By Meenakshi Sarkar Recently, the British Sociological Association organised a postgraduate and early career researcher regional event – Public sociology and the role of the researcher: Engagement, communication and academic activism on 29th March 2017, at the DeMontfort University, Leicester. The… Read More ›
Tag Archive for ‘reflexivity’
The Challenge of Life Planning in a Digital Age
I just got back from the CSO workshop in Paris where I gave a paper on the challenge of flourishing amidst variety. My interest is in how social digitalisation ‘opens up’ the archive, albeit in a deeply uneven way, as well the… Read More ›
Freedom from self-imposed metrified tyranny: some thoughts on the moral psychology of self-tracking
A couple of years ago I purchased a Nike Fuel Band, partly out of a curiosity driven by my nascent interest in self-tracking and partly out of a desire to rationalise not going to the gym. If I was planning… Read More ›
The micro-politics of noise and the challenge of being-with-others
Sometimes the noise other people make bothers me. I mean really pisses me off. The kind of irritation which makes it impossible to ignore the noise, leaving your attention locked in and your perceptual field narrowed until there is only… Read More ›
Tony Soprano and reflexive socialisation in late modernity
Watching the Sopranos, I was struck by what a good example this was of what Margaret Archer argues are the consequences of the intensification of social change for intergenerational socialisation: the decreasing likelihood that children will encounter occupational roles familiar… Read More ›
Routines and Reflexivity in Organisational Life
In this podcast recorded at a Centre for Social Ontology seminar in March 2014, Alistair Mutch (Nottingham Trent University) discusses routines and reflexivity in organisations. Much of the debate occasioned by the development of ideas about reflexivity and morphogenesis has… Read More ›
The burden of continual assessment in a digital age
Due to my current reliance upon a laptop that’s unsuitable for my work, I presently find myself running a disk cleaning utility on a near daily basis. It’s a very useful bit of software that very quickly wipes caches and… Read More ›
Overcoming your modernist training for constant improvement, advancement, development and accumulation
Overcoming your modernist training for constant improvement, advancement, development and accumulation. That’s what the social psychologist Kenneth Gergen advocates in the new introduction to his famous work The Saturated Self, as quoted by Harmut Rosa in Social Acceleration: I am… Read More ›
The Pleasures of Acceleration
Acceleration is often framed as a problem. Things are speeding up. We never have enough time. We’re always falling behind. These will be familiar experiences to most. While the problem is more complex than may initially appear to be the… Read More ›
The Lure of Minimalism
What is ‘lifestyle minimalism’? To a certain extent it depends upon whom you ask. It’s often talked about as a ‘tool’ to live a simpler and more meaningful life. It’s often framed in terms of reducing ‘stuff’ through sometimes extremely rigid… Read More ›
Higher Education and The Temporal Conditions for Critique
I’m aware that I probably come across like I hate Slavoj Zizek but there are many aspects of his work which I really like. My favourite is his account ofneoliberal ideology which I understand to be an argument about how subjective disavowal… Read More ›
Coping with Acceleration
I wrote recently about cognitive triage in higher education and its ramifications for personal reflexivity. My claim is that an inflation of situational demands leads subjects to prioritise the urgent, moving immediately from one necessity to another, in a way which crowds… Read More ›
Reflexivity and an interdisciplinary approach to the ‘structuring of agency
This podcast by Graham Scambler was recorded at a Centre for Social Ontology event in November 2014. Margaret Archer’s recent contributions to our understanding of reflexivity in late capitalist society provide useful resources for theorizing across the substantive domains of… Read More ›
The gaps in which being human happens
I’m currently reading Vincent Deary’s How We Are. It’s the first book in a planned trilogy exploring how people change. For the last few months I’ve had a vague idea that at some point I’d like to develop themes from my PhD… Read More ›
The agency moment
This thoughtful New York Times column by David Brooks reflects on what he terms “the agency moment”: I’ve been thinking about moments of agency of this sort because often you see people who lack full agency. Sometimes you see lack… Read More ›
Benjamin Franklin’s “club of mutual improvement”
What a lovely idea found as an aside in a post on Brainpickings – are there other examples of such “clubs”? It would be interesting to compare the rhetoric found to surround them with that found in contemporary ‘productivity’ culture: At… Read More ›
Time and Reflexivity
In Margaret Archer’s work on Reflexivity, this faculty is seen as mediating between structure and agency. Our capacity to ‘bend back’ upon ourselves, considering our circumstances in light of our commitments and vice versa, constitutes the point at which structural… Read More ›
Why are some interactions energising while others are not?
We subsume such a wide array of phenomena under the category of ‘interaction’ that we sometimes risk obscuring the diversity within this category. One important way in which interactions differ is in how energising, or otherwise, they are to the participating actors. Some interactions… Read More ›
Graham Scambler on an interdisciplinary approach to the ‘structuring of agency’ – November 11th @SocioWarwick
In the third Centre for Social Ontology seminar of 2014/15, Graham Scambler (Emeritus Professor of Medical Sociology at UCL) discusses reflexivity and an interdisciplinary approach to the ‘structuring of agency’: Margaret Archer’s recent contributions to our understanding of reflexivity in late capitalist society provide… Read More ›
Between interaction and intra-action
The notion of ‘interaction’ is well understood. Interactions are part of our everyday life. Sometimes these interactions leave us thinking about them afterwards (“what did he mean when he said that?”, “why is she always like that?” etc) and sometimes… Read More ›
The internal conversation of James Bond
Earlier this week I read Solo by William Boyd. The idea of a new James Bond novel wouldn’t have appealed to me if it had been written by anyone other than Boyd and it lived up to my expectations. One… Read More ›
Cognitive Triage on Wall Street
# / gettyimages.com What’s it like to be a junior analyst on Wall Street making $70,000 a year in your early 20s? What sort of people are drawn towards this career path? Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street’s… Read More ›
Time is always running out
I got briefly obsessed last year by the observation that at a rate of one book a week between the ages of 5 and 80, it will only be possible to read 3,900 books in a lifetime. This is a little over one… Read More ›
Self-tracking and data sensibilities
I recently blogged about the idea of the ‘qualified self’ and why I’m drawn to this phrase. As sometimes happens, I wasn’t being enormously serious when I started writing the post but had argued myself into a new position by the… Read More ›
Getting inside people’s frames: reflexivity and cultural sociology
In recent months I’ve been slowly working through some of Jeffrey Alexander’s work. I’m interested in what cultural sociology has to offer as I begin to try and extend my PhD research on internal conversation & biography into my planned post-doctoral work… Read More ›
Getting out of the mess of life
The title of this post comes from Ian Craib’s wonderful book The Importance of Disappointment, which I wrote about a couple of months ago. His concern is with a contemporary inability, pervasive to the point that we may regard it as epochal, to live… Read More ›
The Importance of Disappointment
Why disappointment? In common usage, and in the dictionary, we talk about disappointment as what happens, what we feel, when something we expect, intend, or hope for or desire does not materialise. One of the difficulties of living in our… Read More ›
Foucauldian analysis and the mystification of elites
In a recent review of The Reflexive Imperative*, Jonathon Joseph describes subjects “being encouraged to become active citizens and consumers who must make the right life choices based on acquiring the appropriate skills and information, making informed choices about risk activities, taking responsibility… Read More ›