Obstructed individualization and social anomie

Abstract

The concept of individualization shares the problems of other strands of modernization theory, including the theories of functional differentiation, secularization, and value change. There is no doubt that certain structural and ideological developments in the labour market, the family, law, and other societal spheres have increased tendencies of individualization, not only within Western societies, but beyond their borders as well. Nevertheless, there is still a lack of conceptual and methodological clarity about how to analyze the interplay of specific societal processes that enable or prevent, increase or decrease individualization, and about how to distinguish possibly contradictory developments at different levels of social reality. In short: individualization is too often presupposed as a given fact, from which sociological research starts, rather than as a research hypothesis that has to be tested against other possibilities of societal development. Beyond that, it is too often treated as an all-encompassing trend that includes developments in the social structure as well as in the cultural realm, and at the level of agency as well as that of structure, rather than disentangling different developments that may be mutually reinforcing, but may also contradict one another and produce specific conflicts.