Postmodernity is the economic or cultural state or condition of society which is said to exist after modernity. Some schools of thought hold that modernity ended in the late 20th century – in the 1980s or early 1990s – and that it was replaced by postmodernity, and still others would extend modernity to cover the developments denoted by postmodernity. The idea of the postmodern condition is sometimes characterized as a culture stripped of its capacity to function in any linear or autonomous state like regressive isolationism, as opposed to the progressive mind state of modernism.
Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena. A tool used by social scientists, social theories relate to historical debates over the validity and reliability of different methodologies, the primacy of either structure or agency, as well as the relationship between contingency and necessity. Social theory in an informal nature, or authorship based outside of academic social and political science, may be referred to as "social criticism" or "social commentary", or "cultural criticism" and may be associated both with formal cultural and literary scholarship, as well as other non-academic or journalistic forms of writing.
Alexander Theodore Callinicos is a Rhodesian-born British political theorist and activist. An adherent of Trotskyism, he is a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and serves as its International Secretary. Between 2009 and 2020 he was the editor of International Socialism, the SWP's theoretical journal, and has published a number of books.
Zygmunt Bauman was a Polish-born sociologist and philosopher. He was driven out of the Polish People's Republic during the 1968 Polish political crisis and forced to give up his Polish citizenship. He emigrated to Israel; three years later he moved to the United Kingdom. He resided in England from 1971, where he studied at the London School of Economics and became Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds, later emeritus. Bauman was a social theorist, writing on issues as diverse as modernity and the Holocaust, postmodern consumerism and liquid modernity.
David G. Bromley is a professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA and the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA, specialized in sociology of religion and the academic study of new religious movements. He has written extensively about cults, new religious movements, apostasy, and the anti-cult movement.
Late modernity is the characterization of today's highly developed global societies as the continuation of modernity rather than as an element of the succeeding era known as postmodernity, or the postmodern. Introduced as "liquid" modernity by the Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, late modernity is marked by the global capitalist economies with their increasing privatization of services and by the information revolution. Among its characteristics is that some traits, which in previous generations were assigned to individuals by the community, are instead self-assigned individually and can be changed at will. As a result, people feel insecure about their identities and their places in society, and they feel anxious and distrustful about whether their self-proclaimed traits are being respected. Society as a whole feels more chaotic.
Timothy W. Luke is university distinguished professor of political science in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences as well as program chair of the Government and International Affairs Program, School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia.
The following events related to sociology occurred in the 1990s.
Andrew John Milner is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University. From 2014 until 2019 he was also Honorary Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. In 2013 he was Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the Institut für Englische Philologie, Freie Universität Berlin.
David Lyon is a retired Scottish sociologist who directed the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. He previously held a Queen’s Research Chair position and appointments in the Department of Sociology and the Faculty of Law at Queen's University.
Paul James is Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity at Western Sydney University, and Director of the Institute for Culture and Society where he has been since 2014. He is a writer on global politics, globalization, sustainability, and social theory.
Mary Francesca Bosworth is an Australian criminologist who is interested in imprisonment, race, and gender. She is the author of a number of books, including Engendering Resistance: Agency and Power in Women’s Prisons (1999), Explaining U.S. Imprisonment (2010), the edited book What is Criminology? (2011), the edited book The Borders of Punishment (2013) and Inside Immigration Detention (2014). Mary Bosworth is UK Editor-in-Chief of the journal Theoretical Criminology.
Gary Donald Bouma was an author and a professor of sociology at Monash University in Melbourne, Victoria. He was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and was a citizen of both the United States and Australia.
Thesis Eleven: Critical Theory and Historical Sociology is a peer-reviewed academic journal that publishes six issues a year in the field of Sociology. It has been in publication since 1980 and is currently published by SAGE Publications.
Erik Olin Wright was an American analytical Marxist sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, specializing in social stratification and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He was known for diverging from classical Marxism in his breakdown of the working class into subgroups of diversely held power and therefore varying degrees of class consciousness. Wright introduced novel concepts to adapt to this change of perspective including deep democracy and interstitial revolution.
Belinda Probert is an educator and social scientist who has advised non-government organisations and state and national governments in Australia. Her academic research and writing has been in the areas of employment policy, gender equity, and work and welfare reform, including households and the domestic division of labour. She has held senior leadership roles in several universities as well as with the Australian Research Council, where she was a member and Deputy Chair of the Research Training and Careers Committee (1993–1998), and member of the Social, Behavioural and Economic Sciences Expert Advisory Committee.
Michael Hviid Jacobsen is a Danish professor of sociology. Since 1997 he has been employed at Aalborg University, acting from 2009 as a professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Work. He is a frequent lecturer and often appears in the media as an expert within a wide range of topics, particularly in relation to our changing culture of death and criminal issues.
Joy Damousi, is an Australian historian and Professor and Director of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. She was Professor of History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne for most of her career, and retains a fractional appointment. She was the President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities from 2017 to 2020.
Yoshio Sugimoto is a sociologist based at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, where he is currently Emeritus Professor.
Peter Bishop Dixon AO FASSA is an Australian economist known for his work in general equilibrium theory and computable general equilibrium models. He has published several books and more than two hundred academic papers on economic modelling and economic policy analysis.
