Overview of the Book

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.

Key Concepts

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.

Historical and Modern Perspectives

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.