Introduction: Modernity or Post-Modernity?

A controversial question among contemporary scholars is whether advanced industrial societies are still in modernity, or whether they are on the threshold of, or even have entered, a new post-modern order (see, for example, Bell, 1973; Lyotard, 1986, p. 14; Lash and Urry, 1987). In The Consequences of Modernity Anthony Giddens writes: ‘Beyond modernity, we can perceive a new and different order, which is “post-modern”, but this is quite distinct from what is at the moment called by many “post-modernity”’ (Giddens, 1990, p. 3). However, he does recognize that there is something perceptibly different about the present, which he characterizes as ‘late modernity’ (or ‘high modernity’), an era in which the consequences of modernity are more radicalized and globalized than before (Giddens, 1990, pp. 3, 51).

For Giddens, the essence of modernity is its dynamism—a dynamism of such pace and scope as to be discontinuous with traditional social orders. One of the images Giddens uses to describe the dynamic experience of living in modernity is that of riding a juggernaut—‘a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of our control and which could rend itself asunder’ (Giddens, 1990, p. 139).