The growth of cybercommunities is a notable social phenomenon. Empirical studies of cybercommunities have described new forms of social behaviour that call for deeper conceptual analysis. Drawing on evidence from our research in the cybercommunity Second Life, the authors examine the sociology of cybercommunities through the lens of Giddens’ abstract theories of modernity. In particular, the au...

This article analyzes the major characteristics of modernity, of modern civilization; the major analytical approaches related to the major social structures and the contemporary state. The core of this analysis is the notion of multiple modernities. This idea assumes that the best way to understand the contemporary world is for modernity to be seen as a story of continual formation, constitutio...

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the extent that ordinary people in Argentina understand and believe the ideas of development, progress and modernity and use these ideas in evaluating the world in general, and family behaviour in particular. We ask whether the concept of development and modernity is known and understood by ordinary people and the extent to which ordinary people use deve...

I offer a major reassessment of Foucault’s philosophico-historical account of the basic problems of modernity. I revise our understanding of Foucault by countering the influential misinterpretations proffered by his European interlocutors such as Habermas and Derrida. Central to Foucault’s account of modernity was his work on two crucial concept pairs: freedom/power and reason/madness. I argue ...

This work analyzes the sanitary question in the modernity-postmodernity debate. Such analyses are performed form a philosophical position that states the crisis of Modernity and questions the ideological twist that to itself propitiates postmodernity, shutting out questioning views or visions. It propitiates an alternative view of politics, thinking of it from the potency plane and giving a rol...