The systematic study of the impact of the "postmodern turn" on the contemporary social sciences constitutes a complex endeavour. As the foregoing analysis has demonstrated, modern and postmodern approaches are divided by profound presuppositional differences. More importantly, however, it should be evident from the preceding chapters that the development of the social sciences in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been significantly shaped by key assumptions underlying postmodern forms of relating to and making sense of the world.