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Michel Foucault (1926–84), Jacques Derrida (1976, 1978) and Julia Kristeva (1984, 1977) are the most influential figures in an intellectual movement known as poststructuralism. However, Foucault’s ideas have had the most influence on sociology and the social sciences. In his writings on crime, the body, madness and sexuality, Foucault analysed the emergence of modern institutions, such as prisons, hospitals and schools, that have played an increasing role in monitoring and controlling the population. He wanted to show that there was a darker side to Enlightenment ideals of individual liberty – one concerned with discipline and surveillance. Foucault advanced important ideas about the relationship between power, ideology and discourse in modern organizational systems.

The study of power is of fundamental importance in sociology, and Foucault continued some of the lines of thought pioneered in classical sociology. The role of discourse is central to his thinking, and he used the term to refer to ways of talking or thinking about particular subjects that are united by common assumptions. Foucault demonstrated, for example, the dramatic way in which discourses of madness changed from medieval times through to the present day. In the Middle Ages the insane were generally regarded as harmless, and some believed that they may even have possessed a special ‘gift’ of perception. In modern societies, however, ‘madness’ has been shaped by a scientific, medicalized discourse which emphasizes illness and treatment. This discourse is supported and perpetuated by a highly developed and influential network of doctors, medical experts, hospitals, professional associations and medical journals.

Foucault’s work is discussed in more detail in chapter 10, ‘Health, Illness and Disability’.

According to Foucault, power works through discourse to shape public attitudes. Expert discourses established by those with power or authority can often be countered only by competing expert discourses. In this way, discourses can be used as powerful tools to restrict alternative ways of thinking or speaking and knowledge becomes a force of control. A prominent theme throughout Foucault’s writings is the way power and knowledge are linked to technologies of surveillance, enforcement and discipline. In sociology, this perspective has expanded the way sociologists think about power relations in many areas of the discipline.

Since the mid-1980s, advocates of postmodernism claim that the classic social thinkers took their inspiration from the idea that history has a shape – it ‘goes somewhere’ and is progressive. But this idea has now collapsed and there are no longer any ‘metanarratives’ – overall conceptions of history or society – that make any sense (Lyotard 1984). The postmodern world is not destined, as Marx hoped, to be a harmonious socialist one. Similarly, the idea that science would lead inexorably to social progress is much less plausible in an age of nuclear weaponry and global warming. Democracy has spread around the world, but in many developed political systems voters are apathetic and politicians reviled. In short, for many postmodern theorists, the grand project of modernity has run into the sand.

For Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007), the postmodern age is a world where people respond to media images rather than to real persons or places. Thus when Diana, princess of Wales, died in 1997, there was an enormous outpouring of grief all over the world. But was this the mourning of a real person? Princess Diana existed for most people only through the mass media, and her death was presented like an event in a soap opera rather than an event in real life. Separating out reality from representation has become impossible when all that exists is ‘hyperreality’ – the intertwining of the two.

See chapter 19, ‘The Media’, for a discussion of Baudrillard and hyperreality.

Zygmunt Bauman (1992) offers a helpful distinction between two ways of thinking about the postmodern. Do we need a sociology of postmodernity or a postmodern sociology? The first view accepts that the social world has moved rapidly in a postmodern direction. The enormous growth and spread of the mass media, new information technologies, the more fluid movement of people across the world and the development of multicultural societies – all of these mean that we no longer live in a modern world but in a postmodern one. However, on this view there is no compelling reason to think that sociology cannot describe, understand and explain the emerging postmodern world.

The second view suggests that the type of sociology which successfully analysed the modern world of capitalism, industrialization and nation-states is no longer capable of dealing with the de-centred, pluralistic, mediasaturated, globalizing postmodern world, and new theories and concepts will have to be devised. In short, we need a postmodern sociology for a postmodern world. It remains unclear what such a sociology would look like.

Bauman accepts that the modern project originating in the European Enlightenment of rationally shaping society no longer makes sense, at least not in the way thought possible by Comte, Marx or other classical theorists. However, from the turn of the century he moved away from the term ‘postmodern’ – which he argued had become corrupted through too diverse usage – and instead described our age as one of ‘liquid modernity’, reflecting the fact that it is in constant flux and uncertainty in spite of all attempts to impose (a modern) order and stability onto it (Bauman 2000, 2007).

Many sociologists do not believe that we are entering a postmodern age at all. One staunch critic is Jürgen Habermas (1983), who sees modernity as ‘an incomplete project’. Instead of consigning it to the dustbin of history, we should be extending it, pushing for more democracy, more freedom and more rational policies. Postmodernists, Habermas argues, are essentially pessimists and defeatists. Whichever view you think more plausible, postmodern analyses have in fact lost ground to the theory of globalization, which has become the dominant backdrop for understanding the direction of social change today. Taking a global view of the development of sociology has led to new critiques which argue that sociology has been and remains Eurocentric, failing to acknowledge the impact of colonialism on knowledge production and dissemination.

Postmodern theory is exemplified by Baudrillard’s ideas on the domination of social life by television. Does the theory still work in relation to the rapid take-up and use of social media?