Socialization as Relational Reflexivity

Bibliographic Data

ID20074641
AuthorsMelanie S Archer (0000-0002-4632-775X, University of Warwick, corresponding author), Margaret S Archer
Year2015
Pages123-154
Publication date2015-06-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeCHAPTER
VenueRelational Subject (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherCambridge University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1017/cbo9781316226780.005
OpenAlexW2497805008
ISBN9781316226780
LanguageEN
Citations received3

Often the ability to state a problem is as important as the capacity to solve it. To that extent, Mead's conviction that the processes of socialization and reflexivity (which he called ‘inner conversation’) were necessarily intertwined was a breakthrough. It promised to provide leverage upon inescapable issues: how were ‘individual and society’ connected? How did the social order enter into the constitution of the human being? How was the tension between singular impulses and social normativity resolved? In his responses, Mead never relinquished his belief that the process of socialization also entailed processes of reflexive reception and reflexive reasoning on the part of subjects. This I consider to be his great achievement, despite serious doubts that his key linking mechanism between socialization and reflexivity, the ‘generalized other’, remains responsible today, as he himself came to question after the First World War. Therefore, it seems a squandering of his patrimony that those forming the line of Mead's successors – Parsons, Habermas, and Beck – should all have abandoned reflexivity in their accounts of socialization

Constitution · Dialogical self · Epistemology · Political science · Reflexive pronoun · Reflexivity · Social science · Socialization · Sociology · Contemporary Sociological Theory and Practice · Critical Realism in Sociology · Law · Management and Organizational Studies · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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