Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
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Tragic Individualization
As a consequence, everyday life in world risk
society is characterized by a new variant of individualization. The individual must cope with the
uncertainty of the global world by him- or herself.
Here individualization is the default outcome of a
failure of expert systems to manage risks. Neither
science, nor the politics in power, nor the mass
media, nor business, nor the law or even the
military are in a position to define or control risks
rationally. The individual is forced to mistrust the
promises of rationality of these key institutions. As
a consequence, people are thrown back onto themselves, they are alienated from expert systems but
have nothing else instead. Disembedding without
embedding this is the formula for this dimension
of individualization: the individual, whose senses
fail him in the face of ungraspable threats, who,
thrown back on himself, is blind to dangers,
remains at the same time unable to escape the
power of definition of expert systems, whose
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References
Arendt, H. (1958) The Human Condition.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Beck, U. (2005) Power in the Global Age.
London: Polity Press.
Beck, U. (2006) The Cosmopolitan Vision.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Beck, U. (2007) Beyond Class and Nation:
Reframing Social Inequalities in a Globalized
World, British Journal of Sociology 58(4):
680705.
Beck, U. and N. Sznaider (2006) Unpacking
Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A
Research Agenda, British Journal of Sociology,
Special Issue 57(1).
Drori, G.S., J. Meyer and H. Hwang (eds) (2006)
Globalization and Organization: World
Society and Organizational Change. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Habermas, J. (2001) The Postnational
Constellation, trans. and ed. M. Pensky.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Held, D. (1995) Democracy and the Global
Order: From the Modern State to
gap between such inner and outer cultural, political and economic domains tend to vary widely and
become particularly complex depending on the
values attached to cultural diversity in the social
environments concerned. This is often the case
when officially protected heritage is built on the
basis of popular and indigenous cultural practices.
So, a crucial question is whether such landmarks
are recognized beyond the limits of the cultural
history of specific social groups, which values are
attributed to them beyond their more immediate
symbolic boundaries and whether they effectively
participate in the processes of social identification
that underlies the formation of hegemonies and of
national cultures.
The global turn of cultural production gave
new significance to objects and ideas that convey
senses of localization and/or cultural singularity,
raising public interest and institutional concern
with inventorying and protecting cultural diversity.
The implications of this shift not only concern the
so-called creative industries, as this issue was the