ABSTRACT
This chapter is organised around distinctions between the modern and the postmodern, modernisation and postmodernisation. It is argued that health promotion contains within its theory and practice contradictory elements both of modernism and postmodernism. Out of these contradictions arise a range of inconsistencies and tensions. We suggest that these tensions can themselves be analysed as the products of the time and context within which health promotion, as a distinctive set of public health practices, emerged. Resolution of this tension is suggested with reference to the sociological problematic of the interaction between agency and structure. We begin with a sketch of the modern-postmodern distinction.
