7 - Internal conversations and their outworks
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
Summary
In this concluding part, the narrative form is exchanged for an analytical method of presentation. Narratives are good for conveying life and colour, but there is always a danger of losing the plot. Within fiction that balance is under the author's control: make the plot too evident and the novel becomes ‘formulaic’; give narrative a free rein and the book becomes slack. Where the freely given life histories of real people are concerned, control is reduced – or, at least, I think it ought to be relaxed. There is a large debt owing to the respondents, which can only be (partially) discharged by respecting them sufficiently to incorporate their precise formulations, qualifications and reservations – their own takes upon their own narratives. That lengthens subjects' contributions and displaces the burden of keeping track on to the reader. Therefore, this chapter takes a more distanced overview and attempts to synthesise the material presented in a more methodical fashion.
Modes of reflexivity are relational properties deriving from different combinations of the interplay between ‘contexts’ and ‘concerns’, but cannot be reduced to either. This type of property has internal and external effects. In other words, practising a particular kind of internal conversation – the one most common to somebody – has consequences for his or her life history. The likelihood is that it will foster a pattern of social mobility, according to the mode of reflexivity that predominates: stability, upward mobility or volatility.
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- Making our Way through the WorldHuman Reflexivity and Social Mobility, pp. 269 - 313Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007