The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity

What do young people want from life? This book shows how the 'internal conversation' guides individual choices.

Margaret S. Archer (Author)

9781107020955, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 3 May 2012

352 pages, 25 b/w illus.
23.4 x 15.6 x 2 cm, 0.7 kg

'… an important and welcome critique …' Jonathan Joseph, Journal of Critical Realism

This book completes Margaret Archer's trilogy investigating the role of reflexivity in mediating between structure and agency. What do young people want from life? Using analysis of family experiences and life histories, her argument respects the properties and powers of both structures and agents and presents the 'internal conversation' as the site of their interplay. In unpacking what 'social conditioning' means, Archer demonstrates the usefulness of 'relational realism'. She advances a new theory of relational socialisation, appropriate to the 'mixed messages' conveyed in families that are rarely normatively consensual and thus cannot provide clear guidelines for action. Life-histories are analysed to explain the making and breaking of the various modes of reflexivity. Different modalities have been dominant from early societies to the present and the author argues that modernity is slowly ceding place to a 'morphogenetic society' as meta-reflexivity now begins to predominate, at least amongst educated young people.

Introduction
1. A brief history of how reflexivity becomes imperative
2. The reflexive imperative versus habits and habitus
3. Re-conceptualizing socialization as 'relational reflexivity'
4. Communicative reflexivity and its decline
5. Autonomous reflexivity: the new spirit of social enterprise
6. Meta-reflexives: critics of market and state
7. Fractured reflexives: casualties of the reflexive imperative
Conclusion
Methodological appendix.

Subject Areas: Social, group or collective psychology [JMH], Social theory [JHBA]