Journal of Critical Realism

ISSN: 1476-7430 (Print) 1572-5138 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/yjcr20

Making Our Way Through the World: Human

Reflexivity and Social Mobility. By Margaret S.
Archer

Andrew Sayer

To cite this article: Andrew Sayer (2009) Making Our Way Through the World: Human
Reflexivity and Social Mobility. By Margaret S. Archer, Journal of Critical Realism, 8:1, 113-123,
DOI: 10.1558/jocr.v8i1.113

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Published online: 21 Apr 2015.

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Review

Andrew Sayer.1 Making Our Way Through the World: Human Reflexivity and
Social Mobility. By Margaret S. Archer. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007. 352 pp. 978-0521696937 paperback, £18.99.

The idea that people are active agents rather than passive products of social
forces is hardly new or controversial, but the novelty of Margaret Archer’s con-
tribution is in studying how this happens by conducting empirical research
to find out how people talk to themselves about their situations and con-
cerns. The first ventures in this topic were introduced in her previous book,
Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation,2 which was itself a continuation
of the major theoretical project on structure and agency in social science
that she developed through her earlier books, Realist Social Theory,3 Culture
and Agency4 and Being Human.5 Making Our Way Through the World (hereafter
MOWTTW) shows its author to be not only the leading critical realist social
theorist but a major innovator in substantive social research.
The book focuses on the everyday reflexivity of ordinary individuals.
She defines this 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’ (p. 4). More prosaically, it involves people talking to them-
selves; or more specifically, doing any of 10 things: mulling things over,
planning, imagining, deciding, rehearsing, reliving, prioritising, holding
imaginary conversations, budgeting (can I afford the money or time to do
x?) and clarifying things (p. 91).
Despite the fact that we all do all or most of these, and despite their
undeniable importance to us, it is extraordinary that social research has
taken scarcely any interest in internal conversations, either theoretically or
empirically. In the research for her previous book, Archer not only began

1
Department of Sociology, Bowland North, Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YT
UK, a.sayer@lancaster.ac.uk.
2
M. S. Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003).
3
M. S. Archer, Realist Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
4
M. S. Archer, Culture and Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 [2nd
edn, 1996]).
5
M. S. Archer, Being Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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114 REVIEWS

to theorise the nature of this reflexivity but took the simple yet bold step of
actually asking people about their internal conversations.6 Before reading
about this research I guess I would have expected such a venture to fall flat.
Yet, far from being an unproductive fishing expedition, Archer’s questioning
has uncovered material which is fascinating both from sociological and per-
sonal points of view, yielding many more insights into social processes and
the relation between individual and society than one might have expected.
The basic theoretical rationale derives from the author’s earlier work on
structure and agency. It is the proposition that social structures and events
do not act upon individuals without some conscious mediation by them.
Contrary to what she terms the ‘hydraulic model’ of social processes, indi-
viduals are not simply and passively moulded by constraints and enable-
ments. Rather the effect or lack of effect of such contexts depends on the
active mediation of individuals monitoring and deliberating on their situ-
ation. Internal conversations mediate ‘the role that objective structural or
cultural powers play in influencing social action and are thus indispensable
to explaining social outcomes’ (p. 5). In other words, circumstances need to
be interpreted by individuals if they are to have an effect, and their effect
will depend on how they are interpreted, and this in turn depends upon how
individuals relate them to their subjectively defined concerns. Thus, our
internal conversations enable us to make our way through the world.
In conventional social science, individual reflexivity is treated either as
a nuisance or a threat. For positivists, it is a source of ‘noise’ obscuring the
quantitative regularities which they hope to find amongst measurable vari-
ables. For economists it is reduced to rational choice as maximisation of
self-interest on the basis of given preference structures in relation to prices.
Psycho-analysis focuses on the unconscious and the repressed rather than the
more prosaic matter of how we talk to ourselves. For structuralist and post-
structuralist determinists it is heretical to acknowledge lay reflexivity without
immediately neutralising it, so that even ‘work on the self ’ is basically doing
the work of society. For much run-of-the-mill sociology it is something that
one must either ignore or reduce to the effects of social context.
Whereas much social theory assumes a two-stage model in which objec-
tive circumstances are responded to by actors in terms of assumed subjec-
tive properties that are imputed to them, such as vested interests or the
dispositions of their habitus, Archer proposes a three-stage model: (1) there
are structural and cultural properties that objectively shape the contexts in
which individuals act; (2) subjects have their own constellations of concerns,
as subjectively defined, whether in relation to nature (e.g. health), prac-

6
Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation.

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tice (e.g. work, sport), or the social; and (3) ‘courses of action are produced
through the reflexive deliberations of subjects who subjectively determine their
practical projects in relation to their objective circumstances’ (p. 17; original
emphasis). In so doing, she explicitly opposes the tendency of social scien-
tists to reduce (2) to products of (1) through various forms of determinism. A
wide range of well-known approaches in social science – from rational choice
theory, to structural determinism, to post-structualist discourse determin-
ism, through to Bourdieu’s ‘Pascalian’ approach, emphasizing the habitus,
are therefore rejected. While structural and cultural contexts constrain and
enable, they only do so insofar as individuals try to do things. To be sure,
their concerns and projects are constructed out of available materials and
encouraged or discouraged by various influences, but they are made reflex-
ively and actively by individuals within open systems, so novelty is always
possible.
In working with a two-stage model, sociologists replace the first-person
perspective and deliberations of individuals with a third-person perspective
that imputes various properties to them, usually in relation to their social
context. ‘In consequence, anything that might count as genuine human sub-
jectivity evaporates’ (p. 6). Thus, socialisation within one kind of context is
assumed to produce a ‘deferential worker’, while another kind of context
produces the utility-maximising market actor. I have to say that as someone
who came to sociology mid-career, it still bothers me that sociologists seem-
ingly take pleasure in this demeaning reductionism, seeing it as enlarging
the scope and status of their discipline, while scarcely noticing that they
have to exempt themselves from such an account. Thus while others inter-
nalise conventions or are ventriloquised by discourses, sociologists them-
selves are somehow capable of reflecting on what’s going on and avoiding
such determinism. This produces not only theory-practice contradictions
but thoroughly alienated and alienating accounts of social life, although
often this resistance to any humanism is seen as a virtue. Archer cites Sydney
Shoemaker’s observation that society would be impossible if people could
only comprehend mental states in a third-person manner and lacked the
reflexive self-awareness that any belief or intention or other thought could
pertain to themselves. Even thoroughly routine, traditional practices require
reflexivity to keep them going in the face of an environment that is never
entirely stable and predictable.
There is an interesting discussion of the elusive general nature of inter-
nal conversation, and whether it depends on natural language and how it
differs from external conversation. Notable here are its highly abbreviated
and personalised form, the lack of censorship and need to consider others’

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reactions, and the difficulties of conveying its content and form in public
language. These indicate the truly first-person character of inner speech.
It would hardly be consistent to emphasize this first-person character
of internal conversations and then proceed to give entirely third-person
accounts of them, and accordingly the book gives a prominent place to
individuals’ own accounts of their internal conversations in their own first-
person voices, though as we have just noted, these accounts are not the
same as the internal conversations themselves. This means additionally,
that in place of the usual dryness of so much social theory, we encounter
individuals’ biographies in their wonderful colour and variety, complexity
and surprises. This is therefore an unusually engaging book that is bound
to prompt readers to reflect on their own biographies and wonder just how
they have made their way through the world.
The empirical research itself was conducted in Coventry with the aid of
two doctoral students, and aimed to obtain a cross-section of the local pop-
ulation. The sample of 174 people was intended to provide a framework
from which to select subjects for in-depth interviewing, not as the basis for
making claims about some wider population but for the purpose of conduct-
ing exploratory qualitative research on a diverse range of people. Interviews
with the larger sample, followed by quantitative analysis of the findings,
enabled the selection of 12 ‘clear practitioners of each dominant mode of
reflexivity’ for further in-depth interviewing.

Modes of Reflexivity
Perhaps the most interesting finding of the research, albeit one introduced
in the author’s previous book, is that while everyone engages in internal con-
versations, and in most of the 10 different forms, they do so in different ways.
There are different ‘modes of reflexivity’. While each individual engages in all
the different modes of reflexivity at some time or other, one mode tends to be
dominant – and which one is dominant differs by individual. Furthermore, it
appears that individuals’ social circumstances influence which mode becomes
dominant for them. The modes do not, therefore, appear to be simply prod-
ucts of different kinds of personality. Four modes are identified: communica-
tive, autonomous, meta-reflexive and fractured.
The internal conversations of communicative reflexives tend to be relatively
truncated because they try out their thoughts with familiar interlocuters
before they have formed them much, and rarely rely purely on their own
judgement. They engage in little long-term planning, but ‘take each day as
it comes’. They have usually experienced relative stability in their lives, or

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‘contextual continuity’, and thus tend to have a stable set of ‘similars and
familiars’ with whom they can discuss their thoughts. Such interlocuters are
likely to have similar experience and hence to present a rather limited set of
views about the past, present and future. However, Archer emphasizes that
they don’t just passively accept what is available, as a Bourdieusian account
would tend to suggest, but rather actively choose it, and resist change, includ-
ing upward mobility. It is not just that they do not choose to pursue upward
mobility (‘refusing what they are refused’, as Bourdieu would say), but that
even if they find themselves becoming upwardly mobile, they consciously
try to return to base, as it were (so they refuse what they are offered if it takes
them away from the world of their interlocuters). When they do find a job
that they are comfortable with, it tends to be with others who are similar in
background, and they tend to use their job to extend their circle of interloc-
utors. Above all, it is their relationships which matter most to them, whether
in their jobs or elsewhere. They tend to be uninterested in politics or in
joining in social activities outside their circle of friends, and have a fatalistic
view of external pressures and events; indeed they have ‘a deep indifference
towards the institutions of civil society’ (p. 282). Archer argues that they are
like this not because they are tightly constrained by social structures but
rather that their mode of reflexivity doesn’t lead them to act in ways which
collide with and activate those constraints. Their choice is not one of res-
ignation to limited opportunities but of actively embracing and cultivating
their immediate relationships.
Autonomous reflexives engage in continual internal conversations and
prefer to act on their ideas with little or no consultation with others. The
subject of their deliberations tends to be planning – working out the means
towards their chosen projects or ends, rather than the evaluation of those
ends in themselves. It is not only that they know what they want without
consulting others, but they know what they want, full stop; their main focus
is on how to achieve it. Compared to the communicative reflexives, they
tend to have experienced contextual discontinuity in their early lives, thus
limiting possibilities for intersubjective dialogue with similars and famil-
iars, and throwing them back on their own resources, although the empiri-
cal research shows that often the individuals in part actively choose to do
so. Interestingly, practical activities which involve extensive solitary practice
and reflexive monitoring, like hobbies and skills, figure prominently in the
concerns and projects of autonomous reflexives. Not surprisingly, they often
become upwardly mobile, and self-employment is common, although they
see jobs as means to their ends rather than ends in themselves. They seek
to circumvent constraints and take advantage of opportunities, though, as
always, the relation between context, projects and action is open and sus-

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ceptible to contingencies. They tend to be individualistic and see society

in relation to their own projects and do not involve themselves in political
movements unless they relate to these.
Meta-reflexives also indulge in constant reflection and do so without seeking
the judgements of others, but the content of their ruminations differs in that
it tends to be less about how to achieve a given goal – though of course, like
anyone, they have to do this sometimes – but more about what goals or ends
they should pursue, and how they should prioritise them. What they value
most is values, and whereas the deliberations of the autonomous reflexives
terminate in decisions, the meta-reflexives never finalise their evaluations. In
so doing they question what others simply accept, and therefore tend not to
find many others with whom to share their thoughts. It seems that it is not so
much contextual discontinuity but contextual incongruity that encourages this
kind of reflexivity, although meta-reflexives tend to reinforce it, continually
finding their social context wanting. In response they seek lateral mobility in
search of a role in life that fits with their own values. In being more critical
than most, of the constraints and conventions that surround them, they do
not respond to the incentives and opportunities that others accept. They are
not satisfied with merely finding a way of circumventing constraints or get-
ting opportunities but want to change those constraints and opportunities.
Not surprisingly, as society’s critics, they tend to be more involved in civil
society than others, engaging in voluntary organisations and politics – albeit
social movements rather than mainstream politics.
Finally, fractured reflexives are those whose internal conversations fail to
yield any answers to their questions and any successful courses of action.
This may be a mode that many fall into for some periods of their lives in
response to crises, though for some it is more persistent. Discussion of indi-
viduals with this mode of reflexivity is reserved for another book.
In her initial research on internal conversations, Archer suggested that
whether one became a communicative or autonomous or meta-reflexive
– or more simply a communicative or non-communicative reflexive – was
related to the presence or absence of ‘contextual discontinuities’ in one’s
life, especially early on. Thus, events such as the death of a parent or divorce
or geographical mobility might limit possible similars and familiars and
hence prevent communicative reflexivity working, thus throwing individu-
als back on their own resources. The research for MOWTTW suggests that
this is too simple, and that there is instead a more dialectical relationship
between individuals’ concerns and their contexts, so that to some extent they
endorsed or rejected their contexts. Thus, a stable context did not necessar-
ily lead to compliance, for individuals might find it uncongenial.

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It is easy – perhaps too easy – to relate all this to people we know, and to
certain popular and sociological stereotypes. Most academics I know seem
to be meta-reflexives. Many non-academics I know at work seem to be com-
municative reflexives, while self-employed business people and technicians
tend to be autonomous reflexives. In so doing it is tempting to align dif-
ferent kinds of reflexivity with class and gender. However, one of the most
interesting and challenging findings of the empirical research is that these
modes of reflexivity do not seem to correlate with class or gender (pp. 96–7),
though those with more advanced educational qualifications tended to
endorse meta and autonomous modes of reflexivity. Thus, the warm world
of the communicative reflexives who check out their thoughts with their
particular similars and familiars several times a day is not limited to female
members of settled working-class families, but is also found in some middle-
class men and women. Likewise, there are working-class male and female,
and middle-class female as well as middle-class male, autonomous reflexives.
One of the challenges the book presents to other researchers is to reconsider
such familiar sociological inferences. We also need to discover how far the
findings are culturally specific.
However, social change seems to be affecting modes of reflexivity.
‘Reflexive modernisation’ has recently been a popular theme in social
theory, and Archer offers a critique of this work both as regards its treatment
of reflexivity and its alleged association with modernity. While reflexivity as
Archer defines it is part of being human rather than a historically specific
property, insofar as modernity implies unrelenting change and increased
geographical mobility, it suggests that contextual continuity – associated
with communicative reflexives – is declining. Quite simply, there are fewer
‘similars and familiars’ to call upon. Neoliberal capitalist economy and cul-
ture encourage and normalise autonomous reflexivity, and a strategic orien-
tation to the world. Nevertheless, in a kind of Polanyian ‘double movement’,
this cultural tendency is liable to stimulate critique from meta-reflexives, and
even the autonomous reflexives have their own agendas which are not neces-
sarily coincident with those of business.

Some Comments and Concerns

My view of this book is overwhelmingly favourable; I would recommend
it to anyone interested in sociology, social theory or critical realism.
However, I want to conclude by noting two questions and putting forward
a more major criticism, concerning the author’s critique of the concept
of habitus.

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First, regarding the typology of modes of reflexivity. These are classified

in three ways: according to whether they are (1) completed largely privately
or through conversation with others; (2) mainly about means to given ends
or about ends themselves; (3) successful in leading to appropriate action
or unsuccessful. Although the combination of these suggests eight possi-
ble actual modes, various forms of mutual reinforcement or incompatibility
among the three axes apparently limit the number of modes to four, so that,
for example, one doesn’t find communicative meta-reflexives. I would have
liked to have had a more systematic discussion of the reasons for this selec-
tiveness in the genesis of modes of reflexivity.
Secondly, although the social influences of contextual continuity, dis-
continuity and incongruity upon the modes of reflexivity that we develop
imply that the latter cannot be reduced to functions of personality at the
psychological level, one still cannot help wondering if personality does have
something to do with it, and although Archer makes occasional passing ref-
erences to personality, the issue is left hanging. Like most social scientists,
and indeed critical realist philosophers, I am embarrassingly uncertain of
how the psychological differs from and relates to the social. No doubt this is
a product of decades of disciplinary separatism and competition, but it is a
major problem for contemporary social science.
Thirdly, regarding my main criticism of the book’s argument: As we
have seen, Archer presents a powerful critique of the reductionist two-stage
model of social action, which reduces individuals’ first person reflexivity to a
set of orientations and dispositions given them by their social context. Here
Bourdieu’s concept of habitus is singled out for criticism. As I understand
the concept, the habitus refers to the set of dispositions, tastes and orienta-
tions that people develop, particularly in early life, from living and acting
within the particular relationships and environments that exist in their part
of the social field. These dispositions, when activated, produce actions which
are generally attuned to those contexts. In Bourdieu’s term, we develop a
‘feel for the game’ or games in which we have been brought up and come
to live. Just as the competent tennis player can return the ball without con-
sciously working out how to do so each time she does it, so our habitus
inclines us to act in an appropriate way. Without a habitus, it is hard to imag-
ine how we could ever be comfortable, competent actors, able to act partly
without thinking what we are doing – or indeed able to act competently, even
in a social situation, while having an internal conversation at the same time
about something else. Other things being equal, a man brought up in a high
income, high status family is likely to gain a sense of security, ease and enti-
tlement – a sense that positions of influence and pro-activity are theirs for
the taking. Hence the outraged hauteur of some upper middle-class parents

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in dealing with teachers who are not so convinced that their child is bright.
Equally, a woman brought up in a low income, low status family whose work
primarily involves serving others and taking orders from them, and who
are not valued by the dominant classes, is likely to develop a habitus which
is attuned to coping with such relations. The habitus is gendered as well as
classed; femininity and masculinity are very much embodied, evident in the
subtleties of demeanour and bodily hexis that are easy to recognise visually,
but hard to describe. For me, the habitus is most evident when we find our-
selves in unfamiliar social situations, having to talk with others who have a
different habitus, and with whom we feel awkward or even stupid, not know-
ing what to say, and feeling that we do not fit in. To be sure, the habitus can
change as we get used to new social environments, but this takes time and
is often only partially accomplished; hence, the common phenomenon of
upwardly mobile people of working-class origin, who, despite evidence of
their success, still don’t quite believe they belong and feel that one day they
will be ‘found out’. Even though they know, through their internal conversa-
tions, that they have ‘made it’, the feeling doesn’t quite go away.
Our habitus is evident not only in our habits, dispositions and tastes, but
in our embodied skills and responses, and these can be not merely adap-
tive, but – pace Archer – creative. No two games of tennis are the same, and
indeed the skills learned in one sport may help one in another; the disposi-
tions of the habitus are transposable. But Bourdieu can rightly be accused
of having a dismissive view of lay reflexivity, although this appears to have
softened in his later years, and indeed his collaborative work, The Weight
of the World, mainly consists of transcripts of interviews with people talking
about how they make sense of the world in their internal conversations.7
If we go back to his example of the competent tennis player, such an indi-
vidual does not gain her skill simply through unmonitored osmosis but has
to concentrate and reflect on what she is doing, so that she can take correc-
tive action when she realises she is doing something wrong. To be sure, she
can’t do a review and plan each time she hits a backhand, but she can go
away and work on it if she finds that she’s been over-hitting it. I agree with
Archer that Bourdieu assumes too close a fit between habitus and habitat, as
if we could simply adjust to any situation, however awful. I also accept that
his view of action is far too strategic and fails to acknowledge the importance
of individual concerns about internal goods and their evaluation.8 However,

7
P. Bourdieu et al., The Weight of the World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999); P. Bourdieu,
Pascalian Meditations (Cambridge: Polity, 2000).
8
A. Sayer, The Moral Significance of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005).

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like Nicos Mouzelis, I feel we should be able to find a way of combining con-
cepts of habitus and individual reflexivity. Abdelmayak Sayad’s book The
Suffering of the Immigrant (edited and completed by Bourdieu) does just this
in a moving account of fractured reflexivity.9 I think it’s an overstatement
to say that ‘the efficacy of any social property is at the mercy of the subjects’
reflexive activity’ (p. 12). Yes we do monitor and mediate many social influ-
ences, but much still gets in below our radar.
In so far as Archer allows any role for the concept of habitus, it is in
more stable societies than our own, and she argues that the progressive
de-routinisation of life produced by high modernity increasingly consigns
it to history, by removing the contextual continuity required for its acquisi-
tion, so that we can scarcely form, let alone rely on, the durable disposi-
tions that make up a habitus. Yet most children still have enough continuity
in their relations and experiences to adjust to them – the familiar home,
the dull routine of school, the daily reminders of their class and gender
position. While there probably is an increase in contextual discontinuity
there is still plenty of stability, and they could hardly become competent
social actors if they did not develop a feel for familiar games. Think of
the countless demonstrations and reiterations of the importance of being
a ‘proper’ boy or a girl, so that even where individuals encounter feminist
ideas and role models and, through their internal conversations, come to
accept them, it takes considerable time and repeated practice to alter their
dispositions, responses, and habits of thought, so that acting differently
becomes second nature rather than difficult, self-conscious and awkward.
Further, the habitus continues to loom large even in the midst of contextual
discontinuity. It might seem, for example, that the rise of marital break-up
and serial ‘re-partnering’ must signal the end of the habitus, but the online
dating agencies that increasingly help people do this depend on their abil-
ity to get users to present themselves in their profiles in ways which enable
others to estimate whether their habitus (and mode of reflexivity!) will be
compatible with their own. Nor are mobility and habitus incompatible. The
well-travelled middle-class student develops a habitus which is attuned to
geographical mobility, and though they may confidently think that they
‘can get on with anyone’ and are beyond class, less mobile working-class
students can easily identify their middle-class habitus as different from
their own.
In the first chapter, Archer gives examples of young people, who through
the reflexive pursuit of their projects in their structural context, were all
socially mobile in various ways, and concludes that ‘These are not Bourdieu’s

9
A. Sayad, The Suffering of the Immigrant (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), ch. 7.

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people …’. She also ends the book with other examples, designed to make
the same point. Ideally, one would have to know more about these individu-
als, and preferably, meet them, to be able to assess this claim, but in the
absence of such information, with the exception of an upwardly Romanian
immigrant, all of the characters, including the non-conformists, seemed to
be exhibiting precisely that sense of security, enterprise and entitlement that
mark the middle-class habitus. To be sure, we (and I include myself) need to
pay more attention to individual reflexivity and the extent to which people
do indeed make their way through the world, but I remain convinced as ever
of the continuing influence of the habitus.
More generally, at least for the purposes of making generalisations
about major social processes, I would suggest the two-stage model still has
its uses. Can we not say, for example, at least as approximations, things such
as ‘a liberal capitalist society tends to produce self-interested, instrumen-
tally rational individuals’? Such generalisations, which omit the mediation
of the reflexive agent, are only a problem if we assume that no more needs
to be said. However, we can take them as provisional generalisations and
go on to show that actually some things people do in such societies are not
merely self-interested and instrumentally rational, and that this is not only
because such societies are never wholly liberal and capitalist but always con-
tain other structuring forces, such as those of families, but because individu-
als are reflexive and actively define and select actions.
Notwithstanding these queries and objections, I want to conclude by
underlining the importance of this book. In addition to the intrinsically
engaging nature of its subject matter, Making Our Way Through the World
represents a major challenge to sociological orthodoxies, both old and new.
It contributes invaluable insights into both substantive and methodological
and theoretical matters. It deals with a subject that sociological imperial-
ism prefers to ignore, at the cost of making its picture of the social world
an alienated one in which we cannot fully recognise ourselves as subjects. I
hope the challenge will be taken up!

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2009.