Thesis Title: Subtitle

Late Modernity, Individualisation and Place

Concerns about the status of the individual in late modernity are deeply connected to the fact that late modernity is the product of extensive social, technological and economic change in Western societies. Social change is typified by the dis-embedding of social norms and traditions due to the gradual erosion of traditional social structures (Giddens 1990; Beck 2000). Rosa (2003) characterises this erosion as an acceleration of social change that results in an institutional instability, particularly with regard to family and occupation. This process has produced the need for individualisation in modern life.
Individualisation is perhaps mostly succinctly explained by Bauman (2000: 31) who argues that “individualisation consists of transforming human ‘identity’ from a ‘given’ into a ‘task’ and providing the actors with the responsibility for that task.” Expanding on this, Beck (2000) argues that humans are no longer born into identities as they used to be. Instead they are tasked with becoming these identities through the process of self-creation and self-assertion. However, this process of self-creation has only been made possible by the “destructive creativity” (Bauman 2000: 28) of modernity, which destabilises or disembeds previous forms of social organisation. The erosion of structures such as class, religion and family means that the individual now has more choice and scope to create personal biographies and narratives of self (Giddens 1991; Beck 1994). Similarly, Bauman (1992) also argues that individuals are now increasingly pushed to create their own identities throughout the life course. This definition of individualisation being part of the process of modernisation echoes across other authors such as Giddens (1990) as well as Beck, Giddens and Lash (1994) who also examined processes of late modernity and their effect on the individual. Identity in late modernity is unstable; as such it is unable to steadily build over the life course. This is due in part to the destabilisation of things like employment stability, as well as an increased awareness of possibilities beyond one’s immediate circumstance (Bauman 1996). As such, Bauman (1996: 18) argues that the task of the individual in late modernity is about “avoiding fixation and keeping the options open.” In keeping their options open, individuals refuse to commit to things such as a place, professional relationships, or even long standing personal relationships (Atkinson 2008).
The extent to which this process is universally experienced is contested by numerous authors, usually on class grounds (Atkinson 2008; Jenkins 2008).
Alongside the process of individualisation come attendant concerns about the decline of community, intimacy and place. According to Beck (1992), individualisation involves
disembedding individuals from their old, communal (pre-modern) forms of life into ones in which they must assemble their own life paths and attendant identities. Giddens (1990) argues that modernity has fundamentally changed the way we experience intimacy.
Modern life has diminished the traditional communal character of day-to-day existence and replaced it with impersonal and specialised relationships and systems. This is seen as a detrimental to personal relationships within modern societies (Giddens 1990). Giddens (1990) labels this position as ‘conservative’ in nature, it is still reflected in contemporary communitarian literature (Etzioni 1996), and is the subject of much ongoing debate (Young 1990; Younkins 2001; Dixon and Dogan 2005). The reinvigoration of community is seen as a panacea to modern depersonalisation and disemebedded-ness that characterise contemporary life in Western societies.
The supposed declined in community and attendant intimacy is often linked to mobility. Globally, more people are mobile than ever before. Urry (2003: 4) argues that the current patterns of mobility, particularly with regards to tourism, represent “the largest ever peaceful movement of people across borders.” Likewise Giddens (1990: 118) argues that the mobility identified by Urry means that “[i]n the sense of an embedded affinity to place, “community” has indeed largely been destroyed.” This sense of disembedded-ness is also facilitated by abstract systems, which further reinforce the loss of the primacy of place that Giddens (1990) identifies as being important in pre-modern settings. Place then become phantasmagoric as its structures are constituted by forces beyond the local. However, as Lefebvre (1991: 86) argues the development of the ‘global’ as a structuring force “does not abolish the local” [emphasis in original]. Rather, it results in a multiplicity of social spaces that are intertwined in complex ways though networks of exchange, which Giddens (1990) argues provide the stability to modern life that was missing in pre-modern structures.
Abstract systems mean that users are not required to have expert knowledge in order to accomplish difficult, complicated or abstract tasks. The system, which embodies and arranges expert knowledge into mostly predictable working order, takes care of the complexity of the task for us. This transforms intimacy from the necessary mutuality of Tönnies’ (1991) gemeinschaft. Instead of needing a personalised relationship of trust to accomplish the necessary tasks of living, one instead trusts an impersonal and abstract system. This dis-embedding of place and the rise of abstract systems that structure daily life has a transformative effect on our relationships, particularly friendships and romantic relationships. Friendship, Giddens (1990) asserts, is a way for humans to re-embed in a disembedded world; a world in which places can often seem abstract if considered in isolation and removed from their social context and the networks that create them.