This accessible and assured book offers readers a new take on the central question of the relation between the individual and society. It offers a thorough, informed and critical guide to the field. It demonstrates how global economic and employment structures, neo-liberal discourse, the role of emotion, irrationality, and ambiguity are factors that impact upon the shape and resilience of the self.

How does social change influence selfhood? What are the fundamental positions in social theories of the self? This accessible and assured book offers readers a new take on the central question of the relation between the individual and society. It offers a thorough, informed and critical guide to the field. It demonstrates how global economic and employment structures, neo-liberal discourse, the role of emotion, irrationality, and ambiguity are factors that impact upon the shape and resilience of the self. Anyone interested in the question of identity and its relation to cultural, social,...

The Reflexive Self is a critical discussion of contemporary self-identity as a reflexive project, which Anthony Giddens claims has emerged as a result of recent and radical social upheavals in late modernity. It initially traces the development of an account of social change and self-identity in Giddenss writing. The author then offers a critical analysis of Giddenss key claims. Drawing on a wide range of critical social and psychological theory, the idea of a reflexively formed self- identity is problematised by various issues: the culturally situated nature of modern identity; aspects of...