What is it about?
How do social structures effect the ways in which people reflect on their world? A very rich account of types of reflexivity has been presented by the social theorist Margaret Archer, but it is possible that her account downplays the influence of factors like education on the shaping of these approaches.
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Why is it important?
The tension between individual and collective agency and the social context in which it is exercised in a recurring theme in social theory. Education is a powerful force shaping capacities for reflection but Margaret Archer's work, perhaps oddly for somebody who started as a sociologist of education, tends to ignore the contributions of writers like Basil Bernstein. This article, while accepting the broad parameters of Archer's approach, seeks to redress the balance a little.
Perspectives
While I find the work of Basil Bernstein complex and often difficult in the way it is expressed, it has always seemed to me rather neglected. I have previously explored its value in looking at management education and the ways in which different backgrounds shape responses to educational content. I am a great admirer of the work of Margaret Archer, but it does seem to me in more recent forms to lean rather too much towards individual reflexivity and to rather neglect the practices which condition its formation and use.
Dr Alistair Mutch
Nottingham Trent University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Constraints on the Internal Conversation: Margaret Archer and the Structural Shaping of Thought, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, December 2004, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5914.2004.00257.x.
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