ABSTRACT
We live, they say, in a time of constant change. Whether we see it as primarily economic and technological or also as social and cultural – and, for that matter, political – change appears to be far-reaching, encompassing many of the areas touched on in this book. The veteran social theorist Zygmunt Bauman claims graphically that we are ‘living in a liquid modern world’, which he defines as ‘a society in which the conditions under which its members act change faster than it takes the ways of acting to consolidate into habits and routines’ (Bauman 2005: 1). Bauman believes that change is about the only thing we can predict.
