INDIVIDUAL AGENCY, THE ORDINARY, AND POSTMODERN LIFE

The postmodern challenge to sociological notions of individual agency assails its experiential substantiality, conveying agency instead in philosophically abstract terms and fleeting media images. In opposition to this, we argue that everyday interpretive practice reflexively constructs agency, utilizing resources drawn from the ordinary contours of experience. Narrative and ethnographic material collected in diverse settings, both formal and informal, illustrate how enduring features of the ordinary-locally shared meanings, biographical particulars, and material objects-are used for the production of manifold selves with recognizable substantiality.