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.

'In critiquing the theory of reflexive modernity, Archer provides a valuable service in questioning such a focus … This is 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 Source: Journal of Critical Realism

'… an important and welcome critique …'

Jonathan Joseph Source: Journal of Critical Realism