Manuscript.

Published in Italian under the title: Globalizzazione e individualizzazione nella

tarda modernit, pp. 3-68 in Bettin, G. (a cura di): Giovani e democrazia in Europa, Tomo 1,
Cedam, Padova, 1999.
Frdric Vandenberghe*
Globalisation and Individualisation in Late Modernity. A Theoretical Introduction to
the Sociology of Youth
Theres no sociology of youth without sociological imagination. With some exageration,
we could say that C.W. Millss Sociological Imagination (Wright Mills, 1959) represents the
sociological counterpart of Kants Critique of Pure Reason. In the same way as the empirical
reality can only be understood thanks to the mediation of the categories of understanding, the
tribulations of contemporary youth can only be understood if their everyday life is seen
against the larger socio-historical background of late modernity. Uncoupled from this sociohistorical background, the sociological analysis of youth risks to remain stuck in the
ethnographic description of life histories and lifestyles, or even worse, in the thoughtless
manipulation of statistical correlations and regressions. In order to overcome this empiricistic
tendency towards the fetichistic accumulation of brute data, which only make sense as postpositivist philosophers well know because they are overdetermined by theory, I will be
concerned in this article with the outline of a theoretical framework for the analysis of youth.
Eventually, this theoretical framework, which is among others inspired by Ulrich Beck and
Anthony Giddens overlapping theories of late modernity, will allow us to see how Millss
categories of the personal and the socio-historical, or the local and the global, to use more
fashionable language, can be meaningfully interconnected in such a way that youth is no
longer seen as a marginal subject, in the double sense of being a historical actor without
power and a specialised area of research which is cut off from the cutting edges of
sociological theory.
To bring the marginal subject back to the center of social life and of sociological theory, I
propose to reconnect the sociology of youth to the sociology of social change in general and
of late modernity in particular. The article is divided in four parts. In the first part, I present a
quick overview of the theories of modernity which have succeeded each other since the birth
of sociology in the nineteenth century. The succession of the theories of modernity, which is
mnemonically indicated by the prefixes classic, anti-, post-, neo- and late-, offers a kind of
knowledge-political preamble to a synthetic theory of late modernity. This theory of late

modernity forms the background for the analyses of the dual processes of globalisation and
individualisation, which are respectively analysed in parts 2 and 3. The main idea which
underlies and connects the analyses of globalisation and individualisation together is that a
critical sociology of late modernity has to be multi-dimensional (Vandenberghe, 1997-1998).
It cannot content itself with a structural analysis of global domination but has to indicate
possible forces of emancipation as well. In the same way as a macro-sociology of the system
needs to be complemented with a micro-analysis of the life-world, the analysis of the
economically driven processes of globalisation has thus to be augmented with an analysis of
the emancipatory processes of individualisation, which are going on at the same time in the
local life-worlds and which could potentially inflect the processes of globalisation in the
direction of a post-materialist order of sustainable development which is both socially
sensitive and ecologically responsible.1 At this point, youth will brought in. In part 4, I will
analyse the situation of youth in late modernity and show how the double process of
g;lobalisation and individualisation affect the transitions to adulthood and life-politics. Youth
will thus not be considered as a biological category but first as a sociological one, defined in
terms of status transitions, and then as a cultural and political one, defined in generational
terms as a instantiation of the new social and cultural movements which struggle for the
normative orientations that determine the direction of social development.
1) Modernity: Classic, Modern, Anti, Post, Neo and Late
Sociology emerged in the long nineteenth century (1789-1914) with the advent of modernity
and cannot be uncoupled from it. Given that sociology is reflexively tied to modernity and
that modernity is intrinsically associated with socio-cultural dynamism and the creative
destruction (Nietzsche) of the remnants of the past (Berman, 1982), it is no surprise that the
analysis of social change has been one, if not the central topic of sociology. The disciplinary
distinction between anthropology, understood as the study of societies without history
(Levi-Strauss), and sociology, understood as the study of modernity, may (and must) be
overhauled, but it nevertheless makes the link between historicity, social change and
modernity explicit. Looking back at the history of sociology, which can also be read as a
theoretical transcription of social change of the last two centuries, we can distinguish at least
five distinctive theoretical-cum-ideological periods of theorising about social change2: (i) the
classic theory of modernity, as formulated by the founding fathers of sociology; (ii) the

post-war theory of modernisation and its ideological inversion in the anti-modernization

theory of the sixties and the seventies; (iii) the post-modern theory of the eighties, (iv) the
neo-modern theory of democratisation and, last but not least (v) the sociological theory of
late modernity, which I consider as a critical synthesis of the forementioned theoretical
strands.
(i) Classic: In the classic period (1840-1933), each of the founding fathers of sociology -Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber -- presented a discontinuist interpretation of
modern history according to which the advent of modernity represents such a significant
break with the past that the societies which emerged in the West in the eighteenth and
nineteenth century are really and radically distinct from all prior forms of social order
(Giddens, 1985: 31-34; 1990: 1-6). Although they dont agree about the specifics and
identify different processes of modernisation, respectively functional differentiation,
commodification and rationalisation (Crook, Pakulski and Waters, 1992: 2-9), we can
nevertheless be confident that the processes of long-run social change which they describe
are largely complementary and that their analyses of modernity converge in a grand
empirical narrative of social change. In this grand narrative, the relative autonomisation of
functionally differentiated social structures, like the market economy or the bureaucratic
administration of the state, and the progressive erosion of tradition and the natural bonds of
solidarity, appear as the distinguishing characteristics of the Great Transition towards
modernity.
Combining a general theory of modernisation with a critical diagnosis of the ambivalence of
modernity, the founders of sociology considered the general diffusion and generalisation of
the purposively rational or strategic mode of action from the economic sphere to all other
spheres of life as the main culprit of the pathologies of modernity. Indeed, without too much
hesitation, we could even say that sociology was from its very beginning involved in a
combat against the theoretical and practical hegemony of utilitarianism (Caill, 1988: 24-32).
Contesting the spread of utilitarian individualism, the classical tradition of sociology was
engaged in a political attempt to reinvigorate and defend an ethically inspired institutional
individualism (Durkheim), which is able to combine the freedom of modernity with the
solidarity of the past.
Notwithstanding those commonalities, it should however be noted that Durkheim and
Mausss diagnosis of the pathologies of modernity differed significantly from that of their
German counterparts. If Weber and Marx were above all concerned with the potential loss of

personal freedom, Durkheim and his nephew put more stress on the loss of meaning and
solidarity.

In the first case the autonomisation of the functionally differentiated social

structures, systemically constraining the individuals from without and imposing a strategic
mode of action on them, was seen as a threat to the autonomy of the individual (alienation);
in the second case, the predominance of strategic action was seen as linked to the dissolution
of solidarity (anomie).
(ii) Anti: Giving an optimist twist to the classic interpretations of modernity, the theory of
modernisation which emerged in the post-war period and of which Talcott Parsons (1966,
1977) is one of the main representatives presented an evolutionary view of social change.
According to Talcott Parsons (and a few others like-minded spirits, such as Daniel Lerner,
Marion Levy, Alex Inkeles, S.N. Eisenstadt, Walt Rostow and Clark Kerr), all modernising
societies were destined to follow a similar path of nonrevolutionary incremental change and
to undergo a steady but stepwise linear process of increased general adaptation (adaptive
upgrading) through functional differentiation and integration of their subsystems which
allows the system to control more and more successfully its environment. From this
evolutionist and slightly teleological perspective, all societies were seen as moving and
converging towards the high degree of industrialisation, secularisation and democratisation
which Parsons saw exemplified in the United States of the sixties. Modernisation theory
offered not only an analytical framework but in so far as it excluded alternative pathways to
modernity it was also a justification of the status quo.
Due to a change in the intellectual and ideological climate, modernisation theory was largely
rejected in the later sixties, both on empirical and ideological grounds. The new generation of
critical theorists came to consider Parsons unilinear and teleological interpretation of world
history as a thinly veiled ideology of the status quo and American imperialism. While
dependency theory rejuvenated the old Leninist argument that the prosperity of the capitalist
societies is purchased at the expense of the impoverishment of large areas of the remainder of
the world (Cockroft, Frank and Johnson, 1972), Barrington Moore argued that dictatorship
and not democracy was spreading throughout the world (Moore, 1966). As a result, Parsons
world growth story (Gellner) was dropped as an ideologically laden Eurocentric grand
narrative, and eventually his theory of evolution and modernisation came to be replaced by a
Marxist theory of revolution and counterrevolution. Some of Parsons critics even went so far
as to reject the process of modernisation as such. The members of the Frankfurt School, for
instance, simply inverted the optimism of modernisation theory: industrialisation does not

lead towards democracy and freedom, but towards increased domination and alienation of the
masses.
(iii) Post: Later onwards, in the eighties, when the revolutionary enthusiasm of the seventies
had vanished, post-modernism emerged on the academic scene. The post-modernists
radicalised the Frankfurt school critique of instrumental reason and seemed to give up the
project of modernity altogether. Post-modernism is however an ambiguous and essentially
contested concept. In order to clarify its meaning and to avoid confusion between the
different brands of post-ism, I propose to categorically differentiate postmodernism (i),
post-modern social theory (ii), and post-modernity (iii). Those terms are not equivalent, but
occur in the three different but overlapping discursive contexts of cultural theory, philosophy,
and sociology in which the so-called post-modern turn is said to have taken place.
(i) Post-modernism: The debate about post-modernism plays an important role in the field of
cultural theory, aesthetics and architecture (Connor, 1989, Harvey, 1989: Part 1, Lash, 1990:
Part 2, Jameson, 1991). Here the debate revolves around distinctions between modernism and
post-modernism in the arts. Modernism represents the culmination of the process of social
differentiation and autonomisation in which the aesthetic sphere, and each of its sub-fields
(painting, sculpture, literature, theatre, architecture, film, etc.), follow their own immanent
laws (e.g. lart pour lart, the house as a machine for living, etc.). Innovation and formal
rationalisation are the norms of the modernist avant-garde. Postmodernism reacts against this
autonomisation of the cultural sphere and pleads for its dedifferentiation so that the Great
Divide between high art and popular art can be overcome and that the cultural sphere can be
reconnected to the life-world, even to the point that the life-world itself, invaded and
colonised by commodified products of an anti-auratic mass-culture, becomes an aspect of
post-modern culture.
(ii) Post-modern social theory: The discourses of the post-modern also appear in the field of
philosophy and social, psychological and cultural theory as well (Habermas, 1985, Dews,
1987, Best and Kellner, 1991). Post-modernists criticise the rationalist assumptions of
modern philosophy and social theory - ranging from the philosophical project of Descartes,
Kant and Hegel to the social theories of Marx, Durkheim, Weber and Habermas, whom they
often conceive as the arch-modernist whose work deserves to be deconstructed. Poststructuralist philosophers like Lyotard, Derrida, Deleuze, Baudrillard, Vattimo and a few
others, inspired by Saussure, Nietzsche and Heidegger, variously criticise modern theory for
its search for a foundation of knowledge, for its universalising and totalising claims, and

above all for its fallacious rationalism and logo- (if not phallo) centrism. They also provide a
critique of representationalism and the modern belief that theory mirrors reality, adopting
instead the relativist position of feminist and post-colonial standpoint theory, possibly
combining it with a deconstructive hermeneutics which argues that all cognitive
representations of the world are historically and linguistically mediated.
(iii) Post-modernity: Discourses on post-modernism also appear in sociological and political
economic discourses that claim to identify a basic epochal transition from modernity to a new
stage of history (Harvey, 1989: Part II and III, Smart, 1992, Webster, 1995). Analysing the
growing predominance of the media and information technology, the growth of the serviceand the knowledge sector, and the changes in the regime of capital accumulation, several
analysts have advanced the claim that we now have reached a new stage in history beyond
modernity (if not beyond history altogether) and that we now live in a new sort of society
which they variously label the post-modern society, the post-industrial society or the postFordist society.
iv) Neo: Since the fall of the Berlin wall, modernisation theory has somehow returned with a
vengeance (Sztompka, 1993: 129-141). The efforts of the post-communist societies to enter
or re-enter Europe show that the old liberal themes of Parsonss modernisation theory have
neither lost their political actuality, nor their ideological force. The free market, the rule of
law and above all parliamentary democracy are not just ideologies of the status quo, as the
antis claim, nor metanarratives which have to be deconstructed, as the postists claim, but
provided that they are adequately reformulated in a neo-functionalist framework, they can be
seen as so many evolutionary universals which the velvet revolutions of 1989 aimed to
institutionalise by democratic means. Extrapolating from the East to the West and beyond,
we can see that the revolt of the really existing individuals against communist regimes have
opened new perspectives of a global and coordinated democratic struggle for the realisation
and institutionalisation of post-materialist values. The new social movements, which have
emerged in the struggle against authoritarian regimes, fighting succesful revolutions not for
socialism but for democracy, solidarity and the defence of the life-world, were animated by
the radical appeal of democracy. The revival of the eighteenth century concept of civil
society, understood as a self-regulating public sphere which mediates between the private
sphere on the one hand and the state and the market on the other hand (Cohen and Arato,
1992), is linked to the post-materialist re-evaluation of universalism. In so far as universalism
is no longer considered as something which is essentially repressive, but as a value that

animates the democratic struggle which the new transnational social movements wage both
against the state and the market, we can indeed say that we are witnessing a gradual shift
from post- to neo-modernism.
(v) Late: The notion of late modernity is used here as synthetic signifier of a sociological
theory of the global present which aims to bring home the harvest of the classic, anti, post
and neo-modernisation theories. The theory of modernity, which dialectically overcomes the
limits of each of the preceding theories, is meant as a general framework of guidelines for the
analysis of the dual processes of globalisation and individualisation which will be presented
in part 2 and 3 of the article and which form the backbone of the analysis of the sociology of
youth, which will be presented in part 4.
- Inspired by the classic project of sociology, the theory of late modernity aims to critically
sift through the theories of Marx, Durkheim and Weber in order to update them and thus to
make them relevant for the present time. With the benefit of hindsight, we can now see that
the radicalisation of modernity has led to a situation which the founding fathers had not
foreseen. First of all, they did not anticipate that the compression of time and space would
lead to a global world in which the social processes are economically, politically and
culturally interconnected. Secondly, they were somewhat too optimistic about the
prospectives of industrialism and did not anticipate the ecological limits of economic growth.
Thirdly, although the founding fathers agreed in their critique of utilitarianism and insisted
on the necessity to reinvogarate the social tissue, neither Durkheim, who stressed the threat
of anomie, nor Marx and Weber, who were more concerned with the threat of alienation, did
envisage the possibility that anomie and autonomy would be brought together in the ethics of
the post-materialist youth and the politics of the new social movements.
- Although the sociological analysis of late modernity is definitely post-marxist in
inspiration, the prefix late is intentionally used here as kind of tribute to neo-Marxist
analyses of late capitalism (Adorno, 1972). Since the demise of socialism, capitalism is
stronger than ever. Pace Fukuyama, the triumph of liberal capitalism does not necessarily
spell the end of history. Although industrial capitalism is now spreading worldwide, as was
anticipated by Marx and Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party, the sociology of
late modernity unmasks the claim that theres no functional alternative to the free market as
part and parcel of the neo-liberal ideology and its attack on the welfare state. Critically
analysing the radical economic, political and cultural transformations which societies
worldwide are undergoing, it aims to explore the possibility of the emergence of

transnational new social movements which would challenge the social consequences of the
neo-liberal hegemony.
- The sociology of late modernity is definitely not a postmodern sociology. Relinquishing the
attractions of postmodern social theory, it works instead towards a sociological account of
postmodernism and postmodernity. The sociology of late modernity agrees with the
postmodernists that contemporary mass culture is essentially postmodern, but against them, it
links the postmodernist regime of signification to the postfordist regime of accumulation and
sociologically decodes postmodernism as the cultural expression of late modernism. The
sociology of late modernity categorically rejects the antifoundationalist and antisystematic
trust of postmodern social theory (Vandenberghe, 1996). However, in so far as it transforms
postmodern social theory from a ressource into a topic of sociological analysis, it transposes
the scepticism of the postmodern philosophers to the lifeworld in order to refunctionalise
the postmodern critique of authority into the fulcrum of a social critique of the politics of
industrial society. Following up the postmodern endeavours to trace the important social,
economical, political and cultural shifts which have occurred in the last decades, the theory
of late modernity breaks, however, with the Foucauldian posture of radical discontinuism.
Rather than making pseudo-historical claims of an epochal move beyond modernity, it
analyses postmodernity as a radicalisation of modernity and refuses to play down the
continuing force of capitalism.
- As the postmodernist interpretation of the world as a local, privatised and fragmented place
gives way to an analysis of the economic forces that shape the global world and of the
political forces that seek to reshape it, the theory of late modernity willingly follows neomodernisation theory by placing democracy back on the agenda. The discussion of reflexive
modernisation, individualisation, youth and the new social movements, which I will present
in the last part of this article, is in line with this shift and conceived as a humble contribution
to it.
2. Economic, Political and Cultural Globalisation
2.1 What is globalisation?
Post-modernism was the fad of the eighties. Since the beginning of the nineties, globalisation
theory has become an increasingly influential paradigm, even to the point that it can be

considered as the successor to the debates on modernity and postmodernity (Featherstone

and Lash, 1995: 1). Globalisation refers to the social processes of time-space compression
(Harvey, 1989: 240) in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural
arrangements recede and people become increasingly aware that they recede (Waters, 1995:
3). As time and space become separated from local contexts and standardised by maps and
clocks, individuals are able to communicate with each other across temporal and spatial
distances. The world shrinks, with the result that borders become increasingly
inconsequential. The intensification of worldwide social relations, says Giddens, link distant
localities in such a way that local happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles
away and vice versa (Giddens, 1990: 64). As the local and the global become dialectically
intertwined, local actions and global structures become mutually implicated in such a way
that local actions reproduce or transform the global structures in which they are embedded
and by which they are increasingly conditioned. Transposed from the metatheoretical realm
to the socio-historical realm, structuration or the dialectical interplay between action and
structure (Giddens, 1984) thus takes on a global dimension. In the same way as every
individual speech act presupposes the social institution of language and contributes to its
reproduction or transformation, every local act is potentially conditioned by global structures
and implicated in their transformation or reproduction. The important points to stress here are
that this dialectic between the local and the global is not one- but two-sided, and that it can
have far reaching social and political implications: global structures do affect local actions
but in so far as the former presupppose the latter and are dependent on them, local actions
can have a significant impact on global structures.
The analysis of the multiplicity of linkages and interconnections that transcend the nationstates which make up the emerging modern world system has recently been brought to the
centre stage of the social sciences thanks to their attempts to theorise globalisation
(Featherstone, 1990, McGrew, 1992, Robertson, 1992, Featherstone, Lash and Robertson,
1995, Waters, 1995, Axford, 1995, Albrow, 1996, McGrew, 1997, Beck, 1997, 1998a, b).
Although some debate is still going on about the periodisation of the onset of the global
shift3, all protagonists of the globalisation debate seem to agree that the scope (or
stretching) and the intensity (or deepening) of the processes of inter- and
transnationalisation have so significantly increased in the last quarter of the century that a
global civilisation is now on the verge of emerging. Objectively, the economic, political and
cultural subsystems are interconnected and interdependent as never before; subjectively, we

are increasingly conscious of the world as a whole. As media products circulate in an

international arena, humanity is able to observe itself in its globality.
On the map, the boundaries between countries are as clear as ever. And yet a closer look at
contemporary economic, political and cultural interconnections reveals that those boundaries
have become largely porous and permeable, almost to the point of becoming irrelevant - at
least in the West, as the phenomenon of globalisation is by no means experienced uniformly
across the globe. Immense flows of capital, money, goods, services, people, information,
technologies, policies, ideas, images and regulations (Lash and Urry, 1994: 280) transcend
individual nation-states and dissolve their borders. Borders become so to speak optional.
Locally bound with their feet to the ground, individuals can think, dream, read, invest, and
communicate globally without the least being hindered by borders. Thinking globally is no
longer a privilege of diplomats, astronauts and bankers. For young people, who are braught
up with and socialised by TV, society is from the very beginning experienced as a world
society without borders, which does not mean that place looses its importance, but that even
without knowing it, their stream of consciousness has a global dimension.
Arguably, globalisation processes are driven forward by the economy. The entire globe is
now operating within the framework of a single capitalist world-economy. The economic
flows of capital, labour, commodities, information and images cross the borders without
control (see 2.2). The expansion of the capitalist world market is accompanied by the decline
of the nation-state and its power to control the flow of goods, people, information and
various cultural forms. Relations between non-governmental actors like international
organisations, transnational corporations and transnational social movements now
supplement intergovernmental relations between nation-states (see 2.3). In addition to the
development of a capitalist world-economy and a shifting system of nation-states, the rise of
global culture is an especially salient feature of contemporary globalisation. Global culture is
ambiguous, however: it involves the worldwide diffusion of capitalist cultural products and
the spread of the consumerist ideology as well as the local interpretation and indigenisation
of those global cultural products (see 2.4). Global cultures and cultural products permeate
local ones, colonising them as much as providing them with forces of resistance against
colonisation. In any case, global culture makes individuals reflexive: confronted with a
plurality of possible lifestyles and lifeforms, they have to choose, produce and cobble
together their own biographies. And given that they choose consciously and that the local is
dialectically intertwined with the global, the aggregation of private life choices can have far

reaching political implications, as we will see later when we analyse the role of youth and
social movements.
2.2 Economic Globalisation
Although the impact of the forces of globalisation are most strongly felt in the domain of
economics, it is important to consider the process of globalisation as a multidimensional
phenomenon and to avoid to reduce it to its sole economic dimension. Globalisation is not
just about the expansion of free trade and competitivity in a global market but involves a
process of overall social change whereby the local and the global are mutually implicated.
Those economists who stress the economic dimension of globalisation at the expense of its
other dimensions, such as the political, ecological, cultural, civil societal and legal ones, do
not see the political and ideological implications of their analyses. In so far as their models
systematically ignore the extra-economical conditions of the free market, they endorse and
performatively reinforce the neo-liberal ideology according to which the laws of the free
market actually represent the only possible mode of global governance. However, if one
adopts the political and sociological perspective and submits the economists laws of the
global market to a defetichisizing critique, one sees that those laws are only able to
systemically regulate and coordinate a multiplicity of local actions on the condition that they
are left to be free and that no social and political factors impinge on the closure of the
economic system. The analysis of those extra-economic conditions of the autopoetic closure
of the economic system defetichisizes the laws of the market and reveals that neo-liberalism
is not simply an economic doctrine but involves a political project. Indeed, as Bourdieu says,
neo-liberalism is a scientific program of knowledge converted into a political program of
action which aims to create the conditions of the realisation of its theory through the
methodical destruction of the collective structures which are able to hinder the logic of the
pure market (Bourdieu, 1998:109). In so far as neo-liberalism only recognises individuals,
the political realisation of its economic theory involves the systematic atomisation of the
social, that is the reduction of collective structures to exploitable individuals strategically
competing for scarce resources. As a result of the dismantling of the collective structures,
individuals, and especially the younger ones whose wages are individualised and whose
working times are flexibilised, become so to speak a manipulable and exploitable input factor
of the economic system.

Although the idealtype of a truly globalised free market economy has not yet been realised in
practice (Hirst and Thompson, 1996), the myth of globalisation is constantly invoked by the
transnational capitalist class (Sklair, 1991: 70-72, 133-137) as a weapon in its struggle for
profits to flexibilise the process of production and to dereglement the labour market. The
argument is always the same: in order to remain competitive on an international scale, the
marginal productivity of labour has to be increased, and this can only be done in 3 ways: by
reducing labour costs, which implies the dismantling of the welfare state (1), by substituting
capital equipment for workers, which means the introduction of new technology (2), and by
re-engineering the workplace, which involves the flexible rationalisation of the organisation
(3). In all cases, the likely result of the implementation of neo-liberal policies is highly
skewed in the direction of a global dual society with record benefits for the winners of
globalisation - the globals who are mobile-, and mass un- and underemployment for the
losers - for the locals who are confined to their quarters (Bauman, 1998:6-26). Inequality
increases, so does exploitation, and what appears as a non political shift to market
governance amounts in fact to a politicisation of society which is masked by an appeal to the
irresistible forces of the global market. Although the effects of economic globalisation affect
people of all ages, it is clear that young people are especially vulnerable to the capitalist
strategies of global flexibilisation of the workforce. Continually faced with the prospect of
unemployment, they extend their studies, become flexible, work in the periphery of the
labour market, accept low wages and variable working hours, and end up blaming themselves
if they cannot secure a stable position on the labour market .
(1) Dismantling of the welfare state: Multinational enterprises and transnational corporations
organise their production, marketing and distribution on a global basis. Their activities are
predominantly geared to increase their profitability and to maximise their international
competitive position. In so far as national subsidiaries operate in the context of an overall
corporate strategy, national labels literally loose their signification and become fetishes, in
the Marxist sense of the word, disguising the transnational accumulation of capital and the
international division of labour in the idiom of national control and territorial sovereignty
(Appadurai, 1990: 306-307). Organised within the framework of the international division of
labour, production is split into fragments and assigned to whichever part of the world that
provides the most profitable combination of capital and labour. Production is thus
delocalised, and plants are installed where labour costs are minimal. The result is not only
that the multinationals are in a position to play nation-states against each other and to bargain

for fiscal incentives, subventions and infrastructural opportunities, but also that they put the
national governments under pressure to dismantle the welfare state and to abolish social
rights and guarantees. Transnational capital has thus become genuinely footloose, but at the
same time it is undermining democracy and welfare state: delocalising its production, it
creates massive unemployment at home but refuses to pay for it. All this is happening
without discussions in parliament, without decisions by the government and without changes
of the law, amounting thus to what Beck calls a global subpoliticisation of society,
politicising society through a depoliticisation of the state (Beck, 1997: 176).
(2) Introduction of new technology: In 1974, Daniel Bell forecasted the coming of the postindustrial society, of a society which is driven by the axial principle of knowledge and
dominated by the service economy. Comparing the industrial society, which is dominated by
manufacturing, to the post-industrial one, Bell identifies five major changes (Bell, 1974: 1433): i) The sources of innovation are increasingly derivative from scientific research and
technological development. ii) While the development of science and technology stimulate
economic growth, technological growth itself is now controlled and systematically planned.
iii) A relative shift of emphasis has occurred from the production of goods to the provision of
human and technical services. iv) This has led to a change in the occupational structure,
which is indicated by the growth in numbers and influence of a professional and technical
class. And finally, v) the most senior of the service workers become the ruling class of the
new society. They rule because they control theoretical knowledge and plan future
development. Bell is rather optimistic about the growth of employment opportunities in the
post-industrial society. According to his forecast, the service society will create a neverending supply of new job opportunities in services aimed at fulfilling the new needs that
more wealth generates.
A quarter of a century later, Bells optimistic prognosis has turned largely sour. Jeremy
Rifkin indicates that in the past, when new technologies have replaced workers in a given
sector, new sectors have always emerged to absorb the displaced labourers. Today, however,
all three of the traditional sectors of the economy - agriculture, manufacturing and service are experiencing technological displacement, with the result that the white collar occupations
that constitute the service sector are now themselves being automated and made redundant.
The only new sector, says Rifkin, is the knowledge sector, made up of a small elite of
entrepreneurs, scientists, technicians, computer programmers and consultants. While this
sector is growing, it is not expected to absorb more than a fraction of the hundreds of

millions who will be eliminated in the next several decades in the wake of revolutionary
advances in the information and communication sciences (Rifkin, 1995: xvii).
3) Flexible rationalisation of the workplace: Theorists of the French Regulation School like
Aglietta, Boyer and Lipietz contend that by the mid-1970s the Fordist regime of capital
accumulation became unsustainable (Lash and Urry, 1987, Harvey, 1989, Boyer and Durand,
1993, Amin, 1994). Due to overaccumulation, the fourth Kondratieff or long wave of
economic growth swung down, and by 1973 the world-economy had entered into a serious
crisis. The main problem with the Fordist model of mass production, which was organised
around the conveyor belt, was rigidity. The mass production of standardised goods, the
centralised nature of decision making and the simplification of the labour tasks, leading to a
deskilled, unmotivated labour force, made it unable to accommodate rapidly to changing
market demands. The post-Fordist model reverses those characteristics (Crook, Pakulski and
Waters, 1992: 167-196, Webster, 1995: 135-162). In order to adapt to a ceaseless change in
market demand, it constantly designs new and diversified products. Driven by knowledge
and information, it is essentially a post-industrial mode of production, which moves away
from standardised mass-production of similar goods to small batch production of diversified
commodities. This shift from an economies of scale (producing large numbers of
standardised products in order to finance high levels of capital investment) to an economies
of scope (producing the widest possible range of commodities) goes together with, and is
made possible by, a radical flexibilisation of the organisation of production along the lines of
the Japanese model (Toyotism).
First of all, the assembly line disappears and is replaced by teamwork. The production
process is divided into a number of stages, each organised around a team of workers.
Workers are qualified, multi-skilled, and rotate from one task to another. As extreme
specialisation of the worker which characterised Fordism is replaced by flexible
specialisation, workers are reskilled so that they can adapt to a wide range of tasks yet have
the capacity to produce an expandable range of highly specialised products.
Secondly, decision making is decentralised and the hierarchy is flattened. The centrally
controlled, vertically integrated and bureaucratically organised structures of command are
replaced by a horizontal flow of information between all of the elements of the network
involved in the production process. As a result of the flattening of the traditional
organisational pyramids, middle managers, which were responsible for co-ordinating the
flows up and down the organisational ladder, become largely superfluous and are forced to

join the growing ranks of the unemployed.

The extreme form of managerial decentralisation is reached when corporations vertically
disintegrate and subcontract with outsiders for the provision of as many as possible of the
companys requirements. Combined with the strategies of wage flexibility (individualisation
of wages, uncoupled from corporatist agreements between the employers and the unions),
labour flexibility (fixed-term contracts) and time flexibility (part-time work), this strategy of
outsourcing fits well with the global corporate strategy of downsizing. By increasing the
competition for scarce jobs among the members of the reserve army, it pushes pressures on
the wages and so increases the flexibility of the corporations to remain competitive in the
global economy, but at the same time this strategy of flexploitation (Bourdieu, 1998: 99)
disorganises capitalism to such an extent that the 800 million human beings who are
actually unemployed or underemployed in the world might very well signal the definite end
of a societal form which is based on work and the utopia of full employment (Offe, 1985a:
129-150).
2.2 Political Globalisation
As a result of the multiplication and intensification of economic, political and cultural
linkages and technological interconnections across boundaries, the nation-state tends to loose
the importance it once had. It is increasingly reduced to being one possible organisational
form among others. Accordingly, the classic theory of the nation-state society (Albrow,
1996: 118), which erroneously identifies nation-states and societies has to be discarded.
Although the global processes should not be exaggerated to represent either a total eclipse of
the nation-state or the simple emergence of an integrated world society, the processes of
globalisation nevertheless seem to justify the abandonment of the implicit postulate of
methodological nationalism (Smith), which characterises classic sociology, and to require a
refocussing of the sociological project - away from society and the nation-state towards the
emerging world society. Such a redirection of the sociological project involves a creative
cooperation between the disciplines of sociology, international political economy and
international relations. If international relations, understood as the international branch of the
political sciences which traditionally focusses on the diplomatic relations between states, and
international political economy, understood as the branch of international relations which is
concerned with the analysis of the ways in which international politics shapes or is shaped by

the global economy, can contribute to sociology by adding an internationational dimension to

it, I like to think that sociology can for its part enrich the discipline of international relations
thanks to its analysis of the dialectical interplay between action and structures and the
importance it attaches to social movements in the transformation of social structures. This
presupposes, however, that the nation-state is no longer considered as the unit of analysis but
that international networks and linkages between people across boundaries are analysed as
the basis of the emergence of transnational social movements which could challenge the
actual drift of globalisation by calling for a radical overhaul of its underlying premisses. In
other words, in a sociological perspective of political globalisation, transnational social
movements are considered as transformative forces which mediate between the local lifeworlds and the global system. By internationally coordinating the moral pressure on the
national political systems, by means of what Habermas calls transnational domestic politics
(Habermas, 1998a: 78), they call for the instauration of supranational bodies of governance,
or appeal to the existing ones, to regulate, domesticate and ultimately reorient the process of
globalisation in the post-materialist direction of a socially, politically, morally and
ecologically justifiable democratic order of humane governance (Falk, 1995). The point is
not to establish a worldgovernment which would re-regulate the deregulated economies but
to force the national governments to take into account the demands for humane governance
which come from the transnational interconnected lifeworlds in such a way that the social
functions of the welfare state, which so far have been executed by the nation-states and
which the processes of economic globalisation are undermining, can be guaranteed by
supranational instances. Given that the European Union is not just a unified market but
involves a political and a social project as well, it makes sense to project the idea of a
democratically legitimated supranational welfare state as the endstate of the process of
European unification (Bourdieu, 1998: 66-75, Habermas, 1998b: 134-156).
In the late twentieth century, politics can no longer be conceived as an insulated national
social activity. The traditional distinction between domestic and international politics
becomes blurred and, eventually, it has to go. Accordingly, the state-centric assumptions of
the traditional theory of international relations, which privileges the territorial sovereignty of
the nation-state and takes the nation-state as the primary unit of analysis, have become under
serious strain (Rosenau, 1990). The reasons for this withering of state-centrism can be
sketched out in the following argument (Held, 1991: 205-209, 1995: 89-96). With the
increase in global interconnectedness, the borders between states become permeable and

states increasingly loose the capacity to generate policy instruments able to control the
transactions of people, goods and services, technology, money and information within and
beyond its borders. The power of the state is further reduced by the growth in scale and
numbers of international and transnational actors and processes. Transnational corporations,
for instance, are often larger and more powerful then national governments. Many of the
traditional areas of state responsibility (defence, communications, economic management)
must therefore be co-ordinated on an international or intergovernmental basis. Accordingly,
states have been obliged to surrender their sovereignty within larger political units (e.g. EU,
Asean), multilateral treaties (e.g. Nato, Opec) or international organisations (e.g. IMF, World
Bank). The result has been the emergence of a system of global governance with its own
policy development and administration, which redefines and further curtails the power of
states. This provides the basis for the potential emergence of a regional supranational state
(e.g. the EU) with coercive and legislative power. Although such a transnational government
is more necessary than ever, if only to control the transnational corporations and to ward off
their politics of social dumping, it does not exist yet. However, in so far as more and more
people are making connections across borders and developing relationships based on
common concerns and issues (the environment, human rights, etc.), a global civil society is
now slowly emerging, which is itself an important precondition for a cosmopolitan
democracy at the global level.
2.3 Cultural Globalisation
One does not have to be a historical materialist to see that the worldwide spread of capitalism
necessarily affects the cultural superstructure. Mass culture has indeed become a commodity
and nothing but a commodity. The cultural industries have only aim: to sell, and what sells
best is lowbrow amusement. It is sufficient to switch on the Italian TV at prime time to be
convinced of that. In any case, the use value of the cultural products has become secondary;
what counts is their exchange value and the accumulation of capital. In this regard cultural
products are not significantly different from other commodities. According to Horkheimer
and Adorno (1948), the very processes of production in the culture industry are modelled on
Fordist factory production. Everything is standardised, streamlined, co-ordinated and planned
to the last detail. All products are mediocre and look alike. But in order to hide the abstract
identity of mass-produced cultural commodities, the culture industry tries to serially

differentiate them by stamping them with an air of originality.

While Adorno and Horkheimer derive the homogenisation of cultural products from the
commodification thesis of culture, Herbert Schiller (1969)embeds the commodification
thesis in an analysis of the global political economy of the media and presents it in the form
of the Americanisation thesis of culture. The communication and information sectors are
oligopolistic and to a large extend controlled by American conglomerates, which pursue their
corporate strategies in a global arena. Schiller argues that the American system of
broadcasting, which is thoroughly permeated by the commercial interests of the transnational
media conglomerates, has served as a model for the development of broadcasting systems
elsewhere in the world, especially in the Third World. Given the huge costs involved in the
domestic production, American TV programmes have been massively imported in the
developing countries. The result of this cultural dumping is a global electronic invasion
(Schiller, 1969, 79) which massively infuses the culture-ideology of productivism and
consumerism in indigenous cultures and puts them so to speak under an electronic siege
(Schiller, 1969, 109) which seriously threatens the cultural integrity of weak societies. By
literally colonising the local life-worlds with Western cultural products, the global system of
communications, which is privately owned and concentrated in the hands of a few
transnational conglomerates, imposes uniform standards of media and consumerist models of
life, undermining the local cultures and leading thus to the Americanisation of indigenous
cultures.
However convincing the arguments of the neo-Marxist may sound, they are nevertheless onesided, and doubly so. Firstly, they do not sufficiently take into account the extent to which
the socio-economic move to post-industrial Fordism is correlated with a cultural move to
post-modernism (i), and secondly, they fail to consider the local reception of global culture
and do not see that as soon as Western cultures are brought into new societies they tend to
become indigenised in one or another way (ii).
(i) Contemporary mass culture is indeed more and more commodified, but that does not
mean that it is standardised and homogenised. To the contrary, commodification leads to
diversification and heterogenisation. Todays mass culture is pluralist, heterogeneous,
fragmented and diversified - or postmodernist, to say it in one word which summarises it all.
In so far as the post-modernisation of culture is linked to its commodification, postmodernism and its figural regime of signification has itself to be analysed and understood
in the framework of economic globalisation and the correlated shift from the Fordist to the

post-Fordist regime of accumulation (Lash, 1990: 37-52, 172-198).

Lash and Urry have demonstrated that the cultural industries were post-Fordist avant la
lettre (Lash and Urry, 1994: 123). Even in the heyday of Fordism, the cultural industries
were driven by innovation and design intensive. Confronted with a crisis of
overaccumulation, the other sectors of the industry have followed the post-Fordist track of
the culture industries since the seventies. What is increasingly being produced and consumed
nowadays are not material objects but semiotic objects or signs. The design of consumer
products becomes more and more important. As a result, objects are increasingly
aestheticised and emptied out of their material content. The aesthetic form trumps the
material content. Use value becomes secondary, and at the end, everything happens as if it is
now the exchange value which induces the use-value. Even more, according to Baudrillard,
the exchange value simply absorbs the use value, becomes self-referential and turns into a
simulacrum, that is into a copy without an original (Baudrillard, 1972, 1985). Although
Baudrillards influential theory of hyperreality playfully, and at times, cynically
exaggerates the extent of the dematerialization of reality, there can be no doubt about the fact
that the spectacularisation (Debord) of commodities indeed characterises contemporary
consumer culture. In this sense, Jameson is right when he defines post-modernism as the
cultural logic of late capitalism (Jameson, 1991).
(ii) The thesis of American cultural imperialism is problematic. Not so much because
competing media centres have emerged in Europe and Asia, but because it stays at the global
level of a political economical analysis of the transnational media conglomerates and fails to
take into account the local processes of interpretation of the globally diffused media
messages. It assumes that Dallas and Dynasty, for instance, are everywhere interpreted in the
same way and does not see that cultural messages which directly emanate from the USA
are differentially received. Analysing the dialectal hermeneutics of the global diffusion and
localised reception of cultural messages, John Thompson rightly stresses that the
appropriation of media products is always a localised phenomenon, in the sense that it always
involves specific individuals who are situated in particular social-historical contexts, and who
draw on the resources available to them in order to make sense of media messages and
incorporate them into their lives (Thompson, 1995: 174). The globalisation and the
localisation of cultural messages are thus not exclusive. The trend towards homogenisation
and heterogenisation coexist; they are complementary and interpenetrative. Globalisation
does not mean delocalisation but presupposes relocalisation in the same way as the

homogenisation of culture goes hand in hand with its indigenisation. To overcome the
opposition between globalisation and localisation, homogenisation and heterogenisation,
Robert Robertson has coined the concept of glocalization, understood as the global
institutionalisation and construction of local particularisms (Robertson, 1995).
Nowadays, even the multinationals take the local characteristics into account in their global
marketing strategies. Goods and services are tailored and advertised in such a way that they
tune in with the local traditions. And the local products are themselves increasingly marketed
and exported to the West. Diversity sells. Western brands are exported to the Third World
and exotic products from the Third World are imported in the West. The impact of nonwestern cultures on the West should not be underestimated. It is enough to think about
phenomena like Thai boxing by Moroccan girls in Amsterdam, Asian rap in London, Irish
bagels, Chinese tacos and Mardi Gras Indians in the Unites States (Nederveen Pieterse,
1995: 53) to underscore the point. As a result of the bi-directionality of transnational flows,
the opposition between the cultural centre and the periphery tends to loose its usefulness.
In any case, culture should no longer be conceived as territorially bounded, stemming from a
socialisation process that is localised. The lessons from the cultural and postcolonial studies
movement (Spivak, Bhabha, Gillroy, Hall, etc.) should be heard, and endorsed: culture is
plural, cultures evolve, are interconnected, interpenetrate and mix. The relativist vision of
cultures as a mosaic of well defined bounded units of equal value has to be dynamised and
dialecticised into the vision of a leaky mosaic in which cultures run over their edges and
flow into one another (Friedman, 1995: 85). Cultures mix and interpenetrate. A
hybridisation and creolisation of culture ensues which is not simply multi-cultural but
rather intercultural. In a world where the local and the global are intertwined, culture
becomes glocal as well. As local cultures are interconnected with the global, they become
subcultures, as it were, within the wider whole (Hannerz, 1990: 237).4 As a result of this
intercultural hybridisation, imagination takes on a global flight as well. Individuals, and
especially young individuals who live in an imaginary global world, consider a plurality of
variations of possible lives (Appadurai, 1998).
3. Reflexive modernisation and Individualisation
3.1. Reflexive modernisation

So far I have mainly stressed the structural determinants of the global economic, political and
cultural changes which societies worldwide are undergoing. Although the political and the
cultural systems follow their own laws and cannot simply be reduced to a mere
epiphenomenon of the economic system, it is clear that the development of the former is
influenced by the development of the latter. From this perspective, even the emergence of a
global culture, which is created as we have seen through the increasing interconnectedness of
varied local cultures, cannot be disconnected from the processes of economic globalisation.
However, if we dont want to end up with a one-dimensional picture in which global
structures are seen to overdetermine local actions, the structural perspective of a political
economy of flows has to be augmented and corrected by a more volontaristic perspective
which stresses the increasing power of individuals vis--vis social structures. Even more, if
we want to conceive the possibility of a counter-hegemonic challenge of neo-liberal
capitalism, we have to reverse the picture and try to show that global structures are
increasingly dependent on local actions and that the coordination of local actions, which are
reflexively directed against the global system, can possibly lead to its transformation. In
order to accomplish such a reversal, I will draw on the theory of reflexive modernisation as
Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Scott Lash have recently developed it (Beck, Giddens
and Lash, 1994).
The concept of reflexive modernisation was first introduced by Ulrich Beck in his
influential book on the risk society (Beck, 1986, part III). In this book, which appeared in the
wake of the Chernobyl disaster and which has exercised a large influence not only in the
coteries of German social theory but in the larger German public sphere as well, Beck gives a
critical-ecological twist to Daniel Bells celebration of the advent of the post-industrial
society. The catchword risk society is intended as an epochal construct which refers to a
developmental phase of modern society in which ecological hazards and risks become so
prominent that they alter, and eventually undermine, the modern arrangement of industrial
capitalist society that has generated them. As the social production of wealth is
systematically linked in the risk society to the social production of risks, the old politics of
the distribution of goods (income, jobs, social security) of the industrial society gives way
to a new politics of the distribution of bads (hazards and risks) (Beck, 1986: 25-27). As a
result, the risks, which are induced and introduced by modernisation itself, become one of the
main themes of private and public discussions. Compared to the dangers of industrial society
- they just happen -, the risks of the risk society are socially manufactured and predicated on

the awareness of a potential threat, whose occurrence can be predicted and whose likelihood
can be statistically predicted, even if one can no longer be insured against it. Indeed,
nowadays, ecological risks are catastrophic in their potential. The environmental dangers
posed by large-scale nuclear or chemical accidents and genetic engineering entail the
possibility of the self-annihilation of the human species. Moreover, modern risks are not
spatially limited in their effects but threaten entire societies and are potentially global in their
reach. Like toxic clouds, radioactivity transcends spatial borders and makes no
discrimination between classes. Risks, however, escape sensory perception and exceed our
imaginative capabilities. It is the scientists who detect risks, it is they who define the
thresholds of acceptable and thus ipso facto accepted risks, and it is they who propose
remedial solutions. Risks are thus discursively mediated and socially constructed by the
scientific experts. And as the experts are increasingly contested by counterexperts, for
instance those of Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth, the political implications of the
scientific management of risks become visible, not only to the experts themselves but also to
the larger public.
At this point, it becomes clear that Becks sociology of the risk society is basically a political
sociology of knowledge which aims to update the German debate of the sixties about
technocracy by giving it a post-modernist twist. Not that Beck is a post-modernist. Hes too
much a Habermassian for that, as can be glanced from his will to reflexively continue the
project of modernity and his call for an ecological Enlightenment (Beck, 1991: 117-139).
But he picks up the arguments about epistemological insecurity, the absence of foundations
of knowledge and the deconstruction of logo(phallo)centrism, and transposes them from the
abstract level of post-modern social theory to everyday life. People have become increasingly
sceptical about the promises of scientific and technological progress. They do not hesitate to
openly contest the scientific experts. In any case, they no longer take their expertise at face
value. As a result of this move from a critical theory of society to a theory of social self
critique (Beck, 1993: 54), the pessimism which surrounded the old debate about technocracy
can now be replaced by cautious political optimism. Now that the dangers of industrial
society begin to dominate public, political and private debates the project of technocracy is
publicly unmasked as a political project and the relations of definition, which take the place
of the relations of production of industrial society, are revealed for what they really are,
namely relations of power which scientifically legitimatise the potentially disastrous
politics of the risk society (Beck, 1988: 211-216, 220-226). The enemy is thus still the same -

technocracy - but now that he has so to speak become public, he has to publicly legitimise his
technocratic project as a political project. And given that this political project potentially
leads to catastrophes, it is no longer accepted at face value but is more and more contested by
the population at large, with the result that politics and morality are gaining primacy over
scientific reasoning.
Although Beck is mainly concerned with the ecological consequences of industrial society
and has not much to say about the social consequences of economic globalisation, his
arguments can easily be extended to it. Indeed, it could be argued that in the same way as the
population at large has become sceptical about the scientific experts, it has also started to
question the expertise of the economists, for instance those of the Worldbank or the IMF,
who scientifically legitimise the neo-liberal politics of global flexploitation by presenting
them as an ineluctable necessity if the national economies want to remain competitive in a
global market. The result of this challenge of the neo-liberal consensus is a possible
repoliticisation of the economy which denaturalises the laws of the market and shows that in
the same way as the scientific experts are blind to ecological risks of the industrial cult of
productivity, the economists are blind to the social risks of the cult of capitalist profitability.
According to Beck, the ecological crisis is not just a crisis of the environment but a genuine
social crisis, which reveals the cracks in the foundations of industrial capitalist society. At
the end of the twentieth century, industrialisation and formal rationalisation have become
problematic. Beck argues that the advance of industrial modernisation ends up by creatively
undermining modernisation itself, leading thus to the advent of a second modernity in
which the damaging consequences of rampant industrialism become a topic of public
concern. Reversing the doom scenario of the Frankfurt Schools Dialectic of the
Enlightenment, he argues that the successes of industrial capitalism do not lead to a hopeless
integration of all possible resistance to the status quo, but that they unleash a new kind of
crisis of legitimation in which ecological crises now take over the role which Habermas once
ascribed to the economic crises of late capitalism (Habermas, 1975). Indeed, confronted with
the BSE crisis, global warming and the possibility of a nuclear winter, people become
increasingly sceptical about the promises of scientific progress as such. The technocratic
ideology, which represents the technological counterpart of the economic doctrine of laissezfaire (Freitag, 1989: 62), looses its credibility. As a result of this challenging of the authority
of science and technology, the technological veil (Marcuse), which fetichistically
misrepresents political decisions as technical decisions, is torn apart. People become

conscious of the fact that the ecological dangers are socially manufactured and that even
natural catastrophes are the result of mens intervention in and social tinkering with nature.
Confronted with the consequences of the politics of industrialisation, industrial society
becomes reflexive, which is to say that it becomes a theme and a problem for itself.
This self-thematisation and self-problematisation of industrial society is at the centre of
Becks theory of reflexive modernisation (Beck, 1991, 180-194; 1993: 35-69, 1995: 11-30;
Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994:1-13). The main idea of this theory is that the pursuit of
industrial modernity undermines the systemic foundations of industrial modernity itself, that
it leads to a modernisation of modernisation which opens up the way to an alternative and
ecologically enlightened modernity. This is the case because the accumulation of perverse
consequences of industrial modernisation produces systemic threats that cannot be dealt with
and assimilated in the system of industrial society, and eventually, as people become
increasingly aware of it, it destroys it. Once more Beck reverses the industrial fatalism of the
Frankfurt School: more formal rationalisation does not lead to an increase of reification, but
eventually to its decrease. Two steps can be distinguished in this process of dereification.
Firstly, the autonomous logic of the reified system unintentionally but systematically creates
consequences which threaten the survival of the system and which cannot be resolved within
the system (e.g. solving the ecological crisis which is created by scientific and technological
control by a scientific and technological control of its effects or solving the problem of mass
employment while pursuing the neo-liberal policy of globalisation). Secondly, confronted
with the risk of self-annihilation of the system, people become aware of the systemic causes
of this risk, ring the alarm bell, submit the system to a systematic critique and call for
fundamental political changes of the system. And as the crisis of the system passes from the
system to the life-world, the system itself becomes increasingly dependent on the
legitimations of the life-world. The iron cage of modernity (Weber) breaks open. Actors do
not simply reproduce the structures, but call for their transformation. The classic dialectic of
actions and structure is loosened, if not reversed. The structures themselves become the
object of social processes of debate and change. Confronted with the social and ecological
effects of a technocratically implemented policy of global economic growth, people become
suspicious of the political system as such, withdraw from it, and retreat to the life-world,
where they develop alternative forms of life which are not without possible political
consequences for the larger system.

3.2. Reflexive Individualisation

The theory of reflexive modernisation does not replace Habermass morally inspired analysis
of the legitimation crisis of late capitalism (Habermas, 1975), but supplements it with an
ecological dimension. The basic contradiction between the operation of late capitalism and
the logic of democracy remains, but it can no longer be justified from the point of view of
post-conventional morality. Individuals no longer accept the social and ecological price
which the members of the industrial capitalist societies pay for the policy of economic
growth and call for a democratic, yet radical transformation of their foundations. Both
theories basically formulate a theory of the political effects of a morally induced legitimation
deficit which industrial capitalist societies face when they are judged according to the postmaterialist criteria of post-convential morality. Sociologically speaking, they both
presuppose that individuals are set free from social structures to such an extent that they are
able to distance themselves reflexively from the traditions and conventional modes of
thought and judgement in which they have been socialised to critically think for themselves.
In other words, reflexive modernisation presupposes reflexive individualisation.
The individualisation thesis, as it has been advanced by Beck (Beck, 1986: 205-219, 1995:
31-41) and Giddens (Giddens, 1991), advances the (Simmelian) claim that under the
conditions of high modernity (young middle class) individuals are increasingly set free
(freigesetzt) both from cultural constraints, such as religion, tradition, conventional
morality and the unconditional belief in the validity of science, and structural constraints,
such as class, status, nation, gender and the nuclear family.5 As the binding force of inherited
forms of social life is dissolved, individuals can reflect on the implications of cultural and
structural processes and thereby choose which of them they become involved in. The result,
of course, is that self-identity becomes a reflexively organised endeavour. What was once
inherited by tradition and taken for granted requires now a conscious decision by the
individual. Identity is no longer ascribed but achieved. As Peter Berger says: What
previously was fate now becomes a set of choices. Or: destiny is transformed into decision
(Berger, 1979: 16). Indeed, confronted with a plurality of life-worlds and lifestyles,
individuals must now produce, stage and cobble together their biographies themselves.
Biography thus becomes, as Berger said well before Beck and Giddens, a designed project.
This design includes identity. The individual not only plans what he will do but also plans
what he will be (Berger, Berger and Kellner, 1974: 74).

The core assumption of the individualisation thesis is that as (young middle class),
individuals are set free from structural and cultural constraints they have to reflexively design
their own biographies. Reformulated in terms of the classic opposition between agency and
structure (and culture), which is now displaced from a methodological to a socio-historical
issue, we could say that individualisation implies that agency is set free from structure (and
culture). However, individualisation is a highly dialectical process in so far as it is due to
structural and cultural constraints that agency frees itself from structural and cultural
constraints. Indeed, processes of reflexive individualisation do not occur in a social vacuum
but are the consequence of a radical transformation of (i) the cultural conditions
(detraditionalisation, cultural globalisation and scientificisation of conduct) and (ii) the
structural conditions (the labour market) of late modernity.
(i) Cultural conditions: Our world is a post-traditional world in which the Parsonsian model
of a smooth and well integrated complementarity between the social, the cultural and the
personality systems has been dissolved by the institutionalisation of reflexivity (Schelsky,
1965). The elements of the cultural system are no longer simply, almost automatically,
introjected but, as Schelsky had already noted at the end of the fifties, cultural traditions
become reflexive and become the subject of discussion. And as they are submitted to
discussion, their validity is necessarily weakened, because traditions only retain their binding
force if their pretensions are not questioned but accepted at face value.
Moreover, in a global world, local cultural traditions are no longer insulated from other
cultural traditions, but they start to mix and to interpenetrate. And as they do so, the local
cultures necessarily loose their binding force and become optional. One can live like a
Rastafari in Florence and like a Florentine in Ethiopia. The global diffusion of the mass
media and the pluralisation of lifestyles they celebrate only increases the optional character
of cultural models.
Add to this the fact that we are increasingly dependent on abstract or expert systems of
knowledge, that our every day actions increasingly incorporate expert knowledge of the most
different sorts and that this expert knowledge is essentially plural and fallible, contestable
and contested, and it becomes clear that the radical doubt which characterises post-modern
theory now permeates the life-world as well.
The combined result of detraditionalisation, cultural globalisation and the scientificisation of
everyday life is that individuals are confronted with a wide range of available models of
conduct and that they have no other choice but to choose for themselves which of them they

are going to follow. And given that there are no guarantees that the choice is the right one,
this choice is necessarily a risky one.
(ii) Structural conditions: The capitalist labour market is and remains the central institution of
contemporary societies. According to Beck, it is also the main engine which drives the
process of the reflexive individualisation of life-forms forwards (Beck, 1986: 115-160, Beck
and Beck-Gernsheim, 1994: 43-60). This is the case in so far as ones chances on the labour
market are systematically linked to prolonged education, frequent mobility and increased
competition, each of which brings about individualisation in its own way. Education replaces
traditional modes of thinking by more universalistic and reflexive ones; social and
geographical mobility dissolves the primary bonds of sociability and forces one to interpret
ones own destiny as a personal destiny; and competition for scarce positions leads to
isolation from ones equals. Moreover, the processes of economic globalisation have induced
a radical flexibilisation of the labour market with massive unemployment, a spectacular rise
of fixed-term and widespread economic insecurity as a result. Although this economic
insecurity is systemically induced by the processes of economic globalisation, it is
interpreted by the individuals as a personal failure. This, together with the fact that the
importance of work as a source of self-identity has declined, explains why a sense of class
consciousness and class solidarity no longer prevails.
This dissolution of collective consciousness and solidarity cannot be compensated, however,
by a retreat to the traditional family. This road is barred as well, not only because the
entrance of women in the labour market is linked to the same processes of individualisation,
but also because the emancipation of women has largely dissolved the traditional institution
of the nuclear family. Now that women earn their own income, they are no longer dependent
on their husband and can experiment with non traditional forms of intimate relations, such as
cohabitation, living-apart-together, bi- and homosexual relations, single mothership, etc.
Confronted with a plurality of post-conventional alternatives to the nuclear family,
individuals are thus forced to choose for themselves which option they will pursue (Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim, 1990).
It has often been assumed that this liberation of the (young middle class) individuals from
structural and cultural constraints leads to an atomisation of society where anomie is rife and
autonomy impossible. However, against both the critics on the left, who argue that
individuals are only liberated from society to be recuperated by society and manipulated by
the market, and the right, who lament about the moral decline of the West, without indicting

the free market, I would like to defend the heuristic claim that anomie and autonomy do not
necessarily exclude each other, but can and actually do include each other. I do not deny that
individualisation and anomie can go together, but anomie can only be interpreted as a serious
threat to the individual and society if it is seen against the backdrop of the well integrated
nomic order of the past. However, in a post-traditional society this nomic order does no
longer exist. People have to choose for themselves which models of conduct they will follow.
This is not without risk for the individuals concerned or for society at large, but there are
empirical indications that the demise of traditional values does not lead to nihilism but rather
to an increased emphasis on the quality of life and democratic political institutions. Indeed,
Ingleharts theory of intergenerational value change (Inglehart, 1977) has now been
empirically confirmed. The historically unprecedented degree of economic security
experienced by the post-war generation in most industrial societies has led to a gradual shift
from materialist values (emphasising economic and physical security above all) toward
post-materialist priorities (emphasising self-expression, autonomy and the quality of life).
Nowadays, materialists and post-materialist are about equally numerous, whereas in 1970
materialists still outnumbered post-materialists by nearly four to one. By the year 2000, the
overall proportion of post-materialist will be about twice as great as in 1970 (Inglehart, 1990:
66-103). Ingleharts recent analysis of the World Value Surveys, which provide data from
60.000 respondents of 43 societies representing 70% of the world population, consistently
confirms his thesis that a post-modernist shift in general and a post-materialist one in
particular have occurred in the last 25 years, especially among the younger cohorts of
Western societies (Inglehart, 1997). The confidence in religious, political and scientific
authority is declining; yet at the same time individuals bring a growing mass desire for
participation and self-expression. In political participation, the emphasis is shifting from
voting for traditional parties to more active and issue-specific forms of mass participation. In
economic behaviour, emphasis is shifting from maximising ones job income toward a
growing insistence on interesting and meaningful work. In sexual norms and family life,
traditional norms have been replaced by greater flexibility for individual choice in sexual
behaviour with a particularly dramatic increase in the acceptance of sexual behaviour outside
marriage and of homosexuality. In the realm of ultimate values, the declining confidence in
churches is accompanied by an increase in spiritual concerns with the meaning and purpose
of life. These data thus convincingly show that were not so much witnessing a loss of values
as a conflict between materialist and post-materialist values.

4. Youth and Social Change in Late Modernity

4.1. Youth - Sociologically Defined
The study of youth provides an ideal opportunity to examine the relevance of the theories of
social change in late modernity. If the processes of globalisation, reflexive modernisation and
individualisation have fundamentally changed the contours of modern societies, as Giddens
and Beck claim, we would expect to find strong evidence of these changes among young
people. And indeed we do. If we define youth not in biological terms as a physiological
phase, commencing in puberty and ending with sexual maturity, or in psychological terms as
a phase of personal life extending through the different phases of adolescence and postadolescence, but as a social category, framed by particular institutions, especially education,
the labour market and the family, and social acts, such as getting educated, leaving home,
finding a job and forming a family (Forns, 1995: 3), we can conceive of youth as a
relatively extended phase of transition between childhood and adulthood which is marked by
three status transitions, namely the professional transition (leaving full-time education and
entering the labour market), the domestic transition (attaining relative independence from the
family of origin) and the housing transition (moving away from the parental home) (Galland,
1995). Up until the 1970s, the life course of young people was highly structured along the
lines of class and gender and relatively standardised. For young working class males the
tresholds of the status transitions tended to coincide in such a way that completion of studies
was usually closely followed by commencement of working life, which in turn led to leaving
home and living as a couple. Whereas middle class males might put off the threshholds that
mark the status transitions indefinitely, keep their options open and change their path as they
went go along, women might skip the occupational stage, leave their parents home to marry
and move in with their husband. In the last decades, structural changes in society have led to
a destructuration of the labour market and cultural changes to a detraditionalisation of the
patterns of behaviour. Those changes have affected the relationships of young people with
family and friends, their experience in education and labour, and their ability to become
established as young adults to such an extent that transitions have been significantly
extended, if not postponed altogether, and the life course destandardised and individualised.
Metaphorically, the standard biography of yore, described in terms of status transitions, can

be viewed in terms of railway journeys (Furlong and Cartmel, 1997: 6-7). Within the school,
young people join trains which are bound for different destinations. The trains they board are
determined by social class, gender, ethnicity and educational achievement. Once the train
journey has begun, opportunities to switch destinations are rather limited. The changes in the
last twenty years, which have led to a replacement of the standard biography by a reflexively
orchestrated and individualised choice biography can best be described in terms of the
wholesale closure of the railways. With the absence of trains, the journey is now undertaken
by car, giving thus the drivers the opportunity to select their route from a vast array of
alternatives. Given the flexibilisation of the labour market, one is tempted to add with Frank
Coffield that the life course of a significant number of young people who cannot afford a car
and have to rely on privatised public transport now also consists of long periods waiting in
the rain at the busstop for transport of any kind to arrive (Coffield, 1997:45).
The destandardisation and individualisation of the life course of young people does confirm
Beck and Giddenss indvidualisation thesis. Yet, at the same time, the individualisation thesis
tends to obscure that the process of neo-liberal globalisation has seriously affected the life
chances of people and that the social relations of inequality have remained stable over the
years. Although the collective material foundations of social life have become more obscure,
they nevertheless continue to provide powerful frameworks which directly constrain the life
chances and indirectly the lifestyles of the majority of the population. In theory, everyone has
the chance to reflect on his or her life and to freely choose his or her lifestyles and lifecourse;
in practice, however, reflexivity remains largely a prerogative of the young white male
members of the middle classes.6 As Bauman says, it is the individual responsibility for
choice that is equally distributed, not the individually owned means to act on the
responsibility (Bauman, 1997: 196).
The problem with Beck and Giddens is that they largely ignore the class-, race-, gender- and
age bases of reflexivity. The kinds of reflexive practices heralded by them presuppose that
basic material interests are satisfied so that individuals can distance themselves from their
immediate needs and the sensuous world to reflect on social structures. In this way, the social
determination of social structures is broken and individuals can decide which ones to act on,
which to ignore, which to oppose, and so on. The adoption of a Bourdivian perspective
(Bourdieu, 1979) allows us see that his capacity to stand outside relations and to reflect on
them is not universal but part of the class habitus which is associated with the academic and
intellectual middle classes. Moreover, in so far as the relation between the satisfaction of

material needs and the capacity of reflection is not an immediate one but reflects the
conditions that prevailed during the socialisation process, we could argue with Inglehart
(1971) that the processes of reflexive individualisation are characteristic not of all ages but
mainly of the younger cohorts. Using once more the transport metaphor, we could summarise
the discussion of the individualisation thesis by saying that the private car has indeed
replaced public transport, but that class, race and gender still significantly determine the
trajectory of the lifecourse of young people. What Beck and Giddens thus fail to realise is
that the type of the car (e.g. a Porsche or a Skoda) which young people have been allocated
at the start of the journey remains the most significant predictor of the ultimate outcome
(Furlong and Cartmel, 1997: 7).
Looking in more detail at the stuctured destructuration of the status transitions that define
youth as a social category, we can see that the deferral of the changes in the lifecourse which
intervened in Europe in the last decades are primarily induced by the global economic shift
towards a post-industrial flexibly organised labour market (Cavalli and Galland, 1995,
Furlong and Cartmel, 1997). With a sharp decline in demand for unqualified minimum-aged
school leavers, young people from all social classes are now remaining in full-time education
until a later age. High education is becoming a mass experience rather than the preserve of a
small elite. These changes have led to a protraction and diversification of transitions from
school to work. Yet, in so far as labour market positions can still be fairly accurately
predicted on the basis of social class (via educational performance), those transitions remain
highly stratified. New forms of flexploitation have reduced job security and many of the
least qualified young people remain trapped on the labour market periphery and are
vulnerable to periodic unemployment. As Coffield says irreverently, young people in Europe
are being stockpiled in the same way that the common agricultural policy has created
mountains of surplus butter and grain (Coffield, 1995: 61). In the States, the situation is
worse (Wacquant, 1996). Theres no safety net, and the marginalisation and criminalisation
of the young black underclass has advanced to such a deplorable level that there are
actually more young blacks in prison than in higher education. Reduced to the role of an
oversized police precinct (Bauman, 1998:120), the state does no longer aim to re-educate
the young delinquents. They are dumped and stocked en masse in privatised prisons.
Along with the protraction of the school to work transition, there has been an extension to the
period in which young people remain in a state of semi-dependency. In Southern Europe, and
especially in Italy (mammismo), most of the young individuals tend to continue to live with
their parents till they hit their thirties and marry swiftly after leaving the parental home. In

Northern Europe, young people tend to leave the parental home earlier and are increasingly
likely to spend time living in intermediate households before they set up their own
household. In any case, the domestic transition is not necessarily followed by the housing
transition. This tendency to protract and defer the domestic and housing transitions, which is
notable accross the classes and genders, is part of a general process of the gentrification of
lifestyles and lifecourses. Incorporating elements of working class cultures in middle class
ones and vice versa, the class divisions are culturally blurred. However, even if the
distribution of lifestyles has become more democratic, the distribution of the life chances has
remained as hierarchical as ever.
The distinction between life chances, which are directly determined by economic capital and
indirectly by culture, and lifestyles, which are indirectly determined by money and directly
by cultural capital, allows us now to specify the range of the individualisation thesis and to
clear up the paradox of late modernity. Objectively, capitalism is stronger than ever. The
causality of the probable, which delimits the possible social trajectory of a given individual
and determines his or her lifechances, remains largely overdetermined by class position. Yet,
subjectively, class consciousness has waned, if not disappeared alltogether. Rather than
blaming the system or look for collective solutions, individuals blame themselves for their
insecurities and seek solutions on an individual basis. In this sense, late capitalism equals
capitalism without Marxism. The disappearance of class consciousness is enhanced and
stimulated by commodification of culture and the commercialisation of lifestyles, which
systematically blur all social divisions (class, gender and etnicity), masking the privileges of
the young people from the middle classes and creating thus the pseudo-Nietzschean illusion
that everyone can be what he or she is.
4.2 New Social Movements
Notwithstanding the persistance of unequal social relations, the old politics of the labour
movement are now completely out of synch with reality. The revolutionary overthrow of
capitalism is no longer on the agenda. Thanks to the neo-corporatist arrangement between the
state, the employers and the unions, the class conflict has progressively been
institutionalised. Since the seventies, the neo-corporatist arrangement has come under serious
strain. If economic and political globalisation has eroded the traditional powers of the state
from above, the anti-corporatist mood of the post-materialists and the neo-liberal backlash
have attacked the state from below (Offe, 1985b: 817-825, Crook, Pakulski and Waters,

1992: 83-105). The breakdown of the neo-corporatist arrangement and the post-materialist
value-shift have made the paradigm of traditional politics increasingly inadequate to
understand the political complexion of late modernity. Unions and political parties are still
important of course, but outside the corporatist system new social movements (NSMs), such
as the feminist, ecopax, and youth movements, have emerged which challenge the existing
system and compete with the power elites for the shaping power of the political. Although
those NSMs are extra-parliamentary or extra-institutional forces that emanate from the lifeworld, they are still political forces in so far as they aim to redirect and transform not only
the political system as such, but the larger economic and social system as well. As long as we
have not overhauled the old paradigm of politics, their political significance will inevitably
escape us, as we will go on looking for the political in the wrong place, on the wrong floors
and on the wrong pages of the newspapers (Beck, Giddens and Lash, 1994: 18).
If we now compare the elite-directed politics of the working-class or labour movement,
which was the paradigmatic old social movement, with the elite-challenging politics of the
NSMs, we can notice different importances with regard to the location (i), the class
determination (ii), the aims (iii) and the organisation (iv) of political processes and
movements (Cohen, 1985, Scott, 1990, Calhoun, 1993, Melucci, 1996)
(i) The politics of the NSMs are movementist rather then statist in orientation. Located
within civil society, they tend to bypass the state and are little concerned to challenge the
state directly. Unlike the old labour movement, which was utopian in orientation and sought
to remake the whole of society through overcoming existing relations of production, NSMs
are predominantly defensive in orientation. They accept the democratic state and the market
economy and do not try to abolish them, but attempt to domesticate and to transform them
democratically in such a way that money and power do not undermine the communicative,
expressive and emotional infrastructures of the life-world.
(ii) Actors involved in the NSMs do not view themselves in terms of a socio-economic class.
Given that the processes of reflexive individualisation have weakened, if not dissolved, the
collective class consciousness and solidarity, political economic identities have lost their
salience and are being replaced by a mixture of ascriptive identities (like race, age or gender)
and expressive identities (like sexual orientation or identification with various lifestyle
communities). In this sense, Dubet is right when he states that social movements are
movements of individuals (Dubet, 1994: 186), but he forgets to specify that the actors
primarily come from the younger segments of the new middle classes. This is not because
the youth or the middle-classes experience a class- or age-specific powerlessness, but

because they identify most with the post-materialist values which the NSMs appeal to (Eder,
1993: 158-184).
(iii) In contrast to older social movements, the NSMs are primarily social or cultural in nature
and only secondarily, if at all, political. Their concern is less with political power than with
the cultural sphere, their focus being not on material interests but on moral values and
expressive life-styles. Criticising the productivist model of the working class movement, they
bring forward a variety of other issues which are grounded in aspects of personal life
(sexuality, ethnicity, ecology), are concerned with the democratisation of structures of
everyday life, or focus on the expressive forms of communication and the defense of the
integrity of the life-world. Their aim to bring about social change through changing values,
developing new life-styles and challenging the identities of social actors.
(iv) The NSMs abandon the organisational mode of the labour movement. Instead of forming
unions or political parties of the socialist, social democratic or communist type, they focus on
grass-roots politics and insist that the organisational forms and styles of movement practice
must exemplify the values the movement seeks to promulgate. Consequently, many NSMs
are committed to direct democracy, a nonhierarchical structure and informal networks.
Organised around specific issues, membership of the movement is shifting and numbers
fluctuate, with participants joining and then disengaging as the political context and their
personal circumstances change. In this sense, NSMs represent hidden networks of
informal relations which can remain latent to become visible whenever collective actors
confront or come into conflict with a public policy (Melucci, 1989: 70). Circumventing the
routines of election and lobbying, they take recourse to direct action and novel tactics.
4.3 Youth - Culturally Defined
Having outlined the main characteristics of the NSMs, I would now like to conclude this
article by some considerations on the importance of the youth and of youthfulness in those
movements. Following Dilthey and especially Mannheim (Mannheim, 1964), I would like to
present a conflictual and cultural definition of youth, which ties youth to the formative
influences of the Zeitgeist to which one is responsive, and to insist that the conflict of
generations can be as influential as the class conflict. However, to take the reflexivity of late
modernity into account, I think that we should not so much focus on the influence of the
actual Zeitgeist of ones adolescent years, as Mannheim does, as on the actual influence of

the life-forms and life-styles of the youth to which one is responsive. Youth is linked to a
certain openness of the mind which expresses itself through the fact that the individual
consciously and selectively orients him or herself to the alternative life-styles of the youngest
cohorts. In so far as youthfulness goes together with a self-evident refusal to blindly follow
the traditional injunctions and a wish to continually stay tuned to and experiment with the
possibility of change, one can be still be young at 40 in the same way as one can be old at 25.
What matters is that one sympathises with and orients oneself to the experimental fractions of
the young cohorts, not that one biologically belongs to them.
Under conditions of reflexive individualisation, individuals are set free from the traditional
binding norms and attachments of the past. Religion, tradition and conventional morality
loose their force and class, status, nation and the nuclear family their attraction.
Consequently, the young individuals are cognitively and normatively disoriented and search
for new social bonds. But for most of them the return to the security of the past is largely
forsaken.7 Their parents are a product of the sixties and they themselves have grown up in
situation of relative socio-economic security. In so far as basic values reflect the conditions
that prevailed during ones preadult years, it comes as no surprise that Ingleharts theory of
the intergenerational value change is empirically confirmed: young people are even more
inclined toward post-materialist values than their parents (Inglehart, 1997: 131-159). Halpern
confirms these findings when he notes that young people are generally more tolerant, have
less respect for traditional values and wish more self-determination and self-responsibility
(quoted by Wilkinson, 1997: 90). Those differences between the young and their parents do
not result from the fact that people become less tolerant when they grow older but from an
acceleration of the intergenerational shift towards post-materialism.
Young people are generally more critical and more political than their parents. They are very
sensitive to moral issues and refuse to accept the unacceptable, such as racial discrimination,
ethnic cleansing, violation of human rights, sexual abuse and the organised irresponsibility
towards the environment. They sympathise with the poor and the excluded and join volontary
associations to care for them and to help them survive. They do no longer accept the
hypocrisy of the politicians and tend to reject politics, not politics as such but the rituals of
the institutionalised party-politics. What appears at first sight to be political apathy in fact
represents a profound cultural revolution (Cohen, 1997:181). Young people increasingly
withdraw from society but this withdrawal is not without political implications. The apparent
de-politicisation of the state goes together with a re-politicisation, or better, to use Becks

terminology, with a subpoliticisation of society (Beck, 1993: 149-171; Beck, Giddens and
Lash, 1994: 13-23). Subpolitics means shaping from below, challenging the system from
within its margins, trying to influence politics and to change the rules of its game by
changing values and developing countercultural life-styles. Subpolitics is thus lifepolitics
(Giddens, 1991: 214-231), a politics not so much of lifechances but of lifestyles which
concerns disputes about how (as individuals and as collective humanity) we should live in a
world where what used to be fixed either by nature or tradition is now subject to human
decisions (Giddens, 1994: 14-15). Life-politics does not eliminate the emancipatory
politics that are concerned with life-chances, but it supplements the struggle against
exploitation, inequality and oppression with a struggle for morally justifiable forms of life
that promote the self-actualisation and self-determination which young people value most.
Indeed, the young cohorts of post-materialists are most sympathetic to life-politics, but there
are good empirical indications that they do not want to abandon the results of the
emancipatory politics of the past (Inglehart, 1990: 7-12, 248-288). They are less attracted to
the Marxist interpretation of society, and although they do not favour an expansion of the
welfare state, they do not support the neo-liberal attack on the welfare state either, as they are
very much aware that a return to laissez-faire capitalism would undermine their postmaterialist aspirations and bring a renewal of the class conflict. Therefore, if transnational
social movements were to emerge to contest the social and ecological effects which the
globalisation of the politics of industrial capitalism entails, we could expect to find the young
cohorts at their forefront.

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Lecturer in sociology at Brunel University (London, England) and post-doctoral fellow in philosophy and
theology at the University for Humanist Studies (Utrecht, The Netherlands).

By using the subjunctive, I want to indicate and explore the potential of counterfactual developments
grounded in the life-world. Needless to say, the counterfactual mode of thinking has mainly a heuristic and
deontological function: extrapolating from the present to the future, it points to what could and should happen if
certain circumstances which are not realised at the present were actually realised.
2
Those successive periods of theorising about modernity can be indicated by the mnemonic device of the 5
prefixes: Classic-, anti-, post-, neo- and late- (Alexander, 1994). In so far as the succession of theories also
reflect socio-historical change, the prefixes are not only meant to refer to historically variable modes of reading
but also to change of socio-historical modes of being. The main advantage of such a double conceptualisation of
modernity along an interpretative and a socio-historical axis is that it allows for the juxtaposition of modes of
reading and modes of being. Adopting this perspective, one can thus not only offer, say, a post- (or anti)modern reading of classic modernity but also a classic (or late) modern reading of postmodernity.
3
The debate about the periodisation of globalisation is part of a larger debate about globalisation which turns
around the questions whether it should be conceived as a radicalisation of modernity (Giddens, Beck), as a
break with modernity (Albrow), as a logical consequence of capitalism (Wallerstein, Harvey, Sklair) or as a
process which precedes modernity (Robertson).
4
This does not mean that globalisation might not lead to the strengthening of local cultures and identities.
Indeed, the recent rise of virulent micro-nationalisms and religious fundamentalisms points in that direction, but
those attempts to strengthen local cultures and particularistic identities should themselves be interpreted in
terms of a resistance to globalisation which is not unaffected by it (Hall, 1992: 291-314).
5
For documentation on and discussion of the individualisation thesis, see also Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 1994
and Heelas, Lash and Morris, 1996. Beck and Giddens present the process of individualisation as process which
affects everyone in late modernity. In the last part of this article, I will analyse the material conditions of
reflexivity and restrict the scope of the individualisation thesis to the young middle classes.
6
Or, to quote a students inscription from the cover of a library copy of Risk Society: Risk society is for
yuppies.
7
For most of them, because confronted with an erosion crisis (Ziehe) and ontological insecurity (Giddens), a
minority of young people hark back to the securities of the past. Some become conventional, others
straitforward fundamentalists, and some are drawn to racist and neo-fascist countermovements.