Reflexivity remains a cipher in social theory. Neither what it is nor what it does has received the attention necessary for producing clear concepts of reflexivity or a clear understanding of reflexivity as a social process. These two absences are closely related and mutually reinforcing. On the one hand, the fact that there is no concept of reflexivity in common currency means that just as Molière's Monsieur Jourdain spoke prose all his life without knowing it, everyone from the founding fathers, through all normal lay people, to today's social theorists have constantly been referring to reflexivity or tacitly assuming it or logically implying it under a variety of different terms.

On the other hand, because the terminology that subsumes reflexivity is so varied – from the portmanteaux concepts of academics, such as ‘consciousness’ or ‘subjectivity’, through Everyman's quotidian notion of ‘mulling things over’, to the quaint, but not inaccurate, folkloric expression ‘I says to myself says I’ – the process denoted by reflexivity has been underexplored, undertheorised and, above all, undervalued. Reflexivity is such an inescapable, though vague, pre-supposition and so tacitly, thus non-discursively, taken for granted, that it has rarely been held up for the scrutiny necessary to rectify its undervaluation as a social process. Because reflexivity has been so seriously neglected, redressing this state of affairs means making some bold moves. The intent behind the present book is finally to allow this Cinderella to go to the ball, to stay there and to be acknowledged as a partner without whom there would be no social dance.