Archerisms (absit invidia): Good luck trying to read Margaret Archer without this important look-up table of Archerisms - words which she intimately knows the meaning of and assumes you do as well - but probably don't. That's ok, normal people don't use these words in everyday conversation - only Ms. Archer speaking to you through her books. It is the mark of a scholar to be obscure - the better ones are almost unreadable, and the best are unintelligible - to their readers, their critics, and even to themselves. Margaret Archer stakes her scholarly work to certain terms which she puts in front of her readers and just shrugs her shoulders if you don't understand.

Don't be surprised if Ms. Archer mentions the same concept 27,618 times - it is her style of writing, and you will likely see it again in her future works. Print out the following terms and make your own Archer-translator - put it next to the book as you read along. You will be glad that you did so.

modus vivendi - way of living. Ms. Archer reportedly gets paid for each time she uses this Latin phrase. She has become wealthy inserting it at every opportunity. "When you go into Latin, you knock people dead - you feel as though you can just snow anybody in the room," says Eugene Ehrlich, author of Amo, Amas, Amat and More How to Use Latin to Your Own Advantage and to the Astonishment of Others... The motive of Latin-droppers, he says, is "to decorate, to show one is pretty smart, pretty well educated..."

pro tem - for the time being

ceteris paribus - with other things the same, or all other things being equal or held constant

per impossible - assuming that the impossible were actually to take place

morphogenesis - those processes which tend to elaborate or change a system's given form, state or structure.

reflexivity - the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa. Archer believes that this is the means by which we make our way through the world.

great American pragmatists - James, Dewey, Mead, Peirce. Ms. Archer assumes you know and have read the works of these authors, because she has. She assumes you know that 'Peirce' is the correct spelling, unlike the typesetter of this book who has 'corrected' it twice, and is pronounced like 'purse'.

DDD - Discernment, Deliberation, Dedication. Well duh, how else would you form your modus vivendi?

ICONI - the Internal Conversation Indicator

Communicative Reflexivity - Internal Conversations need to be confirmed and completed by others before they lead to action

Autonomous Reflexivity - Internal Conversations are self-contained, leading directly to action

Meta-Reflexivity - Internal Conversations critically evaluate previous inner dialogues and are critical about effective action in society

Fractured Reflexivity - Internal Conversations cannot lead to purposeful courses of action, but intensify distress and disorientation resulting in expressive action

Marx - Karl Marx. Always refer to Karl Marx as Marx. This lets your readers know that you have read him. It does not matter why you refer to him, you just do it because you can. Works purporting to be written by Margaret Archer ALWAYS contain this reference to Marx. If it is not present, then beware - the work is likely fraudulent.

Late modernity is defined by complex, global capitalist economies and a shift from state support and welfare to the privatisation of services...a process fueled by the information revolution, the capacity to move capital and information around the world instantaneously

p.1 The positive face of the reflexive imperative is the opportunity for subjects to pursue what they care about most in the social order. In fact their personal concerns become their compasses

p.5 This book is closely related to its predecessors, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation and Making our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility

p.6 Our internal conversations define what courses of action we take in given situations

p.14-15 internal conversation 'does tasks for us that could not be accomplished in any other way'. [JLJ - from Norbert Wiley, The Sociology of Inner Speech: Saussure meets the dialogical self] Specifically, to have a personal identity is defined by our constellation of concerns and to have a concern is necessarily to be concerned about it. If something matters to us it is nonsense to say that we pay it no attention.

p.15 the prime social task of our reflexivity is to outline, in broad brush strokes, the kind of modus vivendi we would find satisfying and sustainable within society - as we know it and know ourselves under our own fallible descriptions. What we are attempting to accomplish is to marry our concerns to a way of life that allows their realization... Hence we gain and maintain some governance over our own lives.

p.15-16 concerns... are commitments that are ends in themselves... They are also definitive of our varying forms of social engagement.

p.41 How do the young launch themselves into the world and what pilots them in one direction rather than another? If past pathways are no guide and if the future speed of change is hostile to the very notion of defined paths to determinate ends, on what basis can they decide how to begin making their way through the world? [JLJ - this pondering also applies to an agent playing a game such as chess]

p.42 it becomes imperative to deliberate about themselves in relation to the open opportunities they now confront. But in what terms can their deliberations be sensibly conducted? The response is 'in relation to their concerns'. This preserves the active agent without him or her degenerating into the wanton gambler. In the two preceding works, the general formula 'contexts + concerns' was presented as the key to what guided the reflexive process, accounted for outcomes and, indeed, shaped the mode of reflexivity employed. Exactly the same recurs here... But, given its hallmark features of unpredictability, incalculability and the valorization of novelty, this means that personal 'concerns' play an increasing role in guiding deliberations and the conclusions arrived at. In sum, 'the importance of what we care about' has never been more important.

p.43 the fact that most can specify their concerns - as will be seen - gives them a grappling hook on the situational logic of opportunity. It enables them to engage in productive and purposeful internal conversation. This inner dialogue allows them to complete the following sequence: (a) defining and dovetailing their CONCERNS, (b) developing concrete courses of action as their PROJECTS and (c) establishing satisfying and sustainable PRACTICES. If conducted successfully, this enables subjects to realize their concerns and results in each person constituting his or her modus vivendi.

p.43 young subjects [JLJ - Archer here is referring to older teenagers and early twenties] are necessarily at an epistemological disadvantage when they first confront the task of making their own match between their concerns and their first form of employment because they know too little about themselves and about swiftly changing opportunities. They have to crystallize both their concerns and to concretize them into a projected course of action in the world of work, yet know they are fallible in these two respects. Self-critique thus becomes intrinsic to the very formulation and endorsement of a project, which distinguishes it from the self-monitoring that was always required for the performance of skilled tasks.

p.44 In other words, they are properly tentative or positively distrustful about their first inclinations and the first occupational matches that they suggest to themselves. This means that they rightfully linger long over the first stage of what I have termed the DDD scheme, made up of Discernment, Deliberation and Dedication. That spells prolonged internal conversations, in which subjects critically explore and test their self-knowledge, and equally critically scrutinize the first 'matches' they have internally suggested to themselves. They do not know enough and are aware of it, but they appear fully cognisant of the fact that only through their own reflexive deliberations can they come to endorse a project, however much information they absorb from career services and recruitment fairs. In other words, internal self-critique is accepted to be a predicate of safe landings and that is a hallmark of meta-reflexivity.

p.44 when they feel reasonably - but of course fallibly - satisfied with the concerns they seek to realize, they still have to designate or design a project for future employment that is expressive of their concerns, thus making them prepared to invest themselves in it. Additionally, but crucially, subjects have to deem their projects to be feasible in the outer world. In this they are hampered by their inadequate knowledge... For others, the reflexive imperative drives them to further 'deliberation', in which feasible-sounding opportunities are discarded on closer inspection or from experience, and new opportunities are discovered and scrutinized.

p.48 The great American pragmatists had always maintained that reflexivity (exercised through 'internal conversation') came into its own when habitual action was blocked by problematic circumstances.

p.50 Morphogenesis refers to 'those processes which tend to elaborate or change a system's given form, structure, or state', and morphostasis to those processes in a complex system that tend to preserve the above unchanged. As an explanatory framework, my morphogenetic approach endorses a stratified ontology for structures (1995), cultures (1988) and agents (2000), because each has its emergent and irreducible properties and powers - and it explains every social outcomes as the product of their interplay. Outcomes, which can be broadly reproductory or largely transformatory, depend on the intertwining of structure, culture and agency, but not by rendering them 'inseparable'... it is never anything but analytical dualism.

p.51 All structural properties found in any society are continuously activity-dependent. Nevertheless, it is possible to separate 'structure' and 'agency' through analytical dualism, and to examine their interplay in order to account for the structuring and restructuring of the social order.

p.51 in social realism, all emergent properties are relational in kind... they may exist unexercised and be exercised unrealized, in what is an ontological and not... an epistemological position.

p.53 Nothing social is self-sustaining; a myriad of agential 'doings'... and social relations alone... keep any higher level social entity in being and may render it relatively enduring.

p.53 When a morphogenetic cycle is completed, by issuing in structural elaboration, not only is structure transformed but so is agency, as part and parcel of the same process - the double morphogenesis.

p.55-56 there are no constraints and enablements per se, that is, as entities. These are the potential causal powers of emergent social properties, yet a constraint needs something to constrain and an enablement something to enable. In other words, for anything to exert the contingent power of a constraint or an enablement, it has to stand in a relationship such that it obstructs or aids the achievement of some specific agential enterprise as subjectively defined. The generic name for such enterprises is 'projects' - i.e. any end, however inchoate, that can be intentionally entertained by human beings. In short, the activation of objective constraints and enablements depends upon their subjective reception by individuals or groups.

p.56 In short, three conditions are required for the conditional influence of structural and cultural properties to exercise their powers as constraints or enablements. Firstly, such powers are dependent upon the existence of human 'projects'; if per impossible there were no such projects, this would mean that there were no constraints or enablements. Secondly, to operate as either an enabling or a constraining influence, there has to be a relationship of congruence or incongruence respectively with particular agential projects. Thirdly, agents have to respond to these influences which, being conditional rather than deterministic, are subject to reflexive deliberation over the nature of the response, and their personal powers include the abilities to withstand them or to circumvent them.

p.61 self-transformation comes about through the reflexive 'internal conversation' in which people seek to conform themselves to their ultimate concerns, ideals or commitments, arrived at intra-personally, 'by cherishing and tending them as I would the flowers in my garden'.

p.61 imagination plays a major role in realizing our commitments through the 'power of preparatory mediation' because such 'musements' are prompted not only by obstacles impeding the routine accomplishment of courses of action: 'People who build castles in the air do not, for the most part accomplish much, it is true, but every man who does accomplish great things is given to building elaborate castles in the air'.

p.64 the prizes in work and employment start going to those who detect, manipulate and find applications for links between previously unrelated bit of knowledge - ones whose contingent complementarity could be exploited to advantage. The 'winners' become such by extruding their skills to match the fast shifting array of opportunities or making their own opportunities by innovating upon contingency.

p.67 Only by striking the right balance between personal, structural and cultural emergent powers is it possible to explain precisely what people do

p.89 Language is what frees the human race from animal-like confinement to reflex action... It enables a variety of courses of action to be held in mind, to be rationally reviewed, and the eventual response to be intelligently selected. [JLJ - of course, Archer makes such a statement about language using language itself. I would think that it would be the subconscious ability of the mind to model potential outcomes, scenarios in fact, which frees us from the stimulus-response trap, and this can be done using an active visual imagination. Some might be visually based - Ms. Archer, who has written multiple books and who is more or less an expert linguistic communicator of her ideas - can be forgiven for thinking that language itself is the necessary tool - perhaps instead it is the tool which interprets and communicates the results of the cognitive, internal modeling efforts. For example, one might choose to play a move in a social game without forming any words at all within one's own mind.]

p.89 [Mead] the conversation which constitutes the process or activity of thinking - is carried on by the individual from the standpoint of the 'generalized other'

p.103 Shaping a life is the practical achievement of establishing a modus vivendi that is satisfying and sustainable by the subject - at least pro tem. It calls upon much further reflexive deliberation, which is an expression of the reflexive imperative.

p.103 A particular modus vivendi is forged by any given person through their reflexive 'internal conversation' and represented in what I have termed the DDD scheme of <'Discernment', 'Deliberation' and 'Dedication'>.

p.103 As Mead puts it, 'we are in possession of selves just in so far as we can and do take the attitudes of others towards ourselves and respond to those attitudes...' [JLJ - applies directly to playing a social game such as chess. We need to see our position as our opponent sees it, and to attack it as our opponent might attack it, in order to develop a position that is sustainable in the uncertain future]

p.117 'The plan' could not have been without the emergent relational goods involved.

p.150 Different again are those with 'under-developed reflexivity', i.e. without any fully developed mode of internal conversation enabling them to diagnose (fallibly, of course) the relationship between their personal concerns and their social circumstances, as is necessary for designing constructive courses of action.

p.251 The common denominator of all fractured subjects is... an absence or a lack in the reflexive internal conversation such that 'it supplies the subject with no orientation towards the question "what is to be done". Instead of leading to purposeful courses of action, the self-talk of the "fractured reflexive" is primarily expressive. Its effect is to intensify affect.'

p.281 It also follows that if the DDD sequence [JLJ - Discernment, Deliberation, Dedication] is not tackled, and thus cannot be completed, then neither can such subjects complete the sequence of <Concerns → Projects→ Modus vivendi>, which secures social identity.