In this major theoretical statement, the author offers a new and provocative interpretation of the institutional transformations associated with modernity. We do not as yet, he argues, live in a post-modern world. Rather the distinctive characteristics of our major social institutions in the closing period of the twentieth century express the emergence of a period of 'high modernity,' in which prior trends are radicalised rather than undermined. A post-modern social universe may eventually come into being, but this as yet lies 'on the other side' of the forms of social and cultural organization which currently dominate world history. In developing an account of the nature of modernity, Giddens concentrates upon analyzing the intersections between trust and risk, and security and danger, in the modern world. Both the trust mechanisms associated with modernity and the distinctive 'risk profile' it produces, he argues, are distinctively different from those characteristic of pre-modern social orders. This book build upon the author's previous theoretical writings, and will be of fundamental interest to anyone concerned with Gidden's overall project. However, the work covers issues which the author has not previously analyzed and extends the scope of his work into areas of pressing practical concern. This book will be essential reading for second year undergraduates and above in sociology, politics, philosophy, and cultural studies.

This major study develops a new account of modernity and its relation to the self. Building upon the ideas set out in The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens argues that 'high' or 'late' modernity is a post traditional order characterised by a developed institutional reflexivity. In the current period, the globalising tendencies of modern institutions are accompanied by a transformation of day-to-day social life having profound implications for personal activities. The self becomes a 'reflexive project', sustained through a revisable narrative of self identity. The reflexive project of the self, the author seeks to show, is a form of control or mastery which parallels the overall orientation of modern institutions towards 'colonising the future'. Yet it also helps promote tendencies which place that orientation radically in question - and which provide the substance of a new political agenda for late modernity. In this book Giddens concerns himself with themes he has often been accused of unduly neglecting, including especially the psychology of self and self-identity. The volumes are a decisive step in the development of his thinking, and will be essential reading for students and professionals in the areas of social and political theory, sociology, human geography and social psychology.

Provides an in-depth introduction to debates within post-colonial theory and criticism. The many contributors include Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Edward Said, Anthony Giddens, Anne McClintock, Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and bell hooks.

Three prominent social thinkers discuss how modern society is undercutting its formations of class, stratum, occupations, sex roles, the nuclear family, and more. Reflexive modernization, or the way one kind of modernization undercuts and changes another, has wide ranging implications for contemporary social and cultural theory, as this provocative book demonstrates.

The production of ‘human waste’ – or more precisely, wasted lives, the ‘superfluous’ populations of migrants, refugees and other outcasts – is an inevitable outcome of modernization. It is an unavoidable side-effect of economic progress and the quest for order which is characteristic of modernity. As long as large parts of the world remained wholly or partly unaffected by modernization, they were treated by modernizing societies as lands that were able to absorb the excess of population in the ‘developed countries’. Global solutions were sought, and temporarily found, to locally produced overpopulation problems. But as modernization has reached the furthest lands of the planet, ‘redundant population’ is produced everywhere and all localities have to bear the consequences of modernity’s global triumph. They are now confronted with the need to seek – in vain, it seems – local solutions to globally produced problems. The global spread of the modernity has given rise to growing quantities of human beings who are deprived of adequate means of survival, but the planet is fast running out of places to put them. Hence the new anxieties about ‘immigrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’ and the growing role played by diffuse ‘security fears’ on the contemporary political agenda. With characteristic brilliance, this new book by Zygmunt Bauman unravels the impact of this transformation on our contemporary culture and politics and shows that the problem of coping with ‘human waste’ provides a key for understanding some otherwise baffling features of our shared life, from the strategies of global domination to the most intimate aspects of human relationships.

"One of the most creative among the younger generation of critical social theorists, Giddens stands alone in his concern for the classical tradition on sociology; but he also makes brilliant use of the latest philosophical and theoretical work of several contemporary schools and disciplines. A very important book for all of social science."—Jeffrey C. Alexander

"Can Modernity Survive? is bound to become the centre and the starting point of all future discourse on modernity."--Zygmunt Bauman