ABSTRACT
In the dreamy routines of daily life, the people tend not to think of ourselves as accomplished individuals using various skills to negotiate the social things about the reader. This chapter introduces the work of two famous social theorists England's Anthony Giddens and France's Pierre Bourdieu. In helping the reader to think about the various ways in which practical life and social relations interweave, social theorists have focused attention on the knowledge and competency that individuals routinely display in negotiating the broader social structures around them. In the late 1990s, Giddens left Cambridge University to take up the high-profile Directorship of the London School of Economics. Giddens’s work is a brilliant conjuncture of social theory and modern sociology, involving a provocative account which examines the very constitution of society through recurrent social practices. In Giddens’s late work on the ‘runaway world’ of modernity, reflexivity is key to the production of personal life and the complexity of society.
