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Individualisation Thesis
The individualisation thesis was created by Chambers who argues that traditional relationships, roles and beliefs have lost their influence over individuals. As a result of increased individualisation, individuals have become increasingly inwardly focused and concerned about how society and networks can be used to provide instant gratification for them.
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What is Individualisation?
Last Updated on August 20, 2021 by Karl Thompson
The concept of individualisation was developed to describe the process where the increasing rapidity of social change and greater uncertainty force individuals to spend more time and effort deciding on what choices to make in their daily lives, and where they have to accept greater individual responsibility for the consequences of those choices.
It is a concept most closely associated with the late modern sociological perspectives of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens.
The easiest way to understand it is to contrast it to the concept of ‘individual freedom’ in postmodern thought.
In postmodernism, the breakdown of traditional social norms and ways of live are presented as something positive – resulting in greater freedom of choice for individuals – since the 1980s especially people do have much more freedom to choose their careers, their family situation (whether to get married or not), their faith, even their sexuality.
In short, postmodern society is one in which people have greater freedom to construct their own individual identity.
HOWEVER, according to Beck and Giddens, postmodernists have overstated the extent to which individuals are free, there is more going on.
The move to postmodernity has also meant that there is more social instability and uncertainty – careers last for a shorter period of time, relationships are more likely to break down, the welfare state provides less security for us if we fall on hard times, and even experts (scientists/ doctors) seem less able to give us definitive answers on how we should live.
THUS, it is not so much a case of postmodern society providing us with opportunities to be free to do as we please, rather we are forced into making hundreds if not thousands of choices in order to simply get-by – we are ‘individualised’, this is NOT the same thing as just simply being free.
Individualisation – In More Depth….
Individualisation is a contradictory phenomenon, both exhilarating and terrifying. It really does feel like freedom, especially for women liberated from patriarchal control. But, when things go wrong there is no excuse for anyone. The individual is penalised harshly not only for personal failure but also for sheer bad luck in a highly competitive and relentlessly harsh social environment. Although the Becks deny it, such a self – condemned to freedom and lonely responsibility – is exactly the kind of self cultivated by neoliberalism, combining freewheeling consumer sovereignty with enterprising business acumen.
The Neoliberal Self by Jim McGuigan
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Individualization Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences
- Ulrich Beck - University of Munich, Germany
- Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim - F.A.-University Erlangen-Nurnberg, Germany
- Description
`Ulrich Beck's Risk Society, and indeed the theory of "reflexive modernization" is characterized by two theses: an environmental thesis and individualization thesis.... In Anglo-Saxon sociology the risk thesis has been enormously influential. The individualization thesis, for its part, has passed virtually ignored. That is the shortcoming that this book Individualization addressess.... In this single volume this thesis receives the exclusive attention of Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. This book represents the other half of Beck's work. And this half today may be the most important half' - Scott Lash, from the Foreword
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Individualization: Author's Preface
Individualization: Losing the Traditional
Individualization: A Life of One's Own in a Runaway World
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COMMENTS
The individualisation thesis was created by Chambers who argues that traditional relationships, roles and beliefs have lost their influence over individuals.
Individualisation is a contradictory phenomenon, both exhilarating and terrifying. It really does feel like freedom, especially for women liberated from patriarchal control. But, when things go wrong there is no excuse for anyone.
Beck (1992) has done this by putting forth what has come to be known as the “individualization thesis,” or the theory that the individual is becoming the central unit of social life.
The concept of “individualization” plays a central role in both classic and modern sociology. In modern sociology writers such as Beck, Giddens, and Bauman made the concept of individualization a key one in their theories of “late”, “reflexive”, and “liquid modernity”.
This new sociological interpretation of individualization challenges traditional perspectives on individuality, as well as dominant neoliberal political ideologies, in which individuality is regarded as the simple absence of external structures.
the risk society: his ‘individualisation thesis’. In general, when sociologists use the term ‘individualisation’, they are referring to individual choices and particular ways of life gaining ground at the expense of collective action and social communities (Brannen & Nilsen, 2005; Howard, 2007a: 2). Obvious examples of this shift from the
In this paper we seek to explore a tendency in current sociological thought to highlight notions of choice and autonomy in writings about contemporary Western societies. We wish to draw attention t...
In this paper we take three geographical indices of central elements of the individualisation thesis, examining the distribution in Britain of same sex couples, births to cohabitants and mothers' withdrawal from the worker role.
Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences. Individualization argues that we are in the midst of a fundamental change in the nature of society and politics. This change hinges around two processes: globalization and individualization.
The individualisation thesis (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002) argues all pillars of society (and therefore, across generations) are potentially experiencing 'risks' across the life course, as new...