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Paper short abstract

Revisiting prior findings from a Japanese welfare facility for people with co-occurring disorders (IARSA), this presentation frames repetition as maintenance-oriented reflexivity under ageing and long-term support, revising Giddens beyond future-oriented self-projects.

Paper long abstract

　This presentation revisits the concept of reflexivity by drawing on findings from a Japanese welfare facility IARSA (Ibaraki Addiction Recovery Support Association) supporting men with co-occurring substance use and mental health disorders. Findings from this study showed that members often experience time not as linear progress toward recovery, but as a repetitive rhythm oriented toward getting through everyday life. This presentation returns to this account and reconsiders their theoretical implications through a dialogue with Anthony Giddens’ concept of reflexivity.

　Everyday life at IARSA is structured through repetitive routines that generate a sense of stability and continuity, rather than being experienced simply as monotony. At the same time, repetition is ambivalent: it can accumulate into a tangible sense of continuity and competence, while also producing feelings of stagnation and constrained futures. Members’ narratives thus reveal how repetition simultaneously sustains life and exposes its limits.

　Rather than interpreting such repetition as a lack or failure of reflexivity, this presentation conceptualizes it as maintenance-oriented reflexivity. This form of reflexivity operates through the ongoing adjustment of relationships, risks, and daily commitments, supported by institutional routines and peer-based care, and oriented toward sustaining life in the present rather than pursuing self-transformation or continual improvement.

　Existing discussions of reflexivity and its critiques have pointed to its cognitive bias, its tendency to overestimate individual agency, and its difficulty in accounting for marginalized lives. While acknowledging these critiques, this paper shifts attention to the temporal assumptions embedded in reflexivity theory, particularly its reliance on future-oriented and project-based models of time. Focusing instead on repetitive and maintenance-oriented temporal arrangements, the paper highlights how reflexivity can take a different form under conditions of vulnerability.

　This perspective becomes especially salient in contexts shaped by ageing, bodily decline, and long-term welfare support, where future-oriented self-projects may be neither realistic nor required. By positioning Japanese welfare practices as an empirical site for revising European social theory, this presentation contributes to debates in social theory, care studies, and Japanese studies, demonstrating how repetitive temporality enables the maintenance of life beyond dominant linear models of recovery and autonomy.