Late Modernity Vs. Postmodernity
Social theorists such as Lash (1990), and "sociologists such as Ulrich Beck, Zygmunt Bauman and Anthony Giddens, criticize adherents of 'postmodernity' that presume the ending of the modernization process and the dawning of a new era. Contemporary modernity, they argue, rather involves a continuation or even a radicalization of the modernization process". On technological and social changes since the 1960s, the concept of "late modernity" proposes that contemporary societies are a clear continuation of modern institutional transitions and cultural developments. Such authors talk about a reflexive modernization process: "social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character". Modernity now tends to be self-referring, instead of being defined largely in opposition to traditionalism, as with classical modernity.
Anthony Giddens does not dispute that important changes have occurred since "high" modernity, but he argues that we have not truly abandoned modernity. Rather, the modernity of contemporary society is a developed, radicalized, 'late' modernity - but still modernity, not postmodernity. In such a perspective, 'so-called postmodernism turns out to be a technological hyper-intensification of modernism...continued enmeshment in modernism '.
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