Post Modernism

• in the last 20 years the world is dissolving and fragmenting
• many sociological ideas are become redundant

Work:

• the nature of work is changing
• most people now work in the service sector
• people today do not expect a job to be for life and accept flexble working hours

Culture:

• media and other cultural industries have grown
• consumption is now a major feature of our lives
• mixing and matching contradictory styles

Indentity:

• now likely to be influnenced by popular culture, consumerism and choice

Globalisation:

• symbols are recognised across the world
• challenging local and national culture as a source of identity

Knowledge:

• no longer have faith in any great truths
• become cynical about the power of science
• socialism is discredited
• truth is unattainable and irrelevant
• no absolute monopoly on truth

• shop and work internationally
• love and marry internationally
• grow and educated internationally
• relationship between space and time has reconfigured due to globalisation
• disembedding - social interaction is removed from local context
• reflexivity - acitvely thinking about how we would like to live our lives, we are encouraged to make conscious descions

Technological Changes -

• cross entire continents
• time - space compression
• risk is on a global scale

Economic Changes -

• 'weightless' electric economy
• money lies in imagined goods
• risk society is added to
• trans-national companies

Political Changes -

• undermines the power of the nation state
• less ability to regulate

The Nation State:

• key political unit, a bound territory ruled by a powerful centralised state
• important source of indentity for citizens

Capitalism:

• based on ownership and means or production
• wealth distribution is unequal

Rationality, science and technology

Individualism

Industrialisation

Meta Narratives

Lyotard

• post modern society developed at the end of the 1950s
• changes are related to technology, science and social developments
• undermines meta narratives
• people no longer believe that reason can conquer superstition, humans can be perfected and communism is a perfect society

Baudrillard

• buying and selling material goods has been replaced by buying and selling signs and images
• eventually the sign develops so it has no resemblance to reality