Postmodernism

Perhaps the most radically transformative intellectual movement (or perhaps, more accurately, movements) of the latter part of the 20th century, postmodernism nonetheless defies ready definition. The term, used by Daniel Bell, Jean Francois Lyotard, Mark Poster, and others to describe contemporary, mediasaturated late-capitalist society is also widely, even indiscriminately, used to describe the work of a range of influential Continental philosophers and social thinkers, such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Jean Baudrillard. Postmodernism in the social sciences is strongly associated with a range of approaches to social research, including discourse analysis, post- structuralism, social constructivism, critical theory, feminist and queer theories, and so on. Indeed, ideas associated with postmodernism have become so all-pervasive in contemporary academic discourses, and its proponents and critics have become so numerous, that its influence can be seen in virtually all areas not only of the social sciences from anthropology and sociology to information behavior research and knowledge management, but also of the academy as a whole.

Despite or perhaps because of this wide-ranging influence, a coherent definition of postmodernism remains problematic. Many of the key writers associated with it propound markedly different theoretical approaches or epistemological positions, while the research approaches and methodologies employed by postmodern researches range from textual analysis and deconstruction to interviewing and ethnomethodologies.

The term postmodernism is perhaps itself significant—indicating, as it does, not an affiliation with a particular philosophical viewpoint, but rather a desire to transcend the limitations of the modernist viewpoint that has dominated Western academic discourses since the Enlightenment. If postmodern writers and approaches can be said to have anything in common, despite their manifest heterogeneity, it is their critique of the core values and belief systems that have underpinned modernist approaches—such as rationalism, objectivity, and the idea of scientific as social progress.

One important area of ambiguity surrounding the term postmodern relates to the fact that it is widely—and ambiguously—used to describe both a sociohistorical epoch (contemporary Western, postindustrial society) and an (admittedly related) paradigm shift in the late 20th-century academy.