Social, political and cultural changes like these go on around us at relentless speed and we struggle to make sense of them. At last, "Towards The Third Modernity" sets out the results of in-depth field research spanning the last 60 years and looking forward to changes that are still on the horizon. Drawing on a mass of interviews, field research, life histories, opinion polls, surveys and social observation conducted across Western Europe and North America since the early 1950s, the author plots the passage of what he calls the First and Second Modernities. On page after page, his observations help us to make sense of changes that we have all seen in our lifetimes.