The Internal Conversation: Mediating Between Structure and Agency

Archer, Margaret (2016). The Internal Conversation: Mediating Between Structure and Agency. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: Economic and Social Research Council. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-850178

Data description (abstract)

This is a proposal for pure basic research whose aim is to contribute to the development of social theory and its central problem of structure and agency. Basically this problem derives from two facts. Firstly, every facet of social structure (eg distributions of resources, the array of roles or social positions, organisations, institutions and systems) is dependent upon the activity of people. Such features derive from the actions of people and are only influential through people, by affecting their activities. However,the properties of structures (eg centralisation) are quite different from those of people (who cannot be centralised),whilst people have their own properties (eg reflection),which no structure can possess.The problem therefore is to explain how structures and agents,as two very different entities, can interact and shape one another. This central issue is also known as the problem of individual and society, or more technically as the problem of the micro-macro-linkage. If it is the interplay between two sets of different characteristics that explains the outcome,then we have to give an account of this interplay itself. That account will be in terms of a process. How do structural factors impinge upon agents,such as to be able to influence their actions? How do agents respond to such social factors,such as to reproduce or to change them? In terms of the last two questions, realist social theory has been much more successful in explaining how structural factors impinge upon us as agents. They do so by shaping the situations that we confront in society, especially our natal social context, which we acquire involuntarily. Such shaping means that from a given social position,some courses of action are easy and rewarding,whilst others are difficult and costly. These are usually termed enablements and constraints. Logically,of course, an enablement requires something to enable and a constraint something to constrain. In general,these somethings have been taken out of the hands of the agent and assumed to be his or her objective interests. What this objective account completely omits is the effect of one of the key properties pertaining to people, namely their subjective reflexivity. In other words,they can deliberate about what they care for most in society,about what courses of action are appropriate to achieve their goals,and about what difficulties they are prepared to try to surmount etc. This process of inner deliberation by agents about society has been neglected in modern social theory. It is what the present proposal seeks to redress - by examining peoples internal conversations. For it is how they consider their personal concerns in relation to the social contexts they inhabit (or that are available to them) that ultimately accounts for exactly what they do. This is held to be the missing link between individual and society; it is the process by which structural influences are mediated through agents. Without reference to this process, sociology has to settle for empirical generalisations about what most people do most of the time in given situations - and this is not an explanation at all because it gives no account of causality. INVESTIGATING INTERNAL CONVERSATIONS. We all talk to ourselves in our heads. Much of these internal conversations are about our personal concerns (what we care about most) in relation to our social circumstances (where we are placed and whether or not to seek a change of context). All subjects believe that everyone else engages in the same type of self-talk as their own. My previous investigation showed that this was not the case (Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation,forthcoming,CUP,2003). Instead,that exploratory study revealed four quite distinct types of inner dialogue (termed modes of reflexivity),by which subjects reflect upon themselves in relation to society. There were, (a) Communicative reflexives (people whose internal conversations need to be completed and confirmed by others before they lead to action), (b) Autonomous reflexives (people who sustain complete internal conversations with themselves, leading directly to action), (c) Meta-reflexives (people who are critically reflexive about their own internal conversations, critical of society,and about the possibility of effective action) and, (d) Fractured reflexives (people who cannot conduct a purposeful internal conversation, but go round in circles of ever-increasing distress and disorientation). There is also the possibility that another mode(s) of reflexivity exists, one not picked up in the earlier study. Much more needs to be known about these forms of internal conversation than could be established from the above study, based upon only twenty people. The most important issues remain to be investigated.

Downloads

Altmetric