'Risk Society' and 'Reflexivity' - Sociological terms used by Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck in reference to modernity.
Ulrich Beck argues that we live in an age characterised by risks that are of human creation, where the ethic of “individual self-fulfilment and achievement is the most powerful current in modern society” (Beck, 2000, p 165). For Beck, the sources of collective identity and meaning that used to underpin the western industrial democracies – family, national state, ethnicity, class and job – are exhausted and no longer provide for either personal security or social integration (Beck, 1992).
German social theorist Ulrich Beck has argued that western societies are becoming increasingly individualised, in the sense that people’s life courses and consequent bodies of experience are increasingly differentiated, and that people also prize autonomy and choice as key life objects (Beck, 2000).
