A comprehensive and up-to-date overview of postmodernization and social change, written for students of social theory, cultural studies and urban and political sociology. It examines the implications of postmodernization in six areas: the collapse of culture into postcultural packaged styles; the erosion of the state; the fragmentation and multiplication of the familiar class and gender categories of modernity; a decline in allegiance to traditional political parties; the development of flexible manufacutring systems which reprofessionalize labour and reduce the scale of bureaucracies; and a decreasing confidence in the capacity of science to solve human problems, thereby delegimitizing it and raising the possibility of its adsorption into technology. The book finishes with an assessment of sociology's own capacity for survival in the face of these developments.