Critical Literature Review Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

Critical - Literature review Example The way to behave was more readily mapped, and people knew what to do in the various phases of their lives from childhood through teenage years, work, marriage, parenthood, retirement and preparing for death of loved ones and of one’s own self. The modern industrialised, capitalist world, he argues, is fluid and contains many more uncharted areas and this requires that our self-identity should form a trajectory, requiring that we make day to day adjustments depending on what happens in our lives. (Giddens: 1991, p. 14). Incessant streams of new information result in a process of what Giddens calls â€Å"chronic revision† (Giddens: 1991, p. 20) and the complexity of modern capitalist society requires people to place their trust in increasingly opaque systems and organisations, many of which are subject to quite spectacular failures and radical transformations. Crossley partly agrees with this analysis and adds the observation that modern societies consist of overlapping networks, and that embodiment is reflexive, and imposed upon individials from many souces (Crossley: 2006, p. 112) Giddens describes the way that all human beings put on â€Å"performances† of their self in different social situations. ... 57. Bourdieu’s influential work on human judgement and taste proposes that all human culture is structured in a hierarchical way and that people access this culture through the family that they are born in and then via all the opportunities that they meet in later life (Bourdieu: 1984, pp. 1-5) This theory implies a structuralist view whereby social patterns tend to repeat themselves again and again through the generations. Bourdieu uses the concept of habitus, which is the partly unconscious way in which people deal with the society around them. (Bourdieu: 1984, pp. 169-174) He argues that people learn how to see the world, and consume all it has to offer, in their early childhood, and that they are conditioned by their family background to approach things in certain habitual ways: â€Å"The manner in which culture is acquired lives on in the manner of using it.†(Bourdieu: 1984, p. 1) The foods people eat, the clothes that they wear, the music and films they like, the values they place on educational achievement and all the other products of the modern world are therefore embodied in each person in stratified ways, and this explains the differences between social classes and the tendency for people to remain within their original social class. When this insight is applied to inborn qualities like race and gender it also helps to explain why people from ethnic minorities, women and people from lower social classes still suffer exclusion and unequal access to promotions in work even when educational barriers have been removed. Bourdieu’s point is that how people learn things is just as important, as what they learn because this