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Look Inside The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity

The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity

$46.99 (P)

Author: Margaret S. Archer, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Date Published: May 2012
availability: Available
format: Paperback
isbn: 9781107605275

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About the Authors

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 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 different 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.
- Margaret Archer is one of Europe's leading sociologists with a worldwide reputation
- Brings Archer's influential work on 'reflexivity' to bear on young people's view of the world and how they make choices
- Provides a new history of reflexivity (how people see their place in the world), never attempted before
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Reviews & endorsements
"In critiquing the theory of reflexive modernity, Archer provides a valuable service in questioning such a focus … an important and welcome critique insofar as it argues, in contrast to reflexive modernization theory, that structural and cultural changes are behind this trend."
Jonathan Joseph, Journal of Critical Realism

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Product details
- Date Published: May 2012
- format: Paperback
- isbn: 9781107605275
- length: 352 pages
- dimensions: 228 x 153 x 16 mm
- weight: 0.56kg
- contains: 25 b/w illus.
- availability: Available
Table of Contents
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.
Look Inside
Author
Margaret S. Archer, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
Margaret S. Archer is Professor in Social Theory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and Directrice of its Centre d'Ontologie Sociale. She was Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick from 1979 until 2010. She has written over twenty books including Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility (2007), Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (2003) and Being Human: The Problem of Agency (2000).