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AT A CROSSROADS

Contemporary societies have been pictured as marked by an unprecedented degree of uncertainty and by the extensive presence of a large variety of risks, which are experienced on both a personal and a global scale (Beck 1992). In the past decades the popular individualisation thesis has pointed out how the dissolution of the traditional order has given way to a process of ‘disembedding’ (Giddens 1991), which has meant emancipation from the grip of authority, yet also disorientation and insecurity. It is argued that in conditions of late modernity people are required to develop a reflexive attitude, and urged to learn the skills to self-reconstruct in order to be able to respond to the changing circumstances that may crop up at any turn in their lives. People find themselves with new freedoms to construct their own life plans, yet they are also confronted with the necessity and burden of making constant choices. In this uncertain scenario, it may therefore be possible for some to construct ‘biographies of choice’ (Beck 1992), that is, courses of action and life plans that are reflexively put together and typically experienced by actors as essentially individual accomplishments, with no connection to wider social processes. However, the extent to which people actually feel disembedded from traditional structures, and the degree of reflexivity and ability to selfreconstruct which they may exert in their everyday lives may considerably vary in relation to their position in the social structure, which continues to be central in people’s lives. Individualisation theorists have overlooked the differential impact that the consequences of the risk society may have on individual biographies, depending on people’s own position in terms of