The main goal of this article is to analyse the relationship between reflexivity and action along three axes.The first entails the discussion of a reflexive action model that explores the combination of factors, processes and mechanisms which explain the guiding role reflexivity can play with regard to practices, in specific circumstances. The second axis concerns situations in which reflexivity does not act as an orientation mechanism and may even have the opposite effect, as a source of disorientation and paralysis of practices. The third relates to the production of social change and reproduction that may arise from the exercise of reflexivity. The whole discussion points to the mediation role that reflexivity assumes in the relationship between structure and agency, i.e. in the way structural enablements and constraints are received, filtered and mobilised by subjects in the subjective definition and reflexive implementation of their personal projects.
Margaret Archer’s work suggests that reflexivity is exercised through internal dialogues, in which subjects talk to themselves in order to clarify ideas, mull over problems, make plans, and take decisions. The present article argues that the exercise of reflexive competences is not limited to the privacy of individual minds, but that there is also an external component, which can lend the concept a broader analytical scope. Using the results of qualitative research focused on the social mechanisms of personal reflexivity, including biographical interviews, the article examines two other modalities of exercising reflexivity: external conversations in interaction contexts and writing practices (autobiographical, creative, communicational, and organisational). It also looks at the differential activation of reflexivity according to both the subjects’ different positions in social space and inter- and intra-contextual variations.
In some of the sociological production of recent decades, the popularity of individualisation theories has resulted in conceptually undifferentiated notions in the analysis of social change. Destandardisation, de-institutionalisation and pluralisation, on the one hand, and reflexivity, agency and action, on the other, are concepts that are frequently used interchangeably, self-evidently and without differentiation. In the social science literature, they often assume the almost incontestable status of a premise, instead of that of an object or empirical hypothesis. Rebutting this approach, in this article, the hypothesis that the process of de-standardising the life course as a growing mass phenomenon has little empirical evidence to support it, is postulated and confirmed. The exercise of reflexivity as an exclusively contemporary practice, mobilised homogeneously by all social groups is also questioned. On the basis of European and Portuguese samples, both statistical and content analyses of biographical sequences and narratives are employed.
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