ABSTRACT
The recent privatization of telecommunication, health care insurance and domestic power supply in the Netherlands has made the ‘agony of choice’ a widely debated phenomenon, evoking images of consumers suffering from stress, doubts and anxiety due to the virtually infinite maze of options and opportunities they face up to. Next to prophets of doom from psychology, such as Schwartz (2004), many a contemporary sociologist also maintains that presentday freedom of choice has become a major problem. Now that the influence and legitimacy of institutions like the church, the state and the family has declined, individuals are allegedly ‘condemned to individualization’ (Beck and BeckGernsheim 1996), continuously struggling to make the correct choices in the absence of clearly defined and pre-given guidelines for thinking, feeling, and acting: ‘In post-traditional contexts, we have no choice but to choose how to be and how to act’ (Giddens 1994: 75, see also Bauman 2001a: 46-7). Because the variety of options to choose from has increased dramatically (Bauman 1998), and because the process of choice-making is understood as a strictly individual endeavor (Beck 1992), Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (1996) have even maintained that the West has witnessed the emergence of a new social type, homo optionis.
