Reflections on economic life under conditions of liquid modernity

This paper reflects on Zygmunt Bauman's concept of ‘liquid modernity’ as a social condition rooted in a deeper transformation of the human condition into social conditions. Rather than understanding liquidity simply as a late-modern outcome of economic or cultural change, the paper situates Bauman's diagnosis within a broader sociological account of existential precarity and the enduring human need to construct stable social orders. Drawing on Bauman's ‘Searching for a centre that holds, liquid modernity is interpreted as a paradox: efforts to stabilise social life simultaneously generate new forms of instability. Economic life is central to this process, as it mediates the satisfaction of material and social needs through work and social organisation. The paper then critically examines three entrenched ‘bad habits’ of economic sociology, namely quantitative reductionism, the separation of economy and society and individualisation. These obscure how economic life unfolds under conditions of liquid modernity namely as a blend of economic, economically relevant and economically conditioned phenomena, an idea gleaned from Max Weber. The paper argues that liquid modernity should not be understood as the disappearance of social order, but as a condition of interdependent economic and social flows in which new, albeit fragile, forms of solidity may emerge.