Self and social change PDF
Preview Self and social change
Adams-3543-Prelims.qxd 4/28/2007 3:51 PM Page i SELF aanndd SOCIAL CHANGE Adams-3543-Prelims.qxd 4/28/2007 3:51 PM Page ii Adams-3543-Prelims.qxd 4/28/2007 3:51 PM Page iii SELF aanndd SOCIAL CHANGE MATTHEW ADAMS Adams-3543-Prelims.qxd 4/28/2007 3:51 PM Page iv © Matthew Adams 2007 First published 2007 Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, or by any means, only with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction, in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers. SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard 55 City Road London EC1Y1SP SAGE Publications Inc. 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320 SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B I/I 1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road New Delhi 110 044 SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 British Library Cataloguing in Publication data Acatalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-4129-0710-1 ISBN 978-1-4129-0711-8 (pbk) Library of Congress Control Number: 2006929865 Typeset by C&M Digitals (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain by Cromwell Press Ltd, Wiltshire Printed on paper from sustainable resources Adams-3543-Prelims.qxd 4/28/2007 3:51 PM Page v For the one on the way, as yet unnamed Adams-3543-Prelims.qxd 4/28/2007 3:51 PM Page vi Adams-3543-Prelims.qxd 4/28/2007 3:51 PM Page vii Contents Introduction ix Acknowledgements xv 1 Self and Social Change 1 2 The Diminished Self 15 3 The Reflexive Self 43 4 The Regulated Self 75 5 The Narcissistic Self 105 6 Repositioning Reflexivity 139 Bibliography 167 Index 185 Adams-3543-Prelims.qxd 4/28/2007 3:51 PM Page viii Adams-3543-Prelims.qxd 4/28/2007 3:51 PM Page ix Introduction What do you think are the most significant social changes of the last fifty years? Here are a selection of answers offered by friends and colleagues: the introduction of the contraceptive pill; the proliferation of television ownership; the globalization of capitalism; communications and informa- tion technology developments; prolonged dependency of offspring on parents; post-modern pessimism; a shift from production to consumption; reproductive technologies (e.g. IVF); gay visibility; increased opportuni- ties for women and the end of apartheid. You may or may not have come up with similar answers. In fact what we perceive to be important social changes will vary depending on our personal histories and relationships as well our current context. A social change, such as the fall of the Berlin wall, may have been expe- rienced as tremendously significant for some, but irrelevant to others. Generalizing is difficult from the outset. But they are fascinating examples and invite us to explore the idea of social change further. How can we make sense of these far-reaching changes? Social theory often attempts to find more general categories of social change to which more specific changes can be allotted. Whilst not losing touch completely with a micro-approach to social change – concern for the specific, localized perception of significant change – we will now turn to macro-approaches to social change. In one of the few existing overviews, Jordan and Pile describe the sociology of social change as ‘the investigation of the times and places when and where society becomes different... [as] necessarily dealing with situations when things are strange, when the new and the old rub up against each other or evolve into another social form’ (Jordan and Pile, 2002: xiv). This is a suitably broad description for a phenomenon as nebulous as social change, and it will serve as a working definition for the purposes of this book. An overview of sociological accounts of social change is an intimidat- ing prospect. So much sociology attempts to indicate what is new, emerg- ing, or soon-to-be-common. Of course at the same time the light of the new casts a descriptive glow over what is lost; the soon to be distant memories of established patterns, the unravelling of once-familiar social habits, the now-you-mention-it obsolescence of formerly taken-for- granted practices and institutions. The process is rarely envisaged as simply one of the new replacing the old however. Social theorizing often posits a more subtle and sophisticated co-existence of old and new
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