‘If People Believe Ideas are Real…’: Women’s SelfPerception as Active Individuals in Late Modernity

The analysis is based on in-depth, qualitative interviews with a heterogeneous group of men and women born in the 1960s. The interviewees have thus grown up in late modernity. The concept of self-perception, or self-view, is closely related to individual world-view in that we always act within social contexts. Everyday life strategies are patterns of action directed at creating and re-creating a meaningful whole. The strategies can be more or less coherent, and they include both conscious and non-conscious action. A strategy is thus a metaphor for actions that can be identified as forming a larger set, directed more or less consciously at a general goal. Everyday life is an analytical perspective on the relation between the individual’s daily life and the re-creation of society. Everyday life is produced through our continuous handling of its close and more general conditions now and throughout life.