Threats and opportunities of individualization: drawing on Ulrich Beck's risk society
KIM Seok-hyeon.
first upoaded: 2017-08-24.
last updated: 2020-12-31.
Living and dining alone, marrying late or even non-marrying, bearing no child, and so on: all those trends suddenly have popped up. Human beings as social animals who have taken granted and assumed cohesive relations among people within a certain boundary may feel uneasy at these trends and may anticipate anxiously a disruption of human relations. If we face unfamiliar social trends, we conceptualize them, which helps the trends recognized, shared and confirmed by the society. 'Individualization' is such a concept for the ongoing trends. However conceptualization is just a beginning and having a role to stimulate further delineations. Notions of individualization vary wide across people, let alone forecasting its development, making moral judgment about it, and prescribing a certain range of policies (including no policy). To sort out all the relevant questions and suggesting answers (including temporal or hypothetical ones) will be a huge challenge: not to mention to set up concepts and draw consensus of them. Probably, Ulrich Beck who is foremost and salient in articulating individualization and his monumental work, Industrial Society: Towards a New Modernity(1992 in English; 1986 in original German),[1] serves as a precious platform to elucidate individualization.
Beck provides a comprehensive framework to grasp various, even contradictory aspects of individualization. At the beginning, as an ahistorical (or abstract) account relevant to general civilizations, Beck suggests two dimensions to conceptualize individualization: one as evolving dynamics; the other as dialectics between objective subjective, being illustrated by his own diagram re-presented below.[2] And then Beck analyzes individualization as a historical development of individualization emerging during the second half of the twentieth century.
Figure 1. Beck's framework of individualization
As to an ahistorical account or model as in the diagram, Beck asserts that individualization realizes or appears in three facets or 'factors' in Beck's term): liberation, loss of stability, and re-integration. Beck recalls that 'individualized' life styles are also found in the Renaissance, Protestantism, emancipation from feudal society, and so on.[3] Beck regards individualization as an essential process of modernization with such features: (1) liberation from traditional dominances; (2) loss of security with respect to conventional knowledge or belief; (3) re-integration such as a new type of social commitments. This modeling helps to establish a universal theory of individualization.
To Beck, it is also important to distinguish the objective and the subjective side of individualization for their implication. In many instances, individualization is regarded and so misunderstood as its only subjective side, that is, personalization, uniqueness, or emancipation; even only narrowed down to the upper-right cell of the diagram. Though Beck acknowledges that studies on the subjective side (the whole right column of the diagram) is limited and remains to be filled in, he focuses more on the objective side of individualization. The objective side of individualization is about changes in 'life situations and biographical patterns" in relation with production and labor. Beck's objective analysis surely encompasses structural changes of the society but focuses on the individual who reflects them and so he articulates social changes in terms of life situation and biography. And Beck's main concern is to apply the general framework to the analysis of individualization evolving during the second half of the twentieth century which can be demarcated as ”late modernization” in distinction from the previous "early modernization" period dating from the industrial revolution.[4]
Beck understands late modernization or individualization as eruption of “contradiction between modernity and counter-modernity within industrial society.” Industrial society freed people from land and traditional class division but constrained people to wage labor and gendered division of labor. industrial society split work and life and correspondingly men and women as well. Men are supposed to devote his most productive time to wage labor and women her one to unpaid house work. Such a division reveals that industrialism or early modernity unavoidably incorporated feudalism into itself. So the contradictory forces between modernity and counter-modernity could not help but erupt while modernization deepens. Each labor attains, or has to attain, more independence and mobility thanks to: each labor's qualitative distinction (skills and education levels as such, dubbed human capital); technology-enabled distanced and outsourced work; and competition forced upon the labor market. Democratized labor market gets the gendered division of labor at odds and consequently the separation of work and life as well.[5]
This whole process of individualization, however, cannot be just convenience or naive happiness to people. Beck properly identifies the negative or downside of individualization as “individualized risk”[6] which occupies a large portion of his discussion on “risk society,” whose namesake book I draw hugely on in this article. Each individual is supposed to make a huge range of decisions on one's will and to bear consequences on one's own.[7]. Instead of 'blow of fate' as unavoidable external mishap, 'personal failure' captivates each individual in ascription of unemployment or divorce. And socially, rather than full employment, flexible and pluralized underemployment becomes a norm.[8] Life-long full time work becomes an obsolete concept, more traditional than concurrent.
Uncertainty and consequent nervousness under individualization may drive us back to traditionalism, that is, “reindustrialization.” dubbed by Beck .[9] This retrospective tendency is resorted to all the time amidst epochal change of society. A well-known instance is Luddite, a movement of manual crafts to destroy weaving machinery in the early days of industrialization. In fact nowadays, advanced nations stressed over de-industrialization and consequent rust belt problems see the surge of nationalistic responses to de-industrialization, that is, populistic promises of re-industrialization: UK's Brexit (Britain's exit from the EU); US's latest presidential election and resulting Trump's presidency; and France's nationalists' ascending in the national politics. Beck anticipated this tendency and also pointed out to its misunderstanding of dangers and opportunities underlying risk society.[10] Beck argues that industrialization increased techno-economics risks or dangers which are not solvable simply by going back and also that modernity gives opportunities to overcome the restrictions of industrial society (which is a positive side of individualization). Though we should not be over-confident in predicting the future, it is hard to conceive that the future will be simply a return to the past. Definitely there will be some aspects of the past continued and repeated in the future. But the accumulated layers of changes will make the future somewhat different, if not radically. And we'd better stand on the accumulated layers of the past and discover new opportunities allowed, than trying to dig down in vain.
But retrospective myths on wage labor cannot help but prevail because the old institutional arrangements have a strong inertia and dominance while new institutional arrangements are just at their inception and struggling to prove themselves as new social commitments. When old is strong and new weak, tensions and frictions are at their culmination and people are at a loss, highly vulnerable to retrospective romanticism, and likely to be captivated by radical politics. Beck expresses such worries as follows: “The old coalition between insecurity and radicalism would be revived.”[11]
Given the difficulties people face in this transition period and the danger of political adventurism, it goes without saying that a new arrangement of institutions, or re-institutionalization of society pari passu with individualization; at least not in opposition to it. The milieu of individuals is risky and threatening of course; but fertile in opportunities as well. Beck quintessentially captures the new horizon available to individuals as follows: “.. world society becomes a part of biography.. [of each individual]” (with parenthesized phrase by the author of this article. But Beck also adds a caveat, emphasizing the importance of active response to the new horizon, saying that “this continual excessive demand [opportunities accompanying challenges, as interpreted by the author of this article] tolerated through the opposite of reaction of not listening, simplifying, and apathy.” [6] It is hard to conceive of any better recommendation than Beck's not only to individualization but also to any societal change in general.

(*) This article is published in intelligence korea, Summner and Winter, 2020. The Korean version is available at intelligencekor.kr/peridical/article.html?bno=3.
Notes
[1] All the citations and quotations in this article from Ulrich Beck (1992), Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage Publications: New York, original German publication in 1986 titled, Riskogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. [2] Beck's ahistorical model of individualization in this and the following two sentences is from Chapter 5, “Individualization, Institutionalization and Standardization: Life Situations and Biographical Patterns” (op. cit.). [3] What Beck illustrates as 'individualized' lifestyles or life situations with their articulators are: “Renaissance” (Burckhardt); “Country culture of middle ages” (Elias); “Inward asceticism in Protestantism” (Weber); “Emancipation of the peasants from feudal bondage” (Marx); “Loosening of intergenerational family” (Imhof); “Flight from the countryside and explosive growth of cities” (Lederer, Kockha) (op. cit., p. 127 in Chapter 5). [4] The demarcation of early and late modernity is an indispensable foothold in Beck's modernization theory. And so as indicated as “new modernity” in the subtitle of his book (op. cit.), the demarcation is prevalent not only in this single book but also throughout his works. A reference to his demarcation is the section headlined “Industrial society is a modern feudal society” in Chapter 4 (op. cit.). [5] Beck articulates feudalistic aspect inherent industrial society in Chapter 4, particularly in the section headlined “Industrial society is a modern feudal society” (op. cit.). [6] Beck, op. cit., Chapter 4, p. 100. [7] Beck, op. cit., Chapter 5, p. 136. [8] Beck, op. cit., Chapter 6, p. 140. [9] Beck, op. cit., Chapter 8, p. 224. [10] Beck, op. cit., Chapter 8, p. 226. [11] Beck, op. cit., Chapter 8, p. 228. [12] Beck, op. cit., Chapter 5, p. 137. Two quotes from Back in this sentence are in fact from one sentence as such: “Furthermore, world society becomes a part of biography, although this continual excessive demand tolerated through the opposite of reaction of not listening, simplifying, and apathy.”