This chapter acts as master of ceremonies, making the introductions and inviting various guests to take the floor. The proposition introduced is that regular conduct of each kind of internal conversation generates a patterning of social mobility over the life courses of its practitioners. Making that connection entails: (1) defining the three modes of reflexivity to be examined; (2) detailing their linkages to different combinations of ‘social contexts and personal concerns’; (3) delineating how differently the three kinds of internal conversationalists conduct their encounters with constraints and enablements, both structural and cultural; and (4) describing the distinctive trajectories of social mobility characterising their work biographies. Instead of working through these points formally, we will meet a communicative, an autonomous and a meta-reflexive and let their narratives cover the ground.

To engage in one form of internal conversation more than any other is to have a particular life of the mind, which thinks about the self in relation to society and vice versa in a particular way. Folk psychology does not endorse this. On the contrary, most people assume that how they talk to themselves is similar to everybody else's self-talk. This is not the case. Therefore, each reader is intimate with his or her own form of inner dialogue but cannot justifiably presume it to be universal or necessarily common even to their friends and colleagues. Instead, to understand other modes of reflexivity we have to enter into the subjective landscapes of others.