SOCIALPSYKOLOGIENS VERDENER

Abstract

The discipline of Social Psychology has developed as the science of individualization. And individualization has been analyzed in its contradiction between social integration and personal development. This challenge of individualization has become, if possible, more demanding today. It has become the challenge of late modernization or of modernity. Before, the challenge of individualization was the central social process in socialization and the educational systems. Today, it seems as if an individualized based »societalization« has become the challenge. Today, the individual has become the actor or the subject of society, and the challenge therefore to ensure further social development. In this article focus is on the modernity individualization perspectives, and it is shown that social psychology has to focus a double challenge: At the one hand the disintegration of institutions and social structures require the establishing of new routines and institutions and at the other hand the centrality of the individual requires a development of »individual capital« as means for coping with the challenges of modernization.