Modernity

1
Modernity

• Peter Burger identified characteristics of
  modernization process of social
  change begun by industrialization
• Decline of small, traditional towns
• High-tech communications puts small towns in
  touch with world
• Expansion of personal choice
• Unending series of options referred to as
  individualization
• Increasing diversity in beliefs
• Promotes more rational, scientific world-view
• Future orientation and growing awareness of time
• Living in industrialized nations tends to focus
  more on future than on
  past
• Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft

sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies
community-town
civil society or 'association-City
2
Ferdinand Tonnies Loss of Community

• With modernization comes loss of gemeinschaft, or
  human community
• Loss of community caring
• Beginning of individualization
• Business-like emphasis
• Modernity brings about condition gesellschaft, or
  impersonal
• People live among strangers
• Ignore most they pass on streets

3
Emile Durkheim Division of Labor

• Modernization is marked by increases in a complex
  division of labor
• People performing highly distinctive roles rather
  than everyone performing same daily routines
• Society transformed from mechanical to organic
  solidarity
• Mechanical solidarity refers to a time when
  society was held together by social bonds
  anchored in common moral sentiments
• Organic solidarity refers to modernity during
  which time social bonding is accomplished by way
  of mutual dependence

4
Max Weber and Rational Society

• Modernization means replacing a traditional
  worldview with a rational way of thinking
• Modern people value efficiency, have little
  reverence for the past and adopt whatever social
  patterns allow them to achieve their goals
• Karl Marx Capitalism
• Industrial revolution was a capitalist revolution
• Social conflict in capitalism sows seeds of
  egalitarian socialist revolution

5
Theoretical Analysis of Modernity

• Structural-functional theory
• Mass society is a society in which prosperity and
  bureaucracy have eroded traditional social ties
• Draws upon the ideas of Tonnies, Durkheim and
  Weber
• Social-conflict theory
• Class society is a capitalist society with
  pronounced social stratification
• Draws upon the ideas of Marx

6
David Riesman Modernity the Individual

• Personal identity can be a problem since society
  changes so rapidly Inherent instability
• Social character refers to personality patterns
  common to members of a particular society
• Tradition-directedness refers to rigid conformity
  to time-honored ways of living
• Other-directedness refers to a receptiveness to
  the latest trends and fashions, often expressed
  in the practice of imitating others

7
PostmodernitySocial Patterns Characteristic of
Postindustrial Societies

• In some ways, modernity has failed
• Much poverty and stress
• The bright light of progress is fading
• Less confidence about future
• Science no longer holds the answers
• Science has created its share of problems
• Cultural debates are intensifying
• The promises of social movements have not been
  fulfilled
• Social institutions are changing
• All institutions are going through change,
  including the most basic, the family