This document discusses several key theories of modernity. It describes Anthony Giddens' theory of the "juggernaut of modernity" which identifies capitalism, industrialization, and surveillance as the three basic institutions of modernity. It also summarizes theories by Ulrich Beck on the "risk society," Manuel Castells on the "informational society," and Jurgen Habermas' view of modernity as an "unfinished project."

1. Contemporary
theories of Modernity

2. Deconstructing modernity....
• It is commonplace to hear references of our world and contemporary
time as being 'modern'.
• But what is modernity? What do we mean when was say we are
living in modern times?
• What standards can we use to determine modernity? Is it
developments in infrastructure, science/tech, governance, and
development?

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• It is easy to assume that a 'modern' society is a
good, better or fair one, but is this so?
• Take a look at the two societies highlighted in
images attached....which one would you want to
live in?
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4. What IS The Age of Modernity
• Ritzer says that this age refers to the period beginning from the
year 1800 to the present day.
• This is because of during this time-period came the advent of
the following:
1. Industrialisation
2. Science and technological development
3. Rationalisation: empiricicism over mysticism, reason and logic
over religious belief, and bureaucracy

5. Anthony
giddens and
the
juggernaut of
modernity
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• The first theory to be covered in this
sessions is the Juggernaut of Modernity by
Anthony Giddens.
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6. • Giddens states that modernity has 4 basic
institutions:
1. Capitalism: an economic and political system in which a
country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners
for profit.
2. Industrialisation: industrialisation is the period of social and
economic change that transforms a human group from an
agrarian society into an industrial society. This involves an
extensive re-organisation of an economy for the purpose of
manufacturing
3. Surveillance capacities: monitoring instruments of the

7. The 3 aspects of modernity according to
giddens
According to Giddens, there are three aspects of Modernity. These are:
1. Distanciation: relates to separation of time and space as being overly necessary in a
modern society. With modernization, time was standardized and the close linkage
between time and space was broken. Relationships with those who are physically absent
and increasingly distant become more and more likely
2. Disembedding: involves “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of
interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time-space”.
3. Reflexivity: in reflexivity “social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the
light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their
character” (Giddens, 1990:38). Everything is open to reflection in the modern world,
including reflection itself, leaving us with a pervasive sense of uncertainty.

8. Modernity and Identity
In a modern world the self comes to be something to be reflected upon, altered, even molded.
The institutions of modernity come to influence our identities along the following lines:
1. Individualism, self-love, and exploitation: Central to the reflexive creation and
maintenance of the self are the appearance of the body and its appropriate demeanor in a
variety of settings and locales. The body is also subject to a variety of “regimes” (for
example, diet, exercise books, and cosmetic surgery) that not only help individuals mold
their bodies but also contribute to self-reflexivity as well as to the reflexivity of modernity in
general. The result, overall, is an obsession with our bodies and our selves within the
modern world.
• People can also mimick the exploitative nature of the capitalistic society they are living in.
2. looming threat of personal meaninglessness: all sorts of meaningful things have been
sequestered from daily life; they have been repressed

9. Modernity and the self
• Taylor identifies selfhood as a central component of the modern order.
• he argues that the most important feature of selves is that they develop in relation to moral
goods. Taylor breaks this down into several specific claims:
• “We are selves only in that certain issues matter for us. What I am as a self, my identity, is
essentially defined in the way that things have significance for me”.
• “We are only selves insofar as we move in a certain space of questions, as we seek and find
an orientation to the good”.
• “One is a self only among other selves. A self can never be described without reference to
those around it”.
• “There is no way we could be inducted into personhood except by being initiated into
language” .
• For Taylor, selves emerge in spaces of shared meaning, spaces of shared questions, and
spaces of shared values.

10. Modernity and Intimacy
• The modern society can can have affect how people relate with one another.
• Its pressures can alter gender roles and expectations because of the need to conform to
the demands of the modern society.
• Giddens argue that the modern society affects the idea of the pure relationship, or “a
situation where a social relation is entered into for its own sake, for what can be derived
by each person from a sustained association with another; and which is continued only so
far as it is thought by both parties to deliver enough satisfactions for each individual to
stay within it” (Giddens, 1992:58). In the case of intimacy, a pure relationship is
characterized by emotional communication with self and other in a context of sexual and
emotional equality.

11. MODERnity's social imaginary
• Taylor argues that modernity is shaped by social imaginaries.
• The social imaginary is a set of ideas about society that is intertwined with everyday practice.
• Social imaginaries have the following characteristics:
1. They focus on the way that “ordinary” people, as opposed to intellectuals, “imagine” their social
surroundings (C. Taylor, 2004:23).
2. They are often “carried in images, stories, and legends” though they do not have to be explicitly
acknowledged and described; they are part of the background understanding of everyday life.
3. “They are shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society”.
4. The social imaginary is “that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a
widely shared sense of legitimacy”.

12. MODERNITY'S UNFINISHED PROJECT
• Jurgen Habermas is arguably not only today’s leading social theorist but also the leading
defender of modernity and rationality in the face of the assault on those ideas by
postmodernists (and others).
• Habermas (1987b) sees modernity as an “unfinished project,” implying that there is far
more to be done in the modern world before we can begin thinking about the possibility of
a postmodern world.
• Habermas calls the modern project ‘unfinished’ because the problems it addresses have
not yet been solved, because he thinks it futile to attempt to halt or reverse the ongoing
process of modernization, and also because he thinks the proposed alternatives to
modernity and modernization are worse.

13. Ulrich beck's Risk Society theory
• Giddens says,
"Modernity is a risk culture. I do not mean by this that social life is inherently more risky than it used to be;
for most people that is not the case. Rather, the concept of risk becomes fundamental to the way both lay
actors and technical specialists organise the social world. Modernity reduces the overall riskiness of
certain areas and modes of life, yet at the same time introduces new risk parameters largely or completely
unknown to previous eras."
• Beck sees a break within modernity and a transition from classical industrial society to the risk society,
which, while different from its predecessor, continues to have many of the characteristics of industrial
society.
• The central issue in classical modernity was wealth and how it could be distributed more evenly. In
advanced modernity, the central issue is risk and how it can be prevented, minimized, or channeled.
• In classical modernity, the ideal was equality, whereas in advanced modernity, it is safety.
• In classical modernity, people achieved solidarity in the search for the positive goal of equality, but in
advanced modernity, the attempt to achieve that solidarity is found in the search for the largely negative

14. • The risks are, to a large degree, being produced by the sources of wealth in
modern society. Specifically, industry and its side effects are producing a
wide range of hazardous, even deadly, consequences for society and, as a
result of globalization
• Using the concepts of time and space, Beck makes the point that these
modern risks are not restricted to place (a nuclear accident in one
geographical locale could affect many other nations) or time (a nuclear
accident could have genetic effects that might affect future generations).
• What is true for social classes is also true for nations. That is, to the degree
that it is possible, risks are centered in poor nations, while the rich nations
are able to push many risks as far away as possible. Furthermore, the rich
nations profit from the risks they produce by, for example, producing and
selling technologies that help prevent risks from occurring or deal with their
adverse effects once they do occur.

15. Informationalism and the Network Society
• One valuable contribution to modern social theory is a trilogy authored by Manuel
Castells.
• Castells examines the emergence of a new society, culture, and economy in light of the
revolution, begun in the United States in the 1970s, in informational technology
(television, computers, and so on).
• This revolution led, in turn, to a fundamental restructuring of the capitalist system
beginning in the 1980s and to the emergence of what Castells calls “informational
capitalism.”
• Also emerging were “informational societies” (although there are important cultural and
institutional differences between these societies).
• Both are based on “informationalism” (“a mode of development in which the main
source of productivity is the qualitative capacity to optimize the combination and use of
factors of production on the basis of knowledge and information” [Castells, 1998:7]).

16. • At the heart of Castells’s analysis is what he calls the information technology paradigm with five basic
characteristics:
1. these are technologies that act on information
2. since information is part of all human activity, these technologies have a pervasive effect
3. all systems using information technologies are defined by a “networking logic” that allows them to
affect a wide variety of processes and organizations.
4. the new technologies are highly flexible, allowing them to adapt and change constantly.
5. the specific technologies associated with information are merging into a highly integrated system.
• In the 1980s, there emerged a new, increasingly profitable global informational economy.
• This global informational economy is informational because the productivity and competitiveness of
units or agents in this economy (be it firms, regions, or nations) fundamentally depend upon their
capacity to generate, process, and apply efficiently knowledgebased information.
• This global informational economy is global because it has the “capacity to work as a unit in real time on
a planetary scale ”. This was made possible, for the first time, by the new information and communication
technologies.

17. • Accompanying the rise of the new global informational economy is the emergence of a new
organizational form, the network enterprise.
• Among other things, the network enterprise is characterized by flexible (rather than mass) production,
new management systems (frequently adapted from Japanese models), organizations based on a
horizontal rather than a vertical model, and the intertwining of large corporations in strategic alliances.
• However, most important, the fundamental component of organizations is a series of networks.
• The network enterprise is the materialization of the culture of the global informational economy, and it
makes possible the transformation of signals into commodities through the processing of knowledge.
• As a result, the nature of work is being transformed (e.g., the individualization of work through such
things as flex-time), although the precise nature of this transformation varies from one nation to another.