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Globalisation, Modernity and Postmodernity - Coggle Diagram
Globalisation, Modernity and Postmodernity
Modernity:
Key features of a modern society:
- Mass industrialisation and urbanisation as a catalyst for the modern era
- The growth of Capitalism and increased ownership of private industry
Weber's key features:
- Changes in our social attitudes
- Gradual secularisation / decline in religious beliefs
- Role of bureaucracy as a necessity - growth in large organisations being used to organise society.
Are we still in the modern era?
For: Certain features of modern society still exist:
- Traditional family structures
- Social mobility can be seen to have stagnated since early 1990s
- Marxism and Feminism highlighting inequalities
- Weber's idea of scientific rationality is evident throughout most institutions
Against:
- Recent crisis's in capitalism (2008) suggest there are reactions against capitalism
- Increased polarisation of opinion on key issues
- Questioning the determinism of class, gender and ethnicity
Modern society emerged in Western Europe from the late 18th Century. It has a number of characteristics that distinguish it from previous traditional societies:
- The nation state - A bounded territory ruled by a powerful centralised state.
- Capitalism - Economy based on private ownership (usually results in class conflict)
- Rationality, science and technology - Rational, secular, scientific ways of thinking.
Individualism - Tradition, custom and ascribed status become less important.
Globalisation:
Economic changes: The global economy is increasingly a 'weightless' or electronic economy. Global 24-hour financial transactions permit the instantaneous transfer of funds around the world in pursuit of profit. Trans-national companies (TNCs) operate across frontiers and organise production on a global scale e.g. Coca-Cola. Sklair argues that the small elite who control these companies now form a separate 'global capitalist class'.
Political changes: Globalisation has undermined the power of the nation-state. Ohmae argues that we now live in a 'borderless world' in which TNCs and consumers have more economic power than the national government.
Technological changes: Satellite communications, the internet, global TV networks and streaming sites have closed the distances between people. However, technology also brings risks on a global scale. Beck argues that we are now living in a 'risk society'.
Culture and Identity changes: Globalisation makes it much harder for cultures to exist in isolation from one another. We are now in a 'global culture' in which Western owned media companies spread Western culture to the rest of the world. Economic integration also encourages a global culture. Globalisation also undermines traditional sources of identity such as class.
Many sociologists argue that we are increasingly affected by globalisation, which is the increasing interconnectedness of people across national boundaries. We live in one interdependent 'global village'
Postmodernism:
Culture, Identity and Politics:
The media are all informing and they produce and endless stream of ever-changing images, values and versions of the truth. Due to this, culture becomes fragmented and unstable as there is no longer a fixed set of values shared by society. This also undermines people's faith in meta-narratives, with so many different versions of the truth, people stop believing in any one version.
Identity also becomes destabilised as we can now construct our own identity from the wide range of images and lifestyles available in the media.
Evaluating Postmodernism:
Strengths:
- Significance of the media for culture and identity
- Rejection of all-embracing meta-narratives is valuable
Weaknesses: (Philo and Miller)
- Ignores power and inequality
- Overlooks that poverty restricts the construction of our identities
- Wrong to claim that people cannot distinguish between reality and a media image
- Assuming that all views are equally true is a morally indefensible position
- Harvey - Even if our theories can't guarantee absolute truths, many argue that they are at least an approximation to it.
Baudrillard argues that society is no longer based on the production of material goods, but rather buying and selling knowledge in the form of images and signs and Simulacra. Simulacra is images that have no original reality but can be produced to create a more satisfying result than reality. This can lead to a Hyper-reality where the signs appear more real than reality and substitute themselves for reality. Baudrillard is pessimistic about postmodern condition, arguing that hyper-reality has resulted in us losing the power to improve society and renders the Enlightenment project unachievable.
A major intellectual movement that emerged in the 1970s, it argues that we are now living in a new ear of postmodernity. Postmodernity is an unstable, fragmented, media-saturated global village, where image and reality is distinguishable.
Late Modernity:
Beck also believes in the power of reason to create a better world even despite living in his described 'risk society'. According to Beck, because of reflexivity we have 'risk consciousness' as we seek to avoid/minimise potential risks. However, most of our knowledge about risks comes from the mass media which gives a distorted view of the dangers we faced. Beck is sceptical about scientific progress and the risk it brought, but believe we can use rationality to overcome them, we can evaluate risks rationality and use political action to reduce them.
Evaluation: Reflexivity suggests that we reflect our actions and are free to shape our lives accordingly to reduce our exposure to risks, however, not everyone has this option.
Rustin argues that it is capitalism that is the source of risk not technology.
Hirst rejects Becks views that movements like environmentalism will bring about significant change, as they are too fragmented to challenge capitalism.
Late modernity does offer a sociological alternative to postmodernism and shows that whilst our knowledge may never be perfect, we can still use it to improve society.
Giddens: A defining characteristic of modern society is that it experiences rapid change. Giddens argues this is because of two key features.
Disembedding: 'Lifting out of social relations from local contexts of interaction' - we no longer need face-to-face contact to interact, interaction becomes more impersonal.
Reflexivity: Tradition and custom become far less important -> we no longer have a guide on how to act -> we become more individualistic, thus leading to being more reflexive.
Under these conditions, culture in late modernity is increasingly unstable and subject to change.
According to Giddens in late modernity we face several human-made high-consequence risks, however, he rejects the postmodernist view that we cannot intervene to improve things.
We are not in the dawn of a new postmodern era but are in a continuation of modernity. In late modernity, key features of modernity that were always present become intensified.
Marxism:
Flexible Accumulation: A new way of achieving profitability. For example the production of customised products for small, 'niche' markets and through the easy switching of production. This has brough about many key characteristics of postmodernity, such as, diversity, choice and instability. Jameson says that postmodernity represents a more developed form of capitalism because it commodifies virtually all aspects of life, including our identities.
Harvey and Jameson argue that flexible accumulation has also brought the political changes characteristic of postmodernity -> it has weakened the working-class and socialist movements -> Other oppositional movements have arisen instead -> H&J are hopeful that these new social movements can form a 'rainbow alliance' to bring about social change.
Marxists believe in the Enlightenment project of achieving objective knowledge and using it to improve society. Some Marxists such as Jameson and Harvey believe that todays society has moved from modernity to postmodernity. They see postmodernity as the most recent stage of capitalism. For Marxists, postmodernity arose out of the capitalist crisis of the 1970s, which saw the end of the long economic boom starting in 1945.
Marxist views about postmodernism have to abandon the original view that the enlightenment project would be achieved by the working class revolting against and overthrowing capitalism. Postmodernist Marxists believe that the political opposition to capitalism has fragmented into many different social movements. A strength of this is that by relating recent changes in society to the nature of capitalism they can offer sociological explanation.