Complete the account of the rival diagnoses of the present.
Lyotard defined the postmodern as incredulity towards ______. Beck argued that industrial societies now generate ______ risks, produced by decisions rather than by nature. Giddens preferred to speak of a ______ modernity in which existing tendencies intensify, and Bauman described a ______ modernity in which institutions no longer hold their shape.
Word bank: metanarratives · manufactured · radicalised · liquid · traditions · solid
Hints
- The first blank is the term for the big legitimating stories of progress and emancipation.
- The last blank is the opposite of solid.
Show the answer
Lyotard defined the postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives. Beck argued that industrial societies now generate manufactured risks, produced by decisions rather than by nature. Giddens preferred to speak of a radicalised modernity in which existing tendencies intensify, and Bauman described a liquid modernity in which institutions no longer hold their shape.
The four terms are competing names for one perceived change, and the name chosen decides the research. Manufactured risk directs attention to expertise and decision-making; incredulity towards metanarratives directs it to knowledge and legitimation; liquidity directs it to biography and insecurity. They are not interchangeable vocabulary for the same finding.
Practise Modernity and Postmodernity
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More questions on Modernity and Postmodernity
- Giddens describes the present as a radicalised modernity while Lyotard describes it as postmodernity. What is…
- Arrange these interventions in the modernity debate, earliest first.
- Arrange the steps of Beck’s argument from industrial modernity to the risk society.
- Fredric Jameson and David Harvey treat postmodern phenomena as a cultural style rather than an epochal break.…
- Sociologists now treat the classical secularisation thesis as having failed in an important respect, while…
- Estimate how many years separate Lyotard’s La condition postmoderne and Bauman’s Liquid Modernity.
- Which claims about Beck’s concept of manufactured risk are accurate?