The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity
Cambridge University Press, 5/3/2012
EAN 9781107020955, ISBN10: 1107020956
Hardcover, 352 pages, 23 x 15.6 x 2.2 cm
Language: English
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.