Youth Culture in Late Modernity

Book Introduction: “Understanding Youth in Late Modernity

This article has no abstract.

Goffman, Action, and Risk Society: Aesthetic Reflexivity in Late Modernity

When I decided to write about edgework over twenty-five years ago, I had no idea that I had put myself on a pathway of sustained engagement with one of the most important sociologists of the twentieth century. As an academic sociologist in the early stages of my career, I felt that I had a good general understanding of Erving Goffman’s most important ideas and a proper appreciation of his uniqu...

The Actuarial Subject: Legitimacy and Social Control in Late Modernity

Cannibalism and bulimia: Patterns of social control in late modernity

The transition from the modern world of the postwar period into late modernity involves a movement from an inclusive to an exclusive society. This is concomitant with a change in tolerance from a society which abhors difference and attempts to reform difficulty to one which celebrates difference and attempts to exclude the difficult. Two motifs of exclusion coexist uneasily in late modernity, t...

Food Systems, Consumption Models And Risk Perception In Late Modernity

T INTR he food system is undergoing profound changes, at the level of production and consumption models. Economic theory on the one hand, and sociological and anthropological theories on the other, give different interpretations of the changes, but these often do not confront each other. Moreover, within sociology, with regard to food, ‘(a) curious, if implicit, division of labour seems to have...