ABSTRACT
The chapter begins by outlining Giddens’ theory about reflexive selfidentity in late modernity. Giddens suggests that self-identities can be viewed as individual projects that emerge from the negotiation of risks and choices in everyday life. Viewed in this way, the topic of self is said to illuminate the increased power that reflexive modernity affords to individuals over their own lives, and the mutually transforming relationships of agency and structure in detraditionalized settings. Giddens’ ideas about social change and self-identity are underpinned by a set of arguments that relate to human beings’ essential needs for a sense of ontological security, and the constant self-monitoring that individuals undertake in day-to-day life. He is concerned with how nowadays individuals reflexively engage in the construction of biographical narratives of the self, and the implications of this for an active engagement with
life-politics. A number of questions can be asked about Giddens’ analysis, and the understandings of contemporary personal life it promotes. First, to what extent does it overplay new possibilities that are open for individual agency in relation to the self? Second, to what extent does it construct an overly coherent conception of the self? Third, in what ways does it undermine the significance of resources for shaping the different possibilities that exist for self and identities in contemporary social contexts? Fourth, to what degree does it present an overly optimistic account of social change? Finally, to what extent does Giddens’ account of reflexive selfhood overemphasize universal subjective experience, and what are the consequences of erasing subjective differences for sociology?
