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Anthony Giddens is one of the most widely published sociologists of the twentieth century. He is one of the most important theorists of the concepts of agency, reflexivity, intimacy, and numerous others. This article examines Giddens’ perspective on family, intimacy, and structural changes in close relationships. The article follows the main theses of this author and gives them a new perspective through the main critics and ideas applied in contemporary research. Giddens places the consideration of intimacy and family within the framework of late modernity, which he sees as a radicalization of the consequences of the development of modern society. The transformation of intimacy is an aspect of contemporary human identity that is viewed reflexively. Today’s society is characterized by a high rate of marriage, divorce, and remarriage, and life circumstances are changing more and more frequently. Giddens sees so-called pure relationships as a new form of expression of intimacy and discusses their position in relation to structural elements of contemporary society, risks, democratization, and individual reflexivity. Based on the analysis of Giddens work and his main critics, the article argues that it is necessary to approach the ideal of a pure relationship by working towards openness and confidential communication in intimate relationships.

This article studies mediated erotic content, especially pornography, as a form of worlding in Michel Houellebecq’s work. Whereas love creates a space of alterity, pornography paradoxically combines the most intimate spatiality of the body with ever-expanding technological systems and global forms of mediation. This short-circuiting of space points to a new sense of being in the world, which is studied in selected passages from the novels La Possibilité d’une île and Soumission, as well as in the essay “Prise de contrôle sur Numéris.” With reference to Ulrich Beck’s description of “banal cosmopolitanism,” I argue that otherness is either reduced to free-floating objects of consumption or to an experience of absence in these texts. Furthermore, this duality is refracted as two “reflexively” interwoven discourses or voices in the work. One is associated with prose and with the bringing of the world to the body of the subject, and the other with poetry and the dissolution of the body into the space of the world.

This major new contribution forms a constructive comparison of the social theories of Jürgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens that focuses on their approaches to modernity, their endeavours to develop new perspectives, and their critical rethinking of the modernist vision of an autonomous society.

Research on ontological security in world politics has mushroomed since the early 2000s but seems to have reached an impasse. Ontological security is a conceptual lens for understanding subjectivity that focuses on the management of anxiety in self-constitution. Building especially on Giddens, IR scholars have emphasized how this translates to a need for cognitive consistency and biographical continuity – a security of ‘being.’ A criticism has been its so-called ‘status quo bias,’ a perceived tilt toward theorizing investment in the existing social order. To some, an ontological security lens both offers social theoretic foundations for a realist worldview and lacks resources to conceptualize alternatives. We disagree. Through this symposium, we address that critique and suggest pathways forward by focusing on the thematic of anxiety. Distinguishing between anxiety and fear, we note that anxiety manifests in different emotions and leaves room for a range of political possibilities. Early ontological security scholarship relied heavily on readings of Giddens, which potentially accounts for its bias. This symposium re-opens the question of the relationship between anxiety and subjectivity from the perspective of ontological security, thinking with and beyond Giddens. Three contributions re-think anxiety in ontological security drawing on existentialist philosophy; two address limitations of Giddens' approach.

Much has been written by important sociocultural theorists about the role played risk in late modern societies, and some, like Beck and Giddens, have ventured contend that industrial society is turning into 'risk society'. Little empirical research has been conducted, however, that has sought to examine the speculations of grand theories about 'risk society'. This article discusses findings from an Australian interview-based study that sought to elicit the participants' understandings of the notion of risk. Three major issues from the interviews are examined: the ways in which the participants defined 'risk', the risks they nominated as most threatening to themselves and those they saw as threatening Australians in general. The findings reveal that the 'risk society' thesis was supported in some ways. Other findings, however, challenged this thesis, including the participants' critique of government's role in protecting its citizens from risk, the ways in which of them represented risk-taking as positive, their relative inattention to environmental risk and the role played by such factors as gender; age and sexual identity in structuring risk perceptions.

The recent concern to develop a radical but critical account of agency in social policy is to be welcomed. However this article questions whether the work of A. Giddens can provide an adequate foundation for such a project. Giddens's account of the welfare subject contains several weaknesses. It is voluntaristic and yet paradoxically it cannot offer an adequate understanding of radical change. It is also rationalistic and assumes the existences of a unitary and knowledgeable subject. As a consequence there is a danger that social policy develops a lop-sided model of agency which is insufficiently sensitive to the passionate, tragic and contradictory dimensions of human experience. A robust account of the active welfare subject must be prepared to confront the real experiences of powerlessness and psychic injury which result from injustice and oppression and acknowledge human capacities for destructiveness towards self and others. Only by exploring these different subject positions – victim, ‘own worst enemy’ and creative, reflexive agent – can we develop an understanding of the welfare subject which is optimistic without being naive.

Using Giddens’ (1984) structuration theory we examine how social structures in mobile communication technologies shape the everyday life of individuals, thereby re-shaping power dynamics that underlie the social organization of society. We argue that the anytime, anyplace connectivity afforded by mobile communication technologies structures society by imposing a network, social and personal logic. We discuss how each logic both reproduces and challenges traditional power structures, at the micro- as well as macro-level. At the micro-level, the network logic refers to mobile communication technologies’ capacity to organize activities in a networked fashion, granting people greater autonomy from time and place. The social logic refers to mobile communication technologies’ capacity for perpetual contact, fostering social connectedness with social relationships. The personal logic refers to mobile communication technologies’ capacity to serve as extensions of the Self, with which people can personalize contents, services, place and time. The flipside of these logics is that, at the micro-level, the responsibility to operate autonomously, to maintain personal social networks, and to manage and act based on personal information shifts to the individual. We also notice shifts in power structures at the macro-level. For instance, to reap the benefits of mobile communication technology individuals engage in free ‘digital labor’ and tolerate new forms of surveillance and control.

The central premise of ontological security theory is that states are ready to compromise their physical security and other important material gains in order to protect their ontological security. While the existing studies have primarily focused on how states defend or maintain their ontological security, little attention has been paid to critical situations that make states ontologically insecure in the first place. Drawing on the work of Anthony Giddens, I conceptualise critical situations in world politics as radical disjunctions that challenge the ability of collective actors to ‘go on’ by bringing into the realm of discursive consciousness four fundamental questions related to existence, finitude, relations and autobiography. The argument is illustrated in a case study of ontological insecurity produced in Serbia by the secession of Kosovo.

The work of the contemporary British sociologist Anthony Giddens, and in particular his structuration theory, has been widely cited by Information Systems researchers. This paper presents a critical review of the work of Giddens and its application in the Information Systems field. Following a brief overview of Giddens's work as a whole, some key aspects of structuration theory are described, and their implications for Information Systems research discussed. We then identify 331 Information Systems articles published between 1983 and 2004 that have drawn on Giddens's work and analyze their use of structuration theory. Based on this analysis a number of features of structurational research in the Information Systems field and its relationship to Giddens's ideas are discussed. These findings offer insight on Information Systems researchers' use of social theory in general and suggest that there may be significant opportunities for the Information Systems field in pursuing structurational research that engages sympathetically, yet critically, with Giddens's work.

When ontological insecurity looms, what comes next? Is chaos the sole alternative to the maintenance of established role-identities and routines? Or is there a more complex set of possible responses to the dread threat of ontological insecurity? The principal approach to ontological security in International Relations (IR) relies unduly on Giddens' account. Consequently, this approach fails to adequately capture both the variety of ways in which coherent and continuous identities can be maintained and the variety of ways in which the available cultural repertoire can support ontological security differently when challenged. Typically, ontological security is re-established, prior to collapse, through re-balancing of the cultural repertoire to give broader scope to an alternative cultural form and the qualitatively different practices it organizes. Due to misrecognition, this reorganization may proceed without disturbing the ontological security of states-in-interaction. Unconscious processes, encoded into cultural forms, are integral to such variable defenses against ontological insecurity. A re-conceptualization that regards Wendt's cultures of anarchy, and their qualitatively different modes of relating, as dynamically co-present within cultural repertoires, but with potentially variable weightings, complements this approach to ontological in/security.