What do young people want from life? This book shows how the 'internal conversation' guides individual choices.

What do young people want from life? This book shows how the 'internal conversation' guides individual choices.

This volume examines the reasons for intensified social change after 1980; a peaceful process of a magnitude that is historically unprecedented. It examines the kinds of novelty that have come about through morphogenesis and the elements of stability that remain because of morphostasis. It is argued that this pattern cannot be explained simply by ‘acceleration’. Instead, we must specify the generative mechanism(s) involved that underlie and unify ordinary people’s experiences of different disjunctions in their lives. The book discusses the umbrella concept of ‘social morphogenesis’ and the possibility of transition to a ‘Morphogenic Society’. It examines possible ‘generative mechanisms’ accounting for the effects of ‘social morphogenesis’ in transforming previous and much more stable practices. Finally, it seeks to answer the question of what is required in order to justify the claim that Morphogenic society can supersede modernity.

How do we reflect upon ourselves and our concerns in relation to society, and vice versa? Human reflexivity works through 'internal conversations' using language, but also emotions, sensations and images. Most people acknowledge this 'inner-dialogue' and can report upon it. However, little research has been conducted on 'internal conversations' and how they mediate between our ultimate concerns and the social contexts we confront. In this book, Margaret Archer argues that reflexivity is progressively replacing routine action in late modernity, shaping how ordinary people make their way through the world. Using interviewees' life and work histories, she shows how 'internal conversations' guide the occupations people seek, keep or quit; their stances towards structural constraints and enablements; and their resulting patterns of social mobility.

Explores the relationship between structure and agency through human reflexivity and the internal conversation.

This volume explores the development and consequences of morphogenesis on normative regulation. It starts out by describing the great normative transformations from morphostasis, as the precondition of a harmonious relationship between legal validity and normative consensus in society, to morphogenesis, which tends to strongly undermine existing laws, norms, rules, rights and obligations because of the new variety it introduces. Next, it studies the decline of normative consensus resulting from the changes in the social contexts that made previous forms of normativity, based upon ‘habits, ‘habitus’ and ‘routine action’, unhelpfully misleading because they no longer constituted relevant guidelines to action. It shows how this led to the ‘Reflexive Imperative’ with subjects having to work out their own purposeful actions in relation to their objective social circumstances and their personal concerns, if they were to be active rather than passive agents. Finally, the book analyses what makes for chance in normativity, and what will underwrite future social regulation. It discusses whether it is possible to establish a new corpus of laws, norms and rules, given that intense morphogenesis denies the durability of any new stable context.

This international collection discusses how the individualised, reflexive, late modern era has changed the way we experience and act on our emotions. Divided into four sections that include studies ranging across multiple continents and centuries, Emotions in Late Modernity does the following: Demonstrates an increased awareness and experience of emotional complexity in late modernity by challenging the legal emotional/rational divide; positive/negative concepts of emotional valence; sociological/ philosophical/psychological divisions around emotion, morality and gender; and traditional understandings of love and loneliness. Reveals tension between collectivised and individualised-privatised emotions in investigating ‘emotional sharing’ and individualised responsibility for anger crimes in courtrooms; and the generation of emotional energy and achievement emotions in classrooms. Debates the increasing mediation of emotions by contrasting their historical mediation (through texts and bodies) with contemporary digital mediation of emotions in classroom teaching, collective mobilisations (e.g. riots) and film and documentary representations. Demonstrates reflexive micro and macro management of emotions, with examinations of the ‘politics of fear’ around asylum seeking and religious subjects, and collective commitment to climate change mitigation. The first collection to investigate the changing nature of emotional experience in contemporary times, Emotions in Late Modernity will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as sociology of emotions, cultural studies, political science and psychology. Chapter 2 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

Many social theorists now call themselves 'relational sociologists', but mean entirely different things by it. The majority endorse a 'flat ontology', dealing exclusively with dyadic relations. Consequently, they cannot explain the context in which relationships occur or their consequences, except as resultants of endless 'transactions'. This book adopts a different approach which regards 'the relation' itself as an emergent property, with internal causal effects upon its participants and external ones on others. The authors argue that most 'relationists' seem unaware that analytical philosophers, such as Searle, Gilbert and Tuomela, have spent years trying to conceptualize the 'We' as dependent upon shared intentionality. Donati and Archer change the focus away from 'We thinking' and argue that 'We-ness' derives from subjects' reflexive orientations towards the emergent relational 'goods' and 'evils' they themselves generate. Their approach could be called 'relational realism', though they suggest that realists, too, have failed to explore the 'relational subject'.

Confucianism and Reflexive Modernity offers an excellent example of a dialogue between East and West by linking post-Confucian developments in East Asia to a Western idea of reflexive modernity originally proposed by Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash in 1994. The author makes a sharp confrontation with the paradigm of Asian Value Debate led by Lee Kwan-Yew and defends a balance between individual empowerment and flourishing community for human rights, basically in line with Juergen Habermas, but in the context of global risk society, particularly from an enlightened perspective of Confucianism. The book is distinguished by sophisticated theoretical reflection, comparative reasoning, and solid empirical argument concerning Asian identity in transformation and the aspects of reflexive modernity in East Asia.

A revindication of the concept of humanity and the primacy of practice over language.