Reflexive Narrative is latest addition to the Qualitative Research Methods series. Author Christopher Johns describes this unique qualitative method and its developmental approach to research to enable researchers’ self-realization, however that might be expressed.

Reflexive Narrative: Self-Inquiry Toward Self-Realization and Its Performance is latest addition to the Qualitative Research Methods series. Author Christopher Johns describes this unique method and its developmental approach to research to enable researchers’ self-realization however that might be expressed. This method focuses on systematizing the reflective process and providing structure while still remaining flexible to the needs of individual researchers and projects. Researchers collect data through reflections on everyday experiences and then selectively use the evidence of researcher’s insights. The text starts out with a brief introduction to narrative research and reflexivity, situating the method within the larger context of organizational practices. The next chapters introduce the steps for reflexive narrative research and walk readers through the movements of the reflexive narrative process, writing, reflection, dialogue, guidance, weaving, and audiencing. Additional coverage of ethics and research examples provide a foundation for application of the method to individual research. A chapter on structuring the method for a doctoral thesis furthers the applied nature of this method. Three extracts from studies provide research examples across several social science disciplines, including nursing and education. For students and researchers alike looking for new approaches to reflexive methods and looking to expand their ideas about self-research in a qualitative context, Reflexive Narrative provides a starting place for their own examination of self in the context of research.

This book is about the metanarrative and metafictional elements of J. M. Coetzee’s novels. It draws together authorship, readership, ethics, and formal analysis into one overarching argument about how narratives work the boundary between art and life. On the basis of Coetzee’s writing, it reconsiders the concept of metalepsis, challenges common understandings of self-reflexive discourse, and invites us to rethink our practice as critics and readers. This study analyzes Coetzee’s novels in three chapters organized thematically around the author’s relation with character, reader, and self. Author and character are discussed on the basis of Foe, Slow Man, and Coetzee’s Nobel lecture, 'He and His Man'. Stories featuring the character Elizabeth Costello, or the figuration Elizabeth Curren, serve to elaborate the relation of author and reader. The study ends on a reading of Summertime, Diary of a Bad Year, and Dusklands as Coetzee’s engagement with autobiographical writing, analyzing the relation of author and self. It will appeal to readers with an interest in literary and narrative theory as much as to Coetzee scholars and advanced students.

Using in-depth interviews, this book explores women employed in the Indian IT industry and highlights the gender specific and culturally specific consequences of reflexive modernity in neo-liberal India.

This book completes Margaret Archer's trilogy investigating the role of reflexivity in mediating between structure and agency. What do young people want from life? Using analysis of family experiences and life histories, her argument respects the properties and powers of both structures and agents and presents the 'internal conversation' as the site of their interplay. In unpacking what 'social conditioning' means, Archer demonstrates the usefulness of 'relational realism'. She advances a new theory of relational socialisation, appropriate to the 'mixed messages' conveyed in families that are rarely normatively consensual and thus cannot provide clear guidelines for action. Life-histories are analysed to explain the making and breaking of the various modes of reflexivity. Different modalities have been dominant from early societies to the present and the author argues that modernity is slowly ceding place to a 'morphogenetic society' as meta-reflexivity now begins to predominate, at least amongst educated young people.