Editing Postmodernity (section)

=== Social sciences ===
[[History of sociology#20th century: functionalism, structuralism, critical theory and globalization|Postmodern sociology]] can be said to focus on conditions of life which became increasingly prevalent in the late 20th century in the most industrialized nations, including the ubiquity of mass media and mass production, the rise of a global economy and a shift from manufacturing to [[service economy|service economies]]. Jameson and Harvey described it as [[consumerism]], where manufacturing, distribution and dissemination have become exceptionally inexpensive but social connectedness and community have become rarer. Other thinkers assert that postmodernity is the natural reaction to mass broadcasting in a society conditioned to mass production and mass politics. The work of [[Alasdair MacIntyre]] informs the versions of postmodernism elaborated by such authors as Murphy (2003) and Bielskis (2005), for whom MacIntyre's postmodern revision of [[Aristotelianism]] poses a challenge to the kind of consumerist ideology that now promotes [[capital accumulation]].

The sociological view of postmodernity ascribes it to more rapid transportation, wider communication and the ability to abandon standardization of mass production, leading to a system which values a wider range of capital than previously and allows value to be stored in a greater variety of forms. Harvey argues that postmodernity is an escape from "[[Fordism]]", a term coined by [[Antonio Gramsci]] to describe the mode of industrial regulation and accumulation which prevailed during the Keynesian era of economic policy in OECD countries from the early 1930s to the 1970s. Fordism for Harvey is associated with Keynesianism in that the first concerns methods of production and capital-labor relations while the latter concerns economic policy and regulation. [[Post-Fordism]] is therefore one of the basic aspects of postmodernity from Harvey's point of view.

[[Cultural artifact|Artifacts]] of postmodernity include the dominance of television and popular culture, the wide accessibility of information and mass telecommunications. Postmodernity also exhibits a greater resistance to making sacrifices in the name of progress discernible in environmentalism and the growing importance of the [[anti-war movement]]. Postmodernity in the industrialised core is marked by increasing focus on [[Civil and political rights|civil rights]] and [[equal opportunity]] as well as movements such as [[feminism]] and [[multiculturalism]] and the backlash against these movements. The postmodern political sphere is marked by multiple arenas and possibilities of citizenship and [[political action]] concerning various forms of struggle against oppression or alienation (in collectives defined by sex or ethnicity) while the modernist political arena remains restricted to class struggle.

Theorists such as [[Michel Maffesoli]] believe that postmodernity is corroding the circumstances that provide for its subsistence and will eventually result in a decline of individualism and the birth of a new [[Neotribalism|neo-Tribal]] era.

According to theories of postmodernity, economic and [[Technology|technological]] conditions of our age have given rise to a decentralized, media-dominated society in which ideas are only [[Simulacrum|simulacra]], inter-referential representations and copies of each other with no real, original, stable or objective source of communication and meaning. [[Globalization]], brought on by innovations in communication, manufacturing and [[transport]]ation is often{{Citation needed|date=April 2007}} cited as one force which has driven the [[Decentralization|decentralized]] modern life, creating a culturally pluralistic and interconnected global society lacking any single dominant center of political power, communication or intellectual production. The postmodernist view is that [[Intersubjectivity|intersubjective]], not objective, knowledge will be the dominant form of [[discourse]] under such conditions and that ubiquity of dissemination fundamentally alters the relationship between reader and that which is read, between observer and the observed, between those who consume and those who produce.