Structure, Culture and Agency

Structure, Culture and Agency Professor Margaret Archer is a leading critical realist and major contemporary social theorist. This edited collection seeks to celebrate the scope and accomplishments of her work, distilling her theoretical and empirical contributions into four sections which capture the essence and trajectory of her research over almost four decades. Long fascinated with the problem of structure and agency, Archer’s work has constituted a decade-long engagement with this perennial issue of social thought. However, in spite of the deep interconnections that unify her body of work, it is rarely treated as a coherent whole. This is doubtless in part due to the unforgiving rigour of her arguments and prose, but is also a byproduct of sociology’s ongoing compartmentalisation. This edited collection seeks to address this relative neglect by collating a selection of papers, spanning Archer’s career, which collectively elucidate both the development of her thought and the value that can be found in it as a systematic whole. This book illustrates the empirical origins of her social ontology in her early work on the sociology of education, as well as foregrounding the diverse range of influences that have conditioned her intellectual trajectory: the systems theory of Walter Buckley, the neo-Weberian analysis of Lockwood, the critical realist philosophy of Roy Bhaskar and, more recently, her engagement with American prag- matism and the Italian school of relational sociology. What emerges is a series of important contributions to our understanding of the relationship between structure, culture and agency. Acting to introduce and guide readers through these contributions, this book carries the potential to inform exciting and innovative socio- logical research. Tom Brock is Lecturer in the department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK. Mark Carrigan is Research Fellow in the Centre for Social Ontology at the University of Warwick, UK. Graham Scambler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at UCL, UK, and Visiting Professor of Sociology at Surrey University, UK. Ontological Explorations Other titles in this series The Politics of Childhoods Real and Imagined Volume 2: practical application of critical realism and childhood studies Priscilla Alderson Critical Realism, Environmental Learning and Social-Ecological Change Edited by Leigh Price and Heila Lotz-Sisitka Metatheory for the Twenty-First Century Critical realism and integral theory in dialogue Edited by Roy Bhaskar, Sean Esbjörn-Hargens, Nicholas Hedlund and Mervyn Hartwig The Post-Mobile Society From the smart/mobile to second offline Edited by Hidenori Tomita Enlightened Common Sense The philosophy of critical realism Roy Bhaskar A Complex Integral Realist Perspective Towards a new axial vision Paul Marshall Crisis System A critical realist and environmental critique of economics and the economy Edited by Petter Næss and Leigh Price Structure, Culture and Agency Selected Papers of Margaret Archer Edited by Tom Brock, Mark Carrigan and Graham Scambler Structure, Culture and Agency Selected Papers of Margaret Archer Edited by Tom Brock, Mark Carrigan and Graham Scambler First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 selection and editorial matter, Tom Brock, Mark Carrigan and Graham Scambler; individual chapters, the contributors. The right of Tom Brock, Mark Carrigan and Graham Scambler to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-93294-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-67887-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Sunrise Setting Ltd., Brixham, UK Contents Foreword vii Acknowledgements x Introduction xiii Morphogenesis: realism’s explanatory framework1 1 Thinking and theorizing about educational systems 36 2 On predicting the behaviour of the educational system 50 3 The myth of cultural integration 59 4 The vexatious fact of society 77 5 Morphogenesis versus structuration: on combining structure and action 102 6 For structure: its reality, properties and powers: a reply to Anthony King 128 7 The private life of the social agent: what difference does it make? 138 8 The ontological status of subjectivity: the missing link between structure and agency 151 9 Reflexivity as the unacknowledged condition of social life 165 10 A brief history of how reflexivity becomes imperative 184 vi Contents 11 Morphogenic society: self-government and self-organization as misleading metaphors 215 12 The generative mechanism reconfiguring Late Modernity 235 13 How agency is transformed in the course of social transformation: don’t forget the double morphogenesis 259 The trajectory of the morphogenetic approach: an account in the first person 282 Interview with Maggie 293 Structure, Culture and Agency: selected papers of Margaret Archer: annotated bibliography 306 Index 314 Foreword It is my honor and great pleasure to have been invited to write this Foreword to the collected work of Margaret (or Maggie, as she prefers) Archer. In one sense, of course, the collection is a deserved tribute that expresses how the collectors feel about her. The collection, however, is primarily meant as a service to the field. The fact is that, although critical realists span multiple disciplines – philosophy, theo- logy, education, business organization and more – among sociologists, Maggie Archer stands first. Her work, most well-known and most drawn-upon, represents what I have elsewhere called the canonical positions of critical realism in sociology. It thus is a service to scholars concerned with critical realism that encapsulated here in this collection are Archer’s most seminal statements. In this brief Foreword, I want to identify what I consider the crux of Archer’s work. But first I would like to take the opportunity to say something about her as a person. In his Sacred Project of American Sociology, Christian Smith describes meetings of the American Sociology Association (ASA) as “tediously stratified,” where “the ‘best’ sociologists largely circulate and talk with their own kind ::: In fact, most of everyone’s eye movements at the ASA meetings involve checking out other people’s name tags, hung unceremoniously from lanyards around their necks, to see if their names are recognizable and at what college or university they work.”1 All I can say is that, both as a person and as a sociologist, Maggie Archer displays no such status-orientation. As the biblical passage puts it, she is no “respecter of persons,” meaning that she is not one to differentiate by social class. Instead, Archer always, in my experience, distinguishes rather by cogency of thought, finding it, if anything, more among the obscure than among the prominent. In comparison, then, with what characterizes ASA meetings, Archer’s personal and professional open- ness is very refreshing. But let me turn to the work. Clearly, Archer’s work spans decades and develops over time. The present collection marks that development. Clearly, I cannot com- ment on it all. What I can do is identify what I believe is key to it all, namely two related positions: Analytical Dualism and the Morphogenetic/Morphostatic (MM) approach. As the latter depends on the former, I will begin with that. Contemporary sociology is largely uncomfortable with binary distinctions. It is uncomfortable with the realist distinction between subject and object; it is viii Foreword uncomfortable with the distinction between culture and agency; equally uncomfortable with the distinction between structure and agency; and uncomfortable even with the distinction between culture and structure. That discomfort has led to all kinds of collapse or, in Archer’s word, conflation. For pragmatist and Bourdieusean perspectives, both widespread, the distinction between subject and object and other such putatively Cartesian oppositions are to be overcome either by some sort of non-realist dialectic or by the concept of habitus. With the so-called cultural turn, social or organizational structure was swallowed by culture (i.e., reduced to rules or schema), and, then, with the so-called practice turn, culture (and with it now structure) has been conflated with practice (agency). The end is Hegel’s “night in which all cows are black.” Lost, that is, are the distinct concepts through which to unravel different kinds of social causality. Against this conflationist tendency stands Archer’s analytical dualism. The designation may now be somewhat misleading as there are several dualisms Archer seeks to preserve. In Culture and Agency Archer

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