By C. Howard
Howard brings jointly most sensible contributorsin avolume that gives a survey of recent study and theoretical paintings regarding individualization. themes lined contain gender, social coverage reform, and financial system.
Read or Download Contested Individualization: Debates about Contemporary Personhood PDF
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Extra info for Contested Individualization: Debates about Contemporary Personhood
Sample text
In this way, Giddens’s notion of the trajectoral biography is central to his Third Way policy reform agenda. While Giddens presents the Third Way in opposition to neoliberalism, his trajectoral model of biography has several affinities with dominant discourses of individualization. For Giddens, reflexive biographical choice is effectively equated with rational choice, since most individuals are assumed to consciously and deliberately weigh alternative options and select lifestyles based upon their own preferences and desires.
Zygmunt Bauman and the Disposable Biography If Giddens’s model of contemporary biography reflects an excessive focus on the continuity of the self, then Zygmunt Bauman’s theories of self-identity represent the opposite extreme. Whereas Giddens believes it is necessary and possible for contemporary individuals to create and maintain a linear coherence of lifestyle, Bauman suggests that late-modern life is bereft of certainties and that individuals are compelled to embrace biographical discontinuity.
A further implication is that once launched, the object or projectile has little control over its own speed or direction, and is more or less committed to a specific course. In addition, the term “trajectory” often implies a curved ballistic path, like that followed by an artillery shell, in which the launched object rises, reaches a plateau, then gradually falls under the effects of gravity, as Three Models of Individualized Biography 33 its momentum declines. These common interpretations of the term have several important implications for Giddens’s theory of biography.