Individualization

Classical sociologists such as Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel recognized individualization as a feature of Western modernity together with functional differentiation and rationalization. Drawing on their work, individualization is defined as the social surfacing of the individual as a unique intersection of social roles, responsibility, and functions as well as the cultural accentuation of the individual as an independent, separated, and original being. Through the workings of functional differentiation, each social actor comes to occupy a fairly unique social position in the complex web of interdependencies that makes up the social space, while rationalization of the self in the form of reflexive self-monitoring allows for integrative effects. Individuality thus acquires a particular moral value: the individual human being as an autonomous self is thus, Durkheim suggested, the God of the apparently secular culture of modernity. Individualization is an ambivalent phenomenon, clarified Simmel; individuals are not simply free to constitute themselves, they are required to do so. According to Foucault, psychologizing becomes the norm as to lay explanations of human behavior, while self-control takes the place of external control in the ordinary government of human subjectivity.

The theme of individualization has recently been taken up again by sociologists such as Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens to put forward a theory of second or late modernity. Following the classics, Beck considers that individual behavior has become less bound by traditional norms and class-based collective identity and argues that one's life is increasingly a reflexive self-programmed project. Thus, in contrast to traditional societies where social norms emanated from the collectivity, in modern societies, “individuals must, in part, supply [norms] for themselves, import them into their biographies through their own actions” (Beck and Gernsheim 2002, 2). [Page 764]Beck contends that although individualization came about at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, this was largely confined to middle- and upper-class males whereas in second modernity—largely coinciding with the postindustrial economy and the postmodern culture emerging since the 1960s—individualization has extended to other social strata. Furthermore, first modernity entailed both disembedding and re-embedding (actors were disentangled from traditional structures such as hierarchical structures based on privilege or lineage and re-embedded into new, fairly stable structures such as bureaucracies and family); however, second modernity works through a general process of disembedding without re-embedding. At the macrolevel, this entails a social and cultural shift that happens not through the breaking of the fundamental structures of modernity but through their radicalization; at the microlevel, this entails emphasis on individual choice and identity. At both levels, consumption acquires relevance.