexive way. The recognition and celebration of difference, in all its guises, may lead to political and moral relativism, found in arguments and policies around those multi-culturalisms that ratify and celebrate difference.
