1. Reflexivity and Culture
Theorising culture as mediatory

2. Prioritising
Deciding
Rehearsing
Worrying
Imagining
Budgeting
Reliving
Planning
Archer (2007) defines reflexivity as “the regular exercise of the
mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves
in relation to their social contexts and vice versa”.

3. • Reflexivity manifests itself through the internal conversation i.e. the
conversations we have with ourselves, silently and internally, rather than
with external others.
• Such conversations are a mundane part of our daily lives and, Archer
suggests, this very „everyday‟ quality may account for the process involved
attracting such little theoretical or empirical scrutiny.
• In fact she argues that this capacity for reflexivity, which the internal
conversation embodies, mediates between structure and agency.
• Through internal conversation an individual subjectively determines their
practical projects in relation to their objective circumstances i.e. through
such inner deliberations an individual takes stock of the situation they
confront, as well as their own desires and concerns, before deciding on a
course of action.
• Structural phenomena (e.g. the credit crunch), are confronted by people
through the situations they shape for agency (e.g. the unavailability of
credit) and it is through the internal conversations of the individuals
impacted that objective circumstances come to shape subjective projects
(e.g. an individual decides to rent rather than buy a property because of the
newfound unavailability of financing).

4. Culture as Mediation
• The interface between objectivity and subjectivity is crucial to
sociological explanation.
• Without an account of the specificity of each domain, we are left
with what Derek Layder calls „conceptual singularities‟ and their
„black holes‟
▫ as he puts it, “the argument that the social world can be represented by
conceptual singularities means that the black holes that surround them
„eat up‟ large chunks of social reality and leave us with a severely
impoverished, emptied-out vision of the social world”.
• Instead he advocates “mediating concepts” which “reflect a dual
emphasis on the effects of objective and subjective aspects of social
life”.
• Archer‟s recent work has begun this process for structure.
• My research is an attempt to do the same thing for culture.
• This presentation is a first attempt to sketch out some of the ideas
for what will be my main theory chapter.

5. Socio-Cultural Interaction The Cultural System
Causal relations between people Logical relations between ideas
Relations of power / influence / persuasion Karl Popper‟s world 3
Freely chosen / forced upon us Different degrees of ideational diversity in different
environments
What does this mean for the life of the subject?
1. The webs of relationships – both chosen and
given – which a subject is embedded within.
2. The ideas sought by the subject and the ideas
available to the subject.
How does the practice of reflexivity relate to the
socio-cultural and the cultural system? Are
there clear patterns in this relationship?

6. Webs of Interlocution Propositional Culture
Change in the self Ideas as cognitive frames
Change in the other Ideas as reflexive resources
Change in the network The ideational environment
Generic Process:
Cultural Mediation by Reproductive or
Reproduction or the Person Transformatory
Transformation (different Action
modalities)
Webs of interlocution Webs of interlocution
(stasis / change) (self/other/network)
Propositional culture Propositional culture
(stasis / change) (framing / reflexive /
environmental)
Initiation Mediation

7. My PhD Research
• A longitudinal study of reflexivity and culture in
the lives of 20 students at a British university
• Termly interviews over the course of their degree
• Developing social theory in an iterative fashion.
• Refining my theoretical account over time in
dialogue with my empirical data.