The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity
The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity
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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.
- 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
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
Product details
June 2012Hardback
9781107020955
352 pages
234 × 156 × 20 mm
0.7kg
25 b/w illus.
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.
