Selfhood and its pragmatic coherence in the context of social entropy: towards a new framework of the social self

Jeff Vass

Contemporary Social Science, 2015, vol. 10, issue 1, 26-38

Abstract: Any contemporary approach to the construction of the self must be able to deal with the prevailing context of 'the entropy of the social' and its impact on the self. This paper: (1) examines the rise of 'entropic' views of sociality and destabilised selfhood and discusses the central difficulty traditional frameworks, based on two broad paradigms of understanding selfhood, have for indexing the stability of the self as a register of social change. As it stands, current approaches leave us in a state of undecideability . (2) Following a genealogy of agency theory in the sociological canon, it argues that we can generate models of greater analytical depth to resolve ambiguity by re-aligning and relating two key features of reflexive selves in action: responsivity and recognition . Finally, (3) this argument is developed in the context of empirical work on couples in cross-generational relationships which are by one definition entropic. A new framework is proposed.

Date: 2015
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DOI: 10.1080/21582041.2014.978811

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