Introduction
Abstract
Introduction SAGE Publications, Inc.1989DOI: 10.1177/072551368902300101 For most of the nineteen eighties and especially its latter half, social theory has been preoccupied with an image of society as postmodern. Using both French post-structuralism and Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition as benchmarks many theorists and practitioners of sociology left the safety of their metanarratives behind and ran headlong into the warm, welcoming, yet shallow waters of postmodernism. Plurality, decentredness and differences became the catchwords that littered its shorelines. Perhaps it is time for a reflection, a realization that to turn one's back on modernity is to drown postmodernisrra's own insights. Certainly what the postmodern social critics point to is the highly differentiated nature of later 20th century society, utopian projects that have become either exhausted or synonymous with domination, the disordered nature of order, and the emergence of new voices and zones of conflict. But perhaps what has been taken as constitutive should rather have been taken as symptomatic of both an enlarged and transforming picture of modernity itself. That is, a picture of modernity not simply portrayed as industrializing, progressive, capitalistic, entrapped in the logic of its 19th century history of class struggles, whether backward or forward looking. Rather what