As is often the case, to come to the end of a book is to start the next one. Thisis so here because a small qualitative study, which cannot pretend to berepresentative even of university students within one institution, furnishes nobasis for inferential statistics and no justification for extrapolation to theincreasingly varied groups constituting the population of Britain. However, as atheoretico-empirical study, what it does provide is food for further theoreticalconsideration; for something between unregulated speculation and theoreticalpropositions warranted by empirical substantiation. In short, the findingspresented have implications worth entertaining in theorizing about futuretransformations of the social order. Their examination is itself a response tothe ‘situational logic of opportunity’, since it too involves anexploration of ‘contingent compatibilities’ that are the ultimateconstituents of the increase in ‘variety’ today.

The patterns and processes involved in the making and breaking of reflexivity– the dominant mode developed, practised and sometimes fractured –amongst this small cohort of sociology students is summarized in Figure 8.1below. These are largely qualitative findings about educated young people inlate modernity. Tempting as these findings are for hypothesis formation, variousforms of inference or extrapolation simply cannot be supported from theempirical work undertaken and presented in chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7: (i) from theinterviewed group to the rest of the entrance cohort, because interviewees werevolunteers, self-selected rather than being matched with the larger group intheir composition; (ii) from the interviewees to students entering the sameuniversity at the same time to study other disciplines or courses, partly againbecause of self-selection but also partly because of different entryrequirements and a penumbra of factors which influenced their possession; (iii)from the Warwick interviewees to those at other British universities, where thedefinition of sociology, desiderata for entrants, and therepute of different institutions contributed to defining different populationsat point of entry; (iv) from those interviewed to the same age cohort in theBritish population and so forth. These are very real limitations but they do notnecessarily entail the banal conclusion that ‘there is need for muchfurther research’ and no more can be said.