Abstract
When Ulrich Beck first launched the notion of ‘individualization’ some thirty years ago, he seemed to capture the mood. Postmodernism, with all its radical claims about the fluidity and multiplicity of social forms, the blurring or collapse of traditional boundaries and the creativity and flexibility of identity construction, was in full swing, but already there was a sense that it went too far, was too extreme and drew conclusions that were too dramatic. Beck, with his vision of ‘second’ or ‘reflexive modernity’, offered an alternative that appeared to take on board much that postmodernism flagged without falling into its excesses. Times have changed, he argued, but not as radically as many postmodernists claim; the old social structures and stable identities of the past may have faded, but in their place we have not a lack of social structures, but new social structures.
Nowhere was this made clearer than in his argument that social class, one of the most longstanding of social science concepts, was indeed, as postmodernists argued, losing its relevance for making sense of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but that coming into view was a new social structure: individualization. The welfare state, competitive labour markets and the expanded education system not only force people to make new choices about jobs, training and family, he claimed, but induce a pervasive sense, which Beck dubbed ‘reflexivity’, that choice must be based on what is best ‘for me’ as an individual, i.e. for one’s self-realization, rather than class-based traditions and expectations (Beck, 1992; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002). In later work he pulled out the underside of this process a little more, tying up with the mounting critique of neoliberalism to emphasize how increasing employment insecurity – a ‘Brazilianization of the workforce’, as he dubbed it – was forcing people to rethink their vocation, keep their options open, anguish over the future and cobble together chequered work biographies no matter their (temporary) class position (Beck, 2000). In both cases he was emphatic in his conclusion: there was no future for class analysis (see also Beck, 2007, 2013).
Soon enough, however, it transpired that Beck, too, exaggerated. Careful examination of the evidence suggested that while there was indeed labour market insecurity thanks to a proliferation of casualized and fixed-term contracts, looser employment laws and weaker trade unions, it was hardly as pervasive and class-killing as he implied (Atkinson, 2010a, 2013; Fevre, 2007; Goldthorpe and McKnight, 2006). Nor were deindustrialization and the expansion of education systems – yes, people have to make new choices about what they want to do, but these are still guided by underlying orientations and senses of what is im/possible given by classed conditions of life (Atkinson, 2010a; Reay et al., 2005). Even the decline of explicit class identities and the new focus on ‘the individual’ established by neoliberal politics hardly signalled the end of class, only the efforts of the dominant class to foist their particular worldview on to the population as a whole and rob the dominated of traditional sources of strength, worth and recognition (Atkinson, 2010a, 2010b; Atkinson et al., 2012; Charlesworth, 2000; Skeggs, 1997, 2004).
Beck’s exaggerations were a product of his style as a sociologist – he was into big claims, not rigorous research; bold themes, not fine details; catchy concepts and phrases, not scrupulous logic; and identifying change, not persistence. His views of what class was were distinctly slippery and he never effectively dealt with the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu (e.g. 1984), whose model of class soared in prominence partly as a way to counter the ‘death of class’ thesis and accommodate the social changes discussed by Beck within a class-based explanatory framework – and, most surprisingly, who Beck himself had recourse to borrow from to make sense of cosmopolitan inequalities (see Atkinson, 2007). Diane Reay (1998), Mike Savage (2000) and Beverley Skeggs (2004) – leading figures of the current generation of class researchers in the UK – all explicitly forged their Bourdieu-inspired research agendas against Beck’s prognosis for class while appreciating the reality of social change. Perhaps, in fact, this will prove to be Beck’s greatest legacy: that he unintentionally (indeed, against his own wishes) contributed to the rekindling of interest in, and reinvention of, the concept of class as a means to think through the themes he foregrounded without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Sociology – a science which, like any other, progresses through the clash of opposing viewpoints, confrontations with alternatives, subversion of orthodoxies and careful testing of claims – is therefore undoubtedly much better off for having had his contribution. Yet, for that same reason, it may well be that Beck’s thesis of individualization, at least in relation to class, will end up much like the work of Daniel Bell, an essayist, social commentator, trend-spotter and exaggerator of a previous generation: being of largely historical interest.