This post will be a starting point, with three following posts. The posts will cover:
(1) A first post, that touches upon Giddens’s focus on the meta-reflexive and contextual discontinuity (Archer 1995: 116; Mutch 2004: 430). Giddens emphasises a strong agential capacity and wholesale reflexivity, characteristic of modernity itself. He states “What is characteristic of modernity is not just an embracing of the new for its own sake–which of course includes reflection upon the nature of reflection itself” (Giddens 1990: 38). However, is it, as Archer argues, that the “victims of educational discrimination are not victimized by their lack of ‘discursive penetration’ of the situation in which they find themselves.” (Archer 1995: 116)
(2) The above approach follows from Giddens’s own structuration theory, with a theoretical inadequacy that follows from its conceptualisation of structure – there is no context as ontologically antecedent to agential capacities and capabilities.
(3) From the above two points, it can be argued that New Labour’s policy ethos of a reflexive and quasi-disembedded ‘aspiring’ learner, with personalised ‘needs’ and learning, shares an affinity with Giddens’s meta-reflexive (especially when he speaks of a “re-distribution of possibilities” and “the cultivation of human potential”). Similarly is the case with educational institutions as reflexive service providers. However, in this age of an instrumentalist bias of education, can we really speak of a wholesale reflexivity?
Based on the above three themes, I intend to follow with a critique of Giddens’ theory of reflexive modernity, but with a theoretical engagement of its foundations. What hopefully follows is a series of posts on reflexivity and the subsequent emergence of social actors, with structured roles. The focus will henceforth be on the reflexive deliberation of concerns, that agents take for themselves, but asks how does this arise qua reflexivity and relational selfhood (considering constraints and enablements).
