Definition
Postmodernity names the sociohistorical condition that succeeds solid, industrial modernity — a period in which stable institutions, fixed identities, and universal narratives have given way to fluidity, plurality, and reflexive doubt. The term spans economy, culture, politics, and selfhood; it is descriptive rather than evaluative.
The canonical formulations come from Jean-François Lyotard's incredulity toward metanarratives, David Harvey's analysis of flexible capitalism and time-space compression, and Zygmunt Bauman's liquid modernity, in which social forms melt before they can settle. Each captures a different facet of the same shift away from solidity.
Why it matters
How it works
In postmodern conditions, life-courses are deinstitutionalised: jobs are precarious, partnerships are revisable, places are interchangeable. Cultural production fragments into niches and pastiches; meaning is assembled rather than received. Politics loses its anchor in class and becomes a contest of identities, lifestyles, and risks.
For criminology, postmodernity reframes the discipline. Crime is read as an effect of consumer culture, surveillance, and exclusion rather than only of poverty or pathology. The criminal justice system itself becomes one site of risk management among many, judged by the perceptions and emotions it produces as much as by what it prevents.