Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics: A Social Realist Viewpoint 3030880311, 9783030880316

Table of contents :
Foreword by Dr. Derek Layder
Foreword by Dr. Albert Weideman
Contents
List of Tables
1 Introduction
Defining AL
Principles and Motivations for This Book
Purposes of This Book
Summary of Contents and General Intention Behind the Book
References
2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics
Past and Contemporary Critiques of AL
Variables and Social Categories in AL
Statistical Analysis in AL
The Successionist Model of Causality and Descriptive-Causal Generalizations
Interpretivist AL Research
Overemphasis on Discourse
The Limitations of Interview Data
Empiricist Tendencies in Interpretivist AL Scholarship
Ontologically Flattened View of Social Processes
Lack of Commitment to Objective Knowledge
Posthumanist AL Research
Conclusion
References
3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL
The Vexatious Fact of Society
A (Selective) History of the Structure–Agency Debate
Parsonian Structural Functionalism
Historical Materialism
Symbolic Interactionism
Phenomenology/Ethnomethodology
Postmodernism/Poststructuralism
Social Constructionism
Structuration Theory
Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice
Habermas and the Lifeworld/System Distinction
Summary
References
4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis
Distinguishing and Appreciating the Relationship Between Things
Emergence
Emergence and Causality
Underlying Causal Mechanisms
Structure and Culture
Agency
Habitual and Transformative Actions: Can Habitus and Reflexivity Be Combined?
References
5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics
Realism and Social Research
Emergence in Realist AL
Causality in Realist AL
Truth, Knowledge and Education in Realist AL
Language in Realist AL
Realist AL Research
Corpus Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis and “Real” Language
References
6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis
CDST in a Nutshell, and Some of its Important Notions
A CDST Approach to Causality
CDST and Agency
CDST and Critical Social Research
CDST, Transdisciplinarity and the Issue of Metaphorical Borrowings
Emphasis on Evolutionary Change
A Tendency to Overemphasize the Relationship Between Things
Conclusion
References
7 Complex Dynamic System Theory and Applied Linguistics
The Relevance of CDST to AL Scholarship
CDST and the Question of Knowledge
CDST, Language Learning and Change
CDST and Research Methodology
CDST, Variables and Statistical Analysis
Disentangling CDST from its Poststructuralist Tendencies
CDST, Critical AL Research and Critical Language Education
Conclusion
References
8 Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics Jérémie Bouchard

Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics

Jérémie Bouchard

Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics

Jérémie Bouchard Faculty of Humanities Hokkai Gakuen University Sapporo, Japan

ISBN 978-3-030-88031-6 ISBN 978-3-030-88032-3 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Apple on table, by Jérémie Bouchard 2020 © This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Foreword by Dr. Derek Layder

In this book Jérémie Bouchard makes a very sophisticated, not to say masterly, critique of what he considers to be certain weaknesses of applied linguistics scholarship—and particularly what he refers to as “successionism” and “interpretivism.” He does this from the point of view of a particular strand of social theory summarized by the term “realism” or “realist social theory.” In this respect I am not by any means an expert in applied linguistics, but I do applaud the author’s approach from a social analytical point of view, as well as from a concern with the idea that theory should, in some crucial way, be tied to empirical evidence and a commitment to practical research. While my own work has recently been preoccupied with these latter issues, this is of course my own preference. However, it seems to me that what Bouchard has done in this book is exceptionally important in its own right. He concentrates on drawing attention to some of the advantages to be gained by recognizing the relevance of this area of philosophically informed social analysis to applied linguistics as a discipline in its own right. But not only this, he also points out its relevance to the many other disciplines (such as psychology, anthropology, ethnography, sociology)

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and approaches (for instance, modernism, postmodernism, subjectivism, objectivism, realism) to which it relates, both as a “contributor” and also from which it may draw as potential sources of influence and information. Bouchard certainly brings to bear a very intimate and expert knowledge of the importance of issues deriving from various strands of social analysis such as the problematic relation between agency and structure (Chapter 3) “realist social theory” (Chapters 4 and 5), as well as what he calls “complex dynamic system theory” (Chapters 6 and 7), while throughout, he tackles the parallel, but often neglected and thorny, issues of “emergence” and causality in social science. In an impressively detailed manner, he spells out the relevance of all these things to applied linguistics and while his treatment is always fair and even handed, he does not hesitate to engage in forceful critique where it is required (see for example, his remarks on so-called ‘posthumanism’, p. 51). Apart from the aforementioned achievements, what struck me forcibly about the book was its underlying emphasis on a creative and openminded approach to wider issues and problems in the human and social sciences concerning the advancement and accumulation of valid, empirically anchored, conceptual knowledge. Bouchard offers a much-needed emphasis on an approach which I admire because it opens up creative possibilities for the types of knowledge available to us as practitioners, as well as for the research methods and strategies that we may use in unearthing the empirical data that underpins this knowledge. I think that such an approach certainly throws light on some general issues and problems in social science which threaten to inhibit advance in these disciplines, and also points to some practical solutions which would open up forms of constructive cooperation between them. Thus, Bouchard rightly underscores the significance of “inter” or “trans” disciplinarity. He begins from the premise that each discipline (or ‘school’, or ‘approach’) has something to offer all the others to which it is related, by pointing out that this would indeed be more obvious and manifest if only such disciplines could or would communicate more willingly with each other. Of course, this would only be possible by casting-off some inherent “defensiveness” from within disciplines—which I have often observed, or come up against, in my own experience of attempting something similar. I think this stems from the feeling that a transdisciplinary perspective

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somehow threatens the “internal” integrity or independence of certain disciplines. In particular cases these may very well be salient problems or issues which must be addressed. Bouchard does this sometimes, and necessarily without reserve, but always with constructive enthusiasm. Although overall the book is intellectually demanding, it more than adequately repays the diligent reader, by being written in a fascinating, perceptive and insightful manner. A very impressive and important read. July 2021

Derek Layder Emeritus Professor of Sociology University of Leicester Leicester, UK

Foreword by Dr. Albert Weideman

The enduring neglect of many fundamental questions has been a disservice to applied linguistics. Applied linguists have been unwilling to ask: where is the discipline heading? Is the fate of those who enter the field likely to be that of victim, or will it enable their development as informed practitioners? Will ideology prevail, or will good sense triumph in the solutions we design? Even where we do consider such issues, there is the one that Bouchard raises here: are we asking the right questions? If we change our perspective, will that not facilitate a richer, wider range of more appropriate questions? Perhaps that might become possible, if we recognize not only perceived things and objects as states of affairs, but also further dimensions of reality: subjective relations, intentions, events, processes, beliefs, styles, strategies, commitments, all of which need explanation, perhaps as interacting “layers” or strata of our experience. And that last, experience, surely goes beyond what is conventionally—but erroneously—thought of as sensorily perceptible phenomena? How to “observe” such realities is, as this book points out, determined by methodological stance, which in turn is dependent on theory.

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No doubt, theories can be more useful or less so; more credible or less so; more aligned with reality and experience or less so and we should not be afraid to say so. Nor should we be prevented from considering what we understand to be useful, credible or aligned with experience because we are unwilling to doff those conventional blinkers, the paradigms that we embrace, often uncritically. The position set out in this book has extensions in and affinities with a multiplicity of current perspectives in the field of applied linguistics. In my own subfield, language assessment, there have been calls, for example, for a “pragmatic realism” that promises to lead us out of the philosophical and theoretical quagmire of the debate on what “validity” means for a language test. Sadly, that debate is still conducted on the fringes, while the conventional interpretivist dogma prevails (“Meaningful interpretation is validity”). This book provides a strong antidote to such unexamined theoretical beliefs. The difficulty of course is: how to begin? The response here seems to be: through patient analysis. By exposing reductionism. By introducing a novel view of the system, yielding a richer perspective, more in tune with reality. By acknowledging that similar issues and observations in our field can be critically unpacked from divergent philosophical frames, and perhaps productively so. In a word: we have only begun to consider the philosophical and theoretical biases that have inhibited rather than promoted understanding what applied linguistics is, and what it should be tackling.

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Any discussion that promotes this is timely and necessary. June 2021

Albert Weideman Extraordinary Professor in Language Education University of the Western Cape Cape Town Republic of South Africa Professor of Applied Language Studies and Research Fellow University of the Free State Bloemfontein Republic of South Africa

Contents

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Introduction

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2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics

27

3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL

95

4

Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis

177

5

Social Realism and Applied Linguistics

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6

Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis

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7

Complex Dynamic System Theory and Applied Linguistics

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Conclusion

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Index

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List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table 5.1

Bhaskar’s ontological domains (Bhaskar, 2008: 46) A realist approach to studying extensive reading

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1 Introduction

Defining AL This book aims to elucidate some of the theoretical bases upon which research in applied linguistics (AL) is grounded, identify some of the persistent problems at the level of theory, and offer possible solutions, an endeavour guided by the hope of a renewed AL scholarship for the future. Specifically, it looks at the contribution by and growing popularity of CDST in AL scholarship, and attempts to situate this emerging strand within a realist ontology. Necessarily, this type of work calls for a definition of AL at the onset; although given the full scope of issues studied by applied linguists to date, it is understandable that a single comprehensive definition of AL has yet to be produced. Nevertheless, some interesting and useful definitions have been suggested: as a collective effort “of language teachers wanting to distance themselves from their colleagues teaching literature” (Kaplan, 2010: vi); as “the academic field which connects knowledge about language to decision-making in the real world” (Simpson, 2011: 1); as research into language-related problems, with consideration for social and cognitive aspects of language (Hall et al., 2011); as a “mode of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_1

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inquiry that engages with the people and issues connected to real-world problems” (Chapelle, 2013: 2); and as the “theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue” (Brumfit, 1997: 93). Davies and Elder (2004: 1) hint at the broad epistemological scope of AL when defining the field as, concerned with solving or at least ameliorating social problems involving language. The problems applied linguistics concerns itself with are likely to be: How can we teach languages better? How can we improve the training of translators and interpreters? How can we write a valid language examination? How can we evaluate a school bilingual program? How can we determine the literacy levels of a whole population? How can we helpfully discuss the language of a text? What advice can we offer a Ministry of Education on a proposal to introduce a new medium of instruction? How can we compare the acquisition of a European and an Asian language? What advice should we give a defense lawyer on the authenticity of a police transcript of an interview with a suspect?

Clearly, this list of questions goes on. Indeed, a quick look at the different special interest groups in most AL associations around the world reveals the true interdisciplinary scope of the field. Rampton (1997) notes that, by its very nature, AL requires a thorough yet creative reinterpretation of concepts and theories from other fields. This is entirely justifiable, for as the above definitions suggest, AL is inherently concerned with issues situated at the interface of language and society, and therefore requires insight from anthropology, cognitive science, education, sociology, psychology, social geography and political science, for example (Coupland et al., 2001; Douglas Fir Group, 2016; García et al., 2017). Specific areas of AL scholarship with strong involvement in transdisciplinarity include contrastive linguistics, education and literacy, language pedagogy and language teacher education, second language acquisition, pragmatics, translation, language policy and planning, conversation, discourse and critical discourse analyses and interactional sociolinguistics. In large part because of its transdisciplinary nature, AL research has undergone impressive developments in research outputs, conceptual models and theories and practical insight and techniques aimed at helping practitioners on the ground. This increasingly stronger and more

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discerning body of scholarly works, in return, also bears relevance to other social sciences concerned with language including anthropology, sociology, philosophy, psychology and health services to name a few. Transdisciplinarity can lead to further sophistication of conceptual and methodological practices across the social sciences. Rampton (2001: 264, emphasis mine) lists three types of linkages between sociolinguistics and other disciplines made possible through transdisciplinary engagement: First and most obviously, research outside sociolinguistics can be useful as a form of wider contextualisation for any given project on language in social life, helping to specify the larger environment within which any particular group, institution or practice is located. Second, [transdisciplinary] can have a deep influence on the underlying assumptions about social reality that shape research in sociolinguistics. Third, it can provide concepts which can be integrated into the analysis and interpretation of specific data, and which may then also serve as a very practical ‘bridge’ back and forwards between sociolinguistics and the fields where the concepts originate.

Although both necessary and beneficial to AL and social research, transdisciplinarity can be challenging precisely because of how descriptions of specific phenomena in different fields often diverge, with sociological concepts such as agency and power providing good examples of how phenomena are understood differently across the social sciences. Huckle (2004: 35) explains that transdisciplinarity “challenges academics to reconcile ideas about the nature of reality, how that reality can be known, and what procedures should guide enquiry (ontology, epistemology, and methodology).” Understandably, transdisciplinarity can be threatening to researchers, not only because of the sheer conceptual, analytical and logistical complexities involved, but also because it questions the perhaps comforting notion of rigid boundaries dividing research disciplines. Layder (2004: ix) argues that, perhaps one reason why attempts at establishing creative connections are not common is that they inevitably attract negative critical responses. This is often because interdisciplinary explorations are regarded with suspicion by those concerned to ‘protect’ their home discipline from

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uninvited incursions from ‘outside’ – presumably for fear of dilution or destabilization.

Beyond conservative forces constraining transdisciplinary endeavours, there are very real conceptual and methodological challenges to be faced (Hult, 2011). In subsequent chapters, I will identify some of these challenges in the context of complex dynamic system theory (CDST), and suggest possible avenues for improvement. Part of this work includes an emphasis on the point that transdisciplinarity in AL should not reinforce empiricist viewpoints or approaches; rather, it should involve— and encourage—greater engagement by AL scholars with theory (Cook, 2005). The transdisciplinary nature of AL has also been identified quite early on in its history. Hymes (1974) provided one of the earliest transdisciplinary visions of AL in his calls for a socially constituted linguistics as based on two core notions: (1) we encounter linguistic features as outcomes of broader social functions, which implies that (2) our analysis must provide descriptions and explanations of the relationship between social functions and linguistic features. This understanding of AL has only strengthened over time, leading Block et al. (2012: 2–3) to argue that “the starting point for applied linguistics should be the study of culture and social structures, followed by an examination of how language plays a part in the enactment of different forms of social action as well as the constitution of second order understandings of these actions.” As these authors elucidate, the study of language-related issues, problems and challenges (a) is deeply transdisciplinary, and (b) must come to term with the stratified, or layered, nature of society and social phenomena (an issue developed in Chapter 4 on realism). This need is also identified by Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 24) thus: applied linguistics phenomena operate at different levels and are broad enough to warrant multiple ways into any topic area. Several examples that come to mind include a focus on the structure of interdependent relations, a focus on relational dynamics, a focus on trajectories of change and self-organized processes or a focus on emergent outcomes.

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Despite some recognition of the importance of theory to AL projects, however, and perhaps because of AL’s transdisciplinary nature, most scholars agree that, being an applied field of inquiry, AL should be devoted to the solution of language-related issues in the world. The Douglas Fir Group (2016: 20), for example, see transdisciplinary AL scholarship as inherently problem-oriented, rising above disciplines and particular strands within them with their oftentimes strong theoretical allegiances. It treats disciplinary perspectives as valid and distinct but in dialogue with one another in order to address real-world issues. Specifically, it seeks to integrate the many layers of existing knowledge about the processes and outcomes of additional language learning by deriving coherent patterns and configurations of findings across domains.

A similar principle is captured by Kramsch (2012: 484) when defining AL as a “‘real-world’ project.” On this point, however, I disagree with Kramsch’s use of inverted commas framing the term real world , which oddly suggests that, unlike practice, theory is somehow not about the real world. In subsequent chapters, I will discuss the realist view of the real and of the centrality of theory in uncovering the real. Coming back to AL, Weideman (2006) defines the field as a discipline of design— i.e., as essentially geared towards the formulation and implementation of solutions to language problems. Accordingly, AL, typically presents the solution in the form of a design or plan, which in its turn is informed by some kind of theoretical analysis or justification. Like any other entity or artefact, the plan presented has two terminal functions: a qualifying or leading function [the technical aspect of design], and a foundational or basis function [the theoretically-grounded analysis of experience]. (p. 72)

This understanding of AL is rather prominent in our field, and posits AL researchers as responsible for producing scholarly insight, models and theories specifically aimed at improving language-related social practices on the ground. In partial agreement with this view, I will make the point in this book that, to achieve these broad aims, AL needs

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conceptually strong and productive models of complexity, emergence and causality—three closely linked concepts—and that the production and consumption of these by scholars and practitioners alike necessarily involves greater engagement on their part with theory. In short, I will argue that, if AL’s central aim is to help practice on the ground, it must be equipped with a more solid conceptual basis. Much of the analysis and argumentation in this volume is anchored by this central line of reasoning.

Principles and Motivations for This Book With its marked emphasis on ontological issues grounding inquiry in AL but also in various fields of social research and human practice, this book mirrors recent developments in various branches of social studies concerned with language issues, including sociology (Archer, 2012; Carter, 2000; Elder-Vass, 2010, 2012; Layder, 1997, 2006; Maccarini et al., 2011), education (Maton & Moore, 2010; Murphy, 2013; Wheelahan, 2010; Willmott, 2002), language and discourse studies (Fairclough, 1992, 2010; Joseph, 2002; Parker, 1998; Wodak et al., 2009) and AL research (e.g., Block, 2007; Bloome et al., 2005; Bouchard, 2017, 2018, 2020; Bouchard & Glasgow, 2019; Canagarajah, 2005; Cook, 2010; Coupland et al., 2001; Filipovi´c, 2015; Kramsch, 1998; Larsen-Freeman, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020; Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008; Mercer & Williams, 2014; Pennycook, 2019, Rampton, 2006; Sealey & Carter, 2004). In this sense, I prefer to think of the argumentation developed in this book as “old wine in a new bottle”. Previously published works in AL, sociology and social theory, in my view, have already formulated most of the points found in the following chapters more succinctly and sophisticatedly, and when possible I invite readers to consult these valuable and timely contributions to AL scholarship and human understanding. My goals in this volume are to build upon existing and developing AL knowledge, locate some of its problematic conceptual bases, clarify some of the epistemological and ontological grounds upon which the field stands, and refer to realist social theory and CDST to suggest new

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perspectives and possibilities. The stratified (or layered , or again laminated ) viewpoint developed in this book has developed from awareness that issues studied in AL are part of, or at least are intricately related to, education in a broader sense, and as such are fundamentally social and ethical concerns. As will be discussed later, the viewpoint offered here is thus stratified both in an ontological sense—i.e., as pertaining to entities within the social realm composed of, and unfolding within and across, multiple layers or strata of that realm—and in a critical sense—i.e., in reference to particular distributions of social “facts” and entities based on differentiated status and access to resources and privilege. Ontological questions, however, will be most prominent. This book also aims to respond to Weideman’s (2007, 2009, 2015) convincing calls for a “philosophy” of AL scholarship. The author’s particular use of the term “philosophy” can, in my view, be interpreted broadly and from multiple epistemological perspectives. Although in agreement with his view, my understanding is limited to the question of how we come to know things within AL worlds (e.g., how do we come to these particular claims about language and language learning and not others?). I also consider Rajagopalan’s (2004) understanding of a “philosophy” as an examination of the philosophical underpinnings of a particular academic discipline, with the intention of resolving pending conceptual and methodological issues and challenges. These combined understandings of the term achieve two purposes in relation to the work in this book: unpacking AL scholarship as a distinct area of the social sciences while situating it within the social sciences, and as such, as an inherently transdisciplinary scholarly practice of importance to the study of a wide range of social issues. Because this book reveals insight into the complex and necessary relationship between theory and practice, it is also intended as a resource for both beginner and experienced applied linguists and sociolinguists. Throughout the book readers will notice a rather free movement between talks of AL and sociolinguistics. This movement, however, should not alarm readers: both areas are concerned with explaining multiple complex phenomena including language(s), language users, language pedagogy and learning, language policy and planning and other

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language-related issues and problems emerging from the complex interaction between structure, culture and human agency. Both AL and sociolinguistics have inherent social foci, even if the emphasis on social realities is more explicit in sociolinguistics. In addition, being a trained TESOL teacher, applied linguist and sociolinguist, I feel confident in moving from AL to sociolinguistics and back when argumentation calls for it. This is not to minimize the important differences between AL and sociolinguistics: it is simply acknowledgement that the content of the present volume bears equal relevance to both. Three broad perspectives ground the overall argumentation in this book. The first one is a justified opinion: AL researchers and sociolinguists should not be oblivious to sociological issues and debates regarding language and society. In our current neoliberal world in which language education is increasingly being commodified (Block et al., 2012), the English language teaching (ELT) industry has paradoxically become more narrow and granular in scope, while gaining greater influence over the directions of specific strands of AL scholarship, dictating what phenomena to research, how to design and implement language-ineducation policies that can serve the economic needs of the nation, how to transform research insight and language policies into one-size-fits-all pedagogical activities, how to produce learning materials of relevance to increasingly larger populations of language-learners-as-consumers, and how to design and administer reliable and profitable language proficiency tests. In my view, these developments are alarming and counterproductive to further sophistication of knowledge in our field, and I would therefore call for widespread critical engagement by all AL researchers alike. Given the hegemonic presence of neoliberal forces gradually but surely limiting the scope and depth of AL scholarship, applied linguists (as social scientists, let’s not forget) must collectively assert the profoundly humanistic nature of AL as a branch of the social science. This mode of thinking in part requires AL scholars to come to terms with the shortcomings of successionism and interpretivism (see next chapter for discussion), and contextualize AL problems within a robust social ontology, problems which in my view must be seen as complex and contingent outcomes of the relationship between structure, culture and agency. They

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must also come to term with socio-political realities, and by extension, become increasingly comfortable and knowledgeable of transdisciplinary concepts, research insight and methodologies. If we agree that AL is “the theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue” (Brumfit, 1997: 93), we then need to recognize the value of greater engagement with social issues and social theory in our attempts to describe and explain the issues we choose to study. The second perspective grounding this book is based on an ontological statement: the social world we inhabit and act within is complex, and as language learners, teachers, users and researchers, we are forced to contend with this often confusing and frustrating feature of society. By complex I do not mean complicated . According to Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 15), “complicated denotes something quantitatively different from simplicity; complexity, however, refers to a qualitative difference […] unlike the complex, what is complicated is fundamentally knowable by breaking it down into its component parts.” For example, a watch is a complicated system: it is a closed system, with multiple parts and links making it whole, and its behaviours can be predicted with a high degree of confidence. As a complicated system, a watch can be broken down into its part and put back again so as to more or less regain its initial state. On the other hand, social phenomena such as language(s), beliefs, values, identities, learning processes, people, classrooms, policies and educational systems are complex, radically open, contingent systems which progress through time often in non-linear fashion. They emerge partly from natural (i.e., biological, chemical, physical) elements, and are the emergent outcomes of activities by human beings as both biological entities (with a brain, senses, neurological impulses, etc.) and reflexive social beings (with emotions, beliefs, aspirations, social roles, etc.). Language-related phenomena are complex because they cannot be reduced to their constituting elements or parts. Human cognition, emotionality and learning, for example, depend on certain biological conditions; however, as emergent phenomena, they cannot be fully explained by or reduced to these necessary conditions. Similarly, classroom language learning depends on the existence of an education system and, of course, specific material objects such as desks, blackboards, textbooks, visual aids and so forth. Classroom language learning cannot,

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however, be fully explained by studying these elements separately, nor can the English education system in a country, for example, be reduced to an aggregate of all the English classes unfolding at any particular moment within that country. Being complex, the social world, the people and most of the phenomena within it are thus open and emergent systems, which entails that predicting future behaviours and states with precision is simply impossible (although as I will argue later, cross-context patterns do exist and therefore need to be accounted for). Understanding of this fundamental difference between complicated and complex things is necessary to the overall argumentation in this book. The third perspective is also an ontological statement, closely linked to the second, yet one which perhaps needs to gain more attention within CDST circles: the social world (and by extension our knowledge of it) is opaque, a quality which becomes rather evident whenever we move beyond descriptions of local realities and attempt to explain their relationship with broader social structures. Stated differently, not everything about society—or language, or language learning for that matter—can be understood empirically: other things, processes and mechanisms are at work in the production of social life, and these exist beyond human perception. To illustrate social realities which cannot be apprehended empirically, a social class, for example, is not something we can measure, touch, feel or delimit the boundaries of through our senses or statistical measurements alone. However, social class divisions have effects on people, contributing to the very real unequal distribution of power and resources in society. Likewise, even if we can identify instantiations of, or evidence of, an education system in the form of policy documents, accreditation structures and so forth, it remains impossible to delimit exclusively through empirical means the ontological boundaries of an education system as a whole unit. Another example is offered by the notion of learning. Although educators can attest to the reality of learning, none of them can pinpoint any precise moment when learning takes place. Pre-test/post-test differentials can only reveal potential traces of learning, but not learning in and of itself. Nevertheless, phenomena such as learning, social class distribution and education systems can be considered “real” mechanisms because they bear consequences to real people in real contexts. As Collier (2011: 11) explains, “some things

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are not concrete entities, but are nevertheless real […] Relations are real because they have real effects, and what has real effects must itself be real.” In other words, everything that we understand as “real” should not be reduced to the empirical realm alone, for mechanisms and processes exist transcendentally (Bhaskar, 1998), and possess properties and powers which allow them to have real effects on real people in real contexts. The opaqueness of the social world has fundamental implications for what we do as AL scholars and social scientists. If the empirical is not all there is, we must therefore use theory to explain the bases upon which variables in our research projects can be operationalized and studied. As Coupland (2001: 8) argues within the context of sociolinguistics research, “sociolinguistic perspectives on interethnic or intercultural communication will differ greatly depending on whether we theorise intergroup relations in politically neutral terms or in the context of post-colonialism.” Because not everyone understands variables such as ethnicity, age, motivation and task in exactly the same way, greater and more refined conceptual unpacking of these in AL scholarship becomes necessary, not only to clarify what we are talking about, but more importantly to more successfully apprehend realities beyond our perceptual capacities as human beings. Secondly, given their opacity, explanatory statements regarding society and social phenomena must be based on some form of causal model. For example, sociolinguists studying and attempting to improve language policy and practice must be equipped with a model or explanatory account of how social stability or change take place, how social phenomena cause other phenomena to emerge, etc., and how these complex realities are dealt with in different strands of social theory. The opacity of society inevitably forces researchers to do more than collect data, study patterns and regularities statistically, and finally advance causal claims directly from such analysis. The third ontological perspective driving the argumentation in this book is therefore that, because the phenomena we are interested in studying (e.g., language, learning, systems, identities, beliefs, educational structures, ideologies, etc.) are fundamentally opaque realities, the type of work we do as AL scholars and social scientists necessitates theoretical engagement. While the point has often been made that theory without practice or practice

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without theory are incomplete and rather ineffective, often missing from this point is an explicit reference to the opacity of society and social phenomena under scrutiny. It is also crucial to state here that theories and paradigms are developed over long periods of time by communities of scholars from different fields of knowledge, and that despite their diverging foci, all of these contributors to human knowledge share an interest in understanding their world. Concepts and theories, in this sense, are not mere human stories or discursive fabrications about the real world: they are dialectically related to an objective, material reality experienced by people both in the present and historically. Recognition of this point, however, should not lead us to conclude that “good” AL research should be ideologically neutral. Coming to terms with the opaqueness of the social world also requires acknowledgement of an important argument made by postmodernists: what we do as researchers is not a-ideological: there are always biases to contend with in our data-gathering strategies, our analyses of the data, etc. This argument has, however, been used by those of a more radical postmodernist penchant to justify deeply relativist AL research. Arguing that all inquiries are inescapably biased, Widdowson (2001), for example, suggests AL scholars to give up trying to be impartial and objective in their work, and instead invest their energies in ethical pursuits. Although I certainly agree that AL research contains an important ethical element, my view as a realist adherent is that commitment to objective knowledge is a necessary requirement for all natural and social sciences, and I will let Sayer (2000: 71) justify this stance: “(1) There is no neutral access to the world, knowledge is linguistic (by and large) and social, and language is not a transparent, stable medium, but opaque and slippery. (2) We can nevertheless develop reliable knowledge of the world and have scientific progress.” As will become clear to readers, a CDST-informed realist AL scholarship—which is what I advocate in this book—is specifically aimed at maintaining this commitment to objective knowledge. Motivation for this book also comes from the groundbreaking contributions by four publications in AL literature which, in their own ways, have offered novel AL perspectives informed specifically by social theory: Lass’s (1980) On Explaining Language Change, Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin’s (2001) edited volume Sociolinguistics and Social Theory,

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Sealey and Carter’s (2004) Applied Linguistics as Social Science, and Larsen-Freeman and Cameron’s (2008) Complex Systems and Applied Linguistics. Lass’s volume provides an early critique of AL scholarship by revealing problematic theoretical and methodological tendencies in historical linguistics, and by questioning some of the underlying theoretical principles used to guide AL research. Specifically, Lass identifies and unpacks the nature of linguistic data as well as the problematic tendency among historical linguists to adopt a variable-based, successionist view of causality (see Chapter 2). Central to Lass’s book is a call for linguists to consider the philosophical grounds upon which the field stands. Similarly, although with a slightly different epistemological focus, contributors to the volume edited by Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin make compelling cases for sociolinguists (and in my view AL scholars in general) to enrich their work specifically by considering the links between sociolinguistics and social theory. In the third volume, Sealey and Carter extend the work initiated in the Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin volume, while providing a convincing response to Lass’s call for a renewed AL scholarship, by developing a stratified, social realist view of language as emergent from the relationship between structure and agency. They also raise important questions of relevance to both AL and social theory, defining AL phenomena as outcomes of complex causal links emerging through human activities over time, within a complex and contingent social realm. In the fourth volume, Larsen-Freeman and Cameron provide a CDST-driven reinterpretation of AL research, and offer the convincing argument that language and language-related phenomena can be conceptualized as complex systems causally related to each other in a non-linear fashion, and over time. The authors also offer new possibilities for studying both emergence and causality in AL contexts from a complexity perspective. In large part, CDST is discussed in the current volume very much along the lines offered by Larsen-Freeman and Cameron, from the realist perspective developed by Sealey and Carter. Together, these four important publications make unique contributions to AL by looking at how insight from social theory can facilitate research design, data analysis, and conceptual enrichment of AL scholarship. They also help situate AL within the social sciences by providing,

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each in their own ways, perspectives on complexity, emergence and causality. The books by Sealey and Carter and the one edited by Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin, however, are more explicit in their attempts to situate AL research problems within a social ontology. Although realism and CDST are explicitly advocated or referred to only in the Sealey and Carter and Larsen-Freeman and Cameron books, these four books are very much aligned epistemologically, and coalesce into a powerful and much needed critique of contemporary AL scholarship. Readers cognizant of these four important references will find numerous echoes of these in the following pages.

Purposes of This Book The main argument proposed in this book is that, for AL scholarship to improve, it needs a more robust social ontology, one that can potentially be afforded by a CDST-informed realist perspective. A social ontology is a conceptual viewpoint which considers what objects and phenomena exist in the social realm, what they are “made of,” and how they relate to other objects and phenomena (Elder-Vass, 2010). To understand how a social ontology can benefit the study of languagerelated issues, we must first consider AL as part of the social sciences, and to this Rampton (2001: 265) provides an appropriate response: “Ontologies provide an essential starting point for any research, and they consist of non-refutable, metaphysical presuppositions about qualities and forces thought to underlie all of the phenomena being addressed.” Aligned with this view, Kaidesoja (2013) places ontological questions prior to epistemological and methodological ones. Although these views are certainly aligned with a realist approach to social research, it is important to note that ontology, epistemology and methodology influence each other in complex, profound and often non-linear ways, which means that influences between them are likely to be multi-directional. This prioritization of ontological questions in social research agrees with a Weberian view of sociology as concerned with understanding social action, and therefore as concerned with understanding the causes and consequences of social action. The realist thinker Elder-Vass (2012:

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15–16) sees ontological questions as particularly relevant to the formulation of causal claims: We cannot make sense of the social world without understanding its ontology: the nature of social being, and more concretely the kinds of things that exist in the social world and how they can have causal effects. We cannot develop a coherent ontology of the social world, however, without first thinking about the general principles of philosophical ontology and how they may be developed and applied.

The enrichment of AL scholarship through greater engagement with social theory has become particularly noticeable in sociolinguistics. As Coupland et al. (2001) explain, the design of sociolinguistic research and its potential to provide solid social and sociological explanations of language-related phenomena are considerably improved when researchers are actively engaged with social theory—and by extension, with transdisciplinarity—asserting that “this shift to a more outward-looking sociolinguistics and to more genuine inter-disciplinarity must be the discipline’s future” (p. xv). Unfortunately, and for reasons already provided, instead of greater theoretical engagement, AL scholarship has largely become invested in the development of language teaching methodology. This relative lack of engagement with theory by AL scholars is explained by Weideman (2006: 71) in the following terms: Applied linguists seldom appear to take the time off to step back and theoretically consider those ideas that inform their practice. This may be because their work has a certain immediacy. It is often undertaken for the sake of alleviating the language-related struggles of those in need of designing interventions. Perhaps this leaves too little time for reflection, and even less for a deliberate theoretical articulation.

Another reason involves professional demands placed upon language practitioners, notably language teachers. Kramsch (2012: 459) identifies an unfortunate tendency in academia and educational contexts, stating in rather strong terms that “language program directors, department chairs, and deans call for more professionalization of language teachers, not for

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more intellectual development.” Most evidently, and perhaps in response to this, talks of theory are increasingly discouraged by publishers and journals, many of which impose rigid word limits and rhetorical structures largely to serve instrumental purposes such as reducing publishing costs and providing marketable strategies and products for the language classroom. However, there is more than mere instrumental concerns at play here. Also possible is adherence to the idea that theories have little to say about practice, an idea which is based on acceptance of the postmodernist view of theories as stories or discursive fabrications. This argument is also used to suggest that, as discursive realities, theories have more to do with power inequalities and relationships within academic worlds than with explaining how the world is and works. However, as Widdowson (2001) explains, any scientific discipline is characterized by its use of theory as the discourse of specialists. While such discourse does possess salience to its knowers and excludes non-knowers, “specialist terminology also has the entirely legitimate use of expressing conceptual distinction which define different ways of thinking […] The argument against specialized terminology is in effect an argument against cultural pluralism” (p. 6). What is important to retain from this is that the value of AL scholarship does not reside exclusively in its arsenal of practical ideas for the language classroom: it is also a body of field-specific terms and concepts which gives AL scholars epistemic authority to make claims about language-related phenomena. As Widdowson (ibid.: 10) states, AL “only has validity to the extent that it presents reality on its own intellectual authority and in its own specialist terms. If it starts producing theories and descriptions to specification and their validity measured by their utility value, then its authority, it seems to me, is bound to be compromised.” van Lier (1994) also notes this problematic tendency in AL, and decries the gradual disappearance of the theory–practice relationship, noting that AL research has veered almost exclusively towards language teaching pedagogy. With its marked emphasis on theory, this book agrees with van Lier and works to contradict the popular claim that applied linguists are not producers but consumers and users of theories (e.g., Corder, 1973), a claim which is unfortunately based on a problematic dichotomization

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between theory as “stories” and practice as “what we are all actually here to do.” Layder (1993: 6) notes a parallel ideological perspective among sociologists, explaining that, Researchers are often dismissive of [social] theory on the grounds that it is speculative and too far removed from the down-to-earth issues of empirical research. I take the view that this is attitude actually hinders the general development of sociological understanding by preventing the harnessing of the insight of general theory to the requirement and procedures of social research. Furthermore, such a situation simply reinforces the gap that already exists between researchers and social theorists by stifling potential dialogue and erecting, rather than removing, barriers to cooperation.

The dichotomy between theory and practice becomes even more problematic within applied fields of research, for as Sealey and Carter (2004: 63) note with regard to AL, Even the most practical of applied linguists, whose principal concerns are with helping language learners to make more successful progress in their studies, for example, have to make use of some theoretical constructs in conceptualizing language […] no applied linguist (when being an applied linguist, that is, and thus, by our definition, a social scientist) can take ‘real language’ as given and unproblematic. Some theorizing and analysis inevitably goes with the territory.

If we accept the idea that a theory is a coherent set of causal propositions regarding empirically observable data which can potentially be generalized (Coupland, 2001), we can then begin to see why theoretical deliberations by applied linguists constitute the necessary grounds upon which they can develop causal claims, and by extension improve practice on the ground. Theory is understood in this volume as central to all applied fields of inquiry, including AL, not only because understanding social practice requires theory, but also because practice both produces and is influenced by concepts and theories as methodologically useful idealizations of reality. Theory, as Sealey and Carter (2004) point out, is an emergent outcome of our studies of the social world,

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and plays an important role in the constitution of the social world we study. Because theories influence both the world and how we view it, social scientists cannot simply select empirical data that confirms previously established theories. If research was merely a practice of confirming what we already know, our epistemological outlook would, of course, be overly and needlessly constrained. As such, the argumentation provided in this book also contradicts the radical poststructuralist view of sociolinguistic research offered by Heller et al. (2018) as “experience,” which leads the authors to reject discussions of ontology, epistemology and the philosophy of knowledge. Instead, this book stems from acknowledgement that “philosophical questions concerning the nature, validity and scope of our knowledge bear on questions of method and strategy” (Layder, 1993: 16). Stated differently, much of what we do and deal with as applied linguists is theory-laden. For example, variables and analytical categories such as motivation, language, learner, task, testing, policy, standardization, language shift, etc. are understood and analysed not exclusively as empirical phenomena, but precisely because scholars have, over time, developed ideas, theories and concepts about what these phenomena are. Within the context of transdisciplinary research, theory matters even more, for as argued above, not everyone across fields shares the same understanding of variables and phenomena under investigation. But again, theories are not entirely devoid of ideologies. Theories have structures, shapes, and contents. As such, they can be appreciated aesthetically by humans as narratives of the world. To this view, it is important to add that the aesthetic component of theories, as Lass (1980) cogently points out, is an undeniable (and in my view an important) aspect of research. Indeed, support for a theory depends first and foremost on its intelligibility, and intelligibility is more than an emergent outcome of logic and of commitment to objective knowledge: it requires appreciation for a theory’s structure, shape, and content, which is not unlike aesthetic appreciation. Lass (ibid.) opines that, we often judge (what we call) the ‘explanatory’ power of a statement or model on the basis of the pleasure, of a very specific kind, that it affords us […] This pleasure is essentially ‘architectonic’; the structure we

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impose on the chaos that confronts us is beautiful in some way, it makes things cohere that otherwise would not, and it gives us a sense of having transcended the primal disorder.

Extending Lass’s argument further, “imaginative” projections, taxonomies and models can be unpacked, and their capacity to explain reality can then be judged, precisely because they are conceptual abstractions emerging from humans’ understanding of an objective world within which they live and with which they interact. Perhaps more importantly, theories can be evaluated with reference to the correspondence theory of truth (discussed later in the book), or their ability to provide a logical, clear and consistent view of the objective world we all live in. Certainly, some aesthetic pleasure has to be experienced when a theory seems to many informed individuals to successfully account for observed “facts.” As Lass (1980: 163) rightfully points out, even where causal laws are unknown or debatable, or frankly not of interest, investigators in a particular field can still agree on the ‘scientific usefulness’ of some given taxonomies […] their undeniable accomplishment is surely the imposition of structure on otherwise chaotic domains. And this is not a trivial success, but an imaginative and argumentative accomplishment of the highest order.

With regard to the fundamental links between AL and theory, Coupland (2001) explains that sociolinguistics (I would include AL here as well) has primarily been a descriptivist approach to language-related issues, especially in its ability to describe the dissemination of linguistic forms across socio-cultural environments, and that time has now come for the field to include an explanatory agenda (i.e., become more concerned with the explanation of causal relationships). To achieve this, the author concludes that “sociolinguistics needs to be aware of how its existing, generally tacit social theorising connects to broader theoretical traditions in sociology and in the other social sciences” (p. 1). Aligned with these perspectives is Layder’s (2004: xi) argument that “applied sociolinguistics is in need of a social theory that can do justice to the variegated nature of social reality and is not content with easy answers to the agency-structure problem especially ones that simply obviate the

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problem by erasing or dissolving the dualism itself.” More on this subject will be unpacked in Chapters 3, 4 and 5. This division between theory and practice is, in sum, odd and rather unnecessary for the future of AL. For natural scientists, it must be pointed out, reluctant engagement with theory is not a viable option: the analysis of rocks, the weather, water and stars, for example, must be grounded in clear understanding of their real-world referents (i.e., their structure and constituting parts, their properties and powers, and their origins, trajectories and interaction with other natural objects and phenomena in time). While social scientists (including AL scholars) deal with human beings and social constructions for the most part, they nevertheless share with natural scientists a commitment to objective knowledge. Given that direct, unmediated access to the brute facts of reality is not granted to human beings, and that human knowledge is essentially oriented towards the elucidation of ontological issues, theory must therefore gain a central role in the work we do. Because commitment to objective knowledge is inherent to all the sciences, and in light of the considerable contribution of theory to practice, AL scholars should therefore not shy away from theory to remain blind empiricists.

Summary of Contents and General Intention Behind the Book The next chapter extends the main argument made in this Introduction by providing more detailed justification for the need for a renewed AL scholarship. In Chapter 3, I provide a summary of the structure-agency debate and clarify its relevance to AL. This is followed in Chapter 4 by a survey of some of the core principles in social realism, and further extended in Chapter 5 with an explanation of the relevance of social realist theory to AL. Chapter 6 then looks at some of the core principles in CDST and their relevance to social research in general. In Chapter 7, I then wrap up the overall argumentation in this book by clarifying the benefits of and the challenges associated with a CDST-informed AL, as understood from a social realist perspective.

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My central objective in writing this book is to push the conversation about AL research further, to attempt to bring greater clarity to what has been said so far about CDST and social realism as it pertains to AL, and see if this conversation can be improved for the benefit of future AL research endeavours. In attempting to do so, I will criticize (from my arguably limited understanding of the complexities involved) a broad range of ideas and propositions made by a number of writers and thinkers over the past few decades. At times I will qualify ideas, concepts, theories or paradigms as “incomplete,” “unproductive” or “ontologically flattened.” This approach to review and critique might potentially be perceived by some readers as rather confrontational and detrimental to the development of a positive and shared academic discourse. Perhaps a more accepting approach would be to advocate pluralistic viewpoints and strategies for research, as many in existing AL literature have long advocated. While I agree with the underlying spirit and intention behind this more accepting viewpoint, I disagree with the idea that academic discourse can be improved through the mere addition of alternative perspectives. To me, this view is aligned with, or at least strongly inspired by, neoliberalist ideology. Rather, throughout history and within and across various fields of inquiry, academic discourse has evolved through a process of critical evaluation, of selective and justified improvement and adaptation to new and increasingly more complex realities. Essential to this process is the practice of researchers identifying certain perspectives as more valid than others. To achieve this, the correspondence theory of truth has been central and has served them well. That being said, however, at no point in this book do I attack the people who generated or reiterated the perspectives under scrutiny. My approach to critique is therefore grounded in the belief that ideas also exist independently of their producers and knowers, and can thus be evaluated and critically unpacked as phenomena independent from people. Indeed, readers of the current volume will most likely agree with the argument that ideas always come from somewhere: they are inherently the products of complex and antecedent intertextual and interdiscursive processes, themselves influenced by broader socio-historical forces. As Filipovi´c (2015: 70) argues with regard to transdisciplinarity, “theoretical postulates are

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not independent, or created in social, historical and epistemological vacuum.” Instead, ideas are shared and developed by very large groups of both living and dead thinkers over long periods of time. And it is precisely this aspect of ideas as also somewhat detached from situated interaction which allows people to judge them, criticize them and ultimately improve or dismiss them. It is therefore perhaps best to avoid conceiving our own arguments, our own books, our own articles, our own academic voices as exclusively ours but rather as fundamentally shared realities. Freeing ourselves from the notion of ideas as personal possessions—and thereby rejecting the institutional, power-laden quality of academic discourse often (and rightfully) identified by the postmodernists as problematic—allows us to criticize ideas more freely, perhaps even more directly and purposefully. Academic discourse is about our shared—and divergent—understandings of the complexity of the world; it is not necessarily about people, their identities and ideas as their possessions. The development of academic discourse, instead, is a deeply and irrevocably critical endeavour requiring intelligence, creativity, humility and reflexive engagement from all involved. It also requires the capacity to be contentious and even controversial when times call for it. It is from this mindset that new and more sophisticated theories and methodologies can emerge over time. I therefore encourage readers of this volume to understand the argumentation in this book not as confrontational or dismissive of existing AL scholarship, but rather as part of a broader critical endeavour aimed at improving future AL scholarship as a collectively produced and constantly negotiated edifice of human knowledge. By inviting readers to adopt this detached and perhaps more selective critical perspective, I also invite similar critiques of this book, and look forward to seeing where this conversation will lead.

References Archer, M. S. (2012). The reflexive imperative in late modernity. Cambridge University Press.

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Bhaskar, R. (1998). The possibility of naturalism: A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences. Routledge. Block, D. (2007). Second language identities. Continuum. Block, D., Gray, J., & Holborow, M. (2012). Introduction. In D. Block, J. Gray, & M. Holborow (Eds.), Neoliberalism and applied linguistics (pp. 1– 13). Routledge. Bloome, D., et al. (2005). Discourse analysis and the study of classroom language and literacy events: A microethnographic perspective. Lawrence Erlbaum. Bouchard, J. (2017). Ideology, agency, and intercultural communicative competence: A stratified look into Japanese EFL education. Springer. Bouchard, J. (2018). On language, culture, and controversies. Asian Englishes, 20, 268–275. Bouchard, J. (2020). The resilience of native-speakerism: A realist perspective. In S. A. Houghton & J. Bouchard (Eds.), Native-speakerism: Its resilience and undoing (pp. 17–45). Springer. Bouchard, J., & Glasgow, G. P. (2019). Agency in language policy and planning: A theoretical model. In J. Bouchard & G. P. Glasgow (Eds.), Agency in language policy and planning: Critical inquiries (pp. 22–76). Routledge. Brumfit, C. (1997). How applied linguistics is the same as any other science. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7 (1), 86–94. Canagarajah, A. S. (2005). Reclaiming the local in language policy and planning. Routledge. Carter, B. (2000). Realism and racism: Concepts of race in sociological research. Routledge. Chapelle, C. A. (2013). Introduction to The encyclopedia of applied linguistics. In. Chapelle, C. (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 1–9). Blackwell. Collier, A. (2011). The social ontology of critical realism. In A. M. Maccarini, E. Morandi, & R. Prandini (Eds.), Sociological realism (pp. 3–20). Routledge. Cook, G. (2005). Calm seas or troubled waters? Transitions, definitions and disagreements in applied linguistics. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 15–3, 282–301. Cook, G. (2010). Translation in language teaching. Oxford University Press. Corder, S. P. (1973). Introducing applied linguistics. Penguin. Coupland, N. (2001). Introduction: Sociolinguistics and social theory. In N. Coupland, S. Sarangi, & C. N. Candlin (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and social theory (pp. 1–26). Pearson Education.

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Coupland, N., Sarangi, S., & Candlin, C. N. (Eds.). (2001). Sociolinguistics and social theory. Pearson Education. Davies, A., & Elder, C. (Eds.). (2004). The handbook of applied linguistics. Blackwell. Douglas Fir Group. (2016). A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world. The Modern Language Journal, 100 (S1), 19–47. Elder-Vass, D. (2010). The causal power of social structures: Emergence, structure and agency. Cambridge University Press. Elder-Vass, D. (2012). The reality of social construction. Cambridge University Press. Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and social change. Wiley-Blackwell. Fairclough, N. (2010). Critical discourse analysis: The critical study of language (2nd ed.). Pearson Education. Filipovi´c, J. (2015). Transdisciplinary approach to language study: The complexity theory perspective. Palgrave Macmillan. García, O., Flores, N., & Spotti, M. (2017). Introduction—Language and society: A critical poststructuralist perspective. In O. García, N. Flores, & M. Spotti (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of language and society (pp. 1–16). Oxford University Press. Hall, C. J., Smith, P. H., & Wicaksono, R. (2011). Mapping applied linguistics: A guide for students and practitioners. Routledge. Heller, M., Pietikäinen, S., & Pujolar, J. (2018). Critical sociolinguistic research methods: Studying language issues that matter. Routledge. Hiver, P., & Al-Hoorie, A. H. (2020). Research methods for complexity theory in applied linguistics. Multilingual Matters. Huckle, J. (2004). Critical realism: A philosophical framework for higher education for sustainability. In P. B. Corcoran & A. E. J. Wals (Eds.), Higher education and the challenge of sustainability (pp. 33–47). Springer. Hult, F. (2011). Theme-based research in the transdisciplinary field of educational linguistics. In F. Hult (Ed.), Directions and prospects for educational linguistics (pp. 19–32). Springer. Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations of sociolinguistics: An ethnographic approach. Tavistock Publications. Joseph, J. (2002). Hegemony: A realist analysis. Routledge. Kaidesoja, T. (2013). Naturalizing critical realist social ontology. Routledge. Kaplan, R. B. (Ed.). (2010). The Oxford handbook of applied linguistics. Oxford University Press. Kramsch, C. (1998). Language and culture. Oxford University Press.

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2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics

Past and Contemporary Critiques of AL This chapter builds on the short summary of AL in the Introduction, and summarizes important critiques of past and contemporary AL. Themes and issues are discussed with regard to AL as a whole, but also with regard to how they inform (and can be informed by) realism and CDST in more specific terms. As such, this chapter does not provide a comprehensive summary of all areas of AL scholarship to date—for this, readers are encouraged to consult the numerous authoritative books and encyclopedias already available (e.g., Berns, 2009; Brown, 2005; Chapelle, 2013; Davies & Elder, 2004; Ellis, 2001; Liontas, 2018)—nor does it identify the full range of conceptual and epistemological challenges facing AL scholars. Instead, this chapter provides a selective review of the field, and the choices made are based on how themes contribute to the main tasks in this volume: looking at the contribution by and growing popularity of CDST in AL scholarship, and situating this emerging strand within a realist ontology. In the process, the chapter highlights and unpacks perhaps some of the most pressing issues AL scholars should face, as they attempt to forge a renewed AL scholarship. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_2

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Four decades ago, Lass (1980) provided a rather pessimistic assessment of linguistics in general by pointing out that “linguists by and large are a rather inbred lot, and often seem not to worry about much except their intradisciplinary self-image, their positions vis-à-vis current orthodoxies and heresies, and the like” (p. x). Although in partial agreement with this view, I also think that Lass’s assessment does not apply fully to contemporary AL, which has made considerable progress in the past few decades. Arguably, as AL researchers began to transcend cognitivism and behaviourism, the transdisciplinary nature of the field became more prominent. At the close of the twentieth century, Brumfit (1997) called for a transdisciplinary AL scholarship, given the complex nature of language and its real-world uses. Following similar transdisciplinary principles is Ortega (2005), who advocates an ethical re-evaluation of AL research, specifically how it is used in language learning contexts. The author proposes three normative principles for such re-evaluation: evaluating AL research in terms of its social utility, acknowledging its inherent subjectivity, and promoting epistemological diversity, namely through transdisciplinary engagement. Mann (2011) echoes this call by highlighting important developments in ethnomethodological approaches to qualitative interviews, often used in fields such as sociology, anthropology and discursive psychology. He argues that the qualitative interview, which has become a staple of contemporary AL research, has, for the most part, been undertheorized. In addition, problematic aspects of data collection, analysis, and representation are frequently left aside. Instead, selected ‘voices’ are arranged in what might be termed a journalistic tableau: there is something appealing, varied and often colourful in their deployment but they tend to be presented bereft of context and methodological detail. (Mann, 2011: 6)

Many of the problems identified by Mann pertain to sociolinguistics research, notably in identity and ideology research within sociolinguistics, and can arguably be overcome through greater emphasis on researcher reflexivity by (1) bringing attention to the interview process not as a means to access the raw data directly but more as a coconstruction between interviewer and interviewee, and (2) considering

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interview data not as evidence but rather traces of the complex interaction between agency, culture and structure (Bouchard, 2017). The second recommendation can also be applied to statistical data analysis. Empirically gathered data can, in this sense, be viewed as traces of deeper causal relations, which means that what we perceive is not reality in its entirety but rather aspects of it, or as will be argued below, the effects of underlying mechanisms. To this point, Layder (1981: 17) points out that, to say that B has caused A on the basis of an observed regularity between the two does not tell us why this regularity exists. To discover the real causal connections between phenomena, we must acquire knowledge of the underlying mechanisms and structures (theoretical entities) which bring about the regularities of the given observable phenomena.

Based on this understanding, what is therefore needed in a renewed AL scholarship is further conceptual work aimed at revealing the ontological grounds of language-related phenomena under investigation, conceptual work which is inherent to transdisciplinary engagement. Understandably, greater theoretical and transdisciplinary engagement in AL research will lead to a more complex and socially engaged AL scholarship. For instance, considering the gradual infiltration of neoliberalism in language education around the world—e.g., the relentless production of textbooks, materials, computer programs and testing apparatuses; the normalized depiction of language learners as “stakeholders” (Morgan & Clarke, 2011)—a socially engaged AL will necessarily involve greater critical engagement by its scholars. Holborow (2013) responds to Rampton’s (1995) early call for a more critically engaged AL scholarship in a socio-political realm dominated by neoliberal ideology, and unpacks the use of language in AL research, particularly the seemingly free and uncritical use of ideologically laden terms deemed to echo neoliberal concerns related to economic restructuring. The author calls for AL scholars to outwardly criticize the spread of neoliberal language within universities and in the field of AL at large. Also concerned with the very language used to conduct AL research is Weideman (2007), who notes the weak philosophical foundations of AL research, and warns that

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an uncritical acceptance of long-standing principles in the field leads to ignorance of its historical and philosophical grounds. The author argues that this problem is particularly noticeable among new AL researchers, many of whom adhere rather uncritically and a-historically to (said) postmodernist/poststructuralist principles in their work. Similar although slightly divergent concerns were raised a decade earlier by Rampton (1997), who also highlighted the need for a more reflexively-engaged AL scholarship, and questioned long-standing notions in AL including linguistic competence and speech community, which according to him are rooted in modernist principles. Kramsch (2015) offers a similar viewpoint, and a convincing critique of the term language acquisition by Larsen-Freeman (2017) is justified on similar grounds. However, the indeterminate quality of AL research is not unanimously perceived as a negative trait. For instance, while Coupland (2001a) criticizes sociolinguistics as overly reliant on survey-based analysis and in need of both theoretical and methodological overhaul, he also depicts the field as an inherently eclectic strand of social research, asserting that “sociolinguistics lies at the intersection of several different theoretical traditions and find it impossible, and probably undesirable, to commit to a single dogmatic theoretical type” (pp. 14–15). Cook (2005), on the other hand, sees the theoretical and methodological separation between various strands in AL as problematic by arguing that the nature and scope of AL has yet to be clearly determined, and that consensus in the field is unlikely to emerge largely because of the proliferation of sub-areas of AL into special interest groups, conference compartmentalization and subject-specific academic journals, divisions which according to the author facilitate avoidance of open debate. In this sense, Cook sees conceptual debate in AL research as necessary to (a) maintaining intellectual progress, (b) strengthening AL’s credibility and epistemic standing within the social sciences and (c) maintaining the vitality of work conducted in the field. Part of this potential vitality is understood by the author as the capacity for applied linguists to critically reassess the epistemological value of principles rejected by “new” and fashionable approaches to language learning and teaching. Five years later, Cook (2010) extended this argument in an award-winning monograph titled Translation in Language Teaching (Cook, 2010), in which

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he criticizes contemporary AL research and practice as overemphasizing the Direct Method (which according to the author requires a rejection of the learners’ L1), a set of principles which ground prominent AL approaches including lexical syllabi, situational teaching, communicative language teaching and task-based instruction. This leads the author to stress that translation (an unpopular practice among adherents of communicative language teaching, for example) actually plays an important role in second language learning and teaching because, in part, multilingual individuals naturally translate both in their minds and in communication on an ongoing basis. The author also recommends AL scholars to be more responsive to contemporary social realities thus: Language learning is not the same now as it was when the current dominant ideas about it were formulated. A student’s reasons for learning a language in 2009 […] are likely to be different from those that were common fifty or a hundred years ago; and the same is therefore true of measures of success. This is the era of electronic communication, mass migrations, an exponential growth in the use of English, and a consequent complexification of identity for many individuals. (p. xvi)

As will be discussed later, successionism and interpretivism constitute two dominant tendencies within AL scholarship which share one core feature: a prioritization of empirical data (Sealey & Carter, 2004). As Firth and Wagner (1997: 288) argue with regard to AL researchers limiting their insight to empirically gathered linguistic data, “at best it marginalizes, and at worst ignores, the social and the contextual dimensions of language.” Sealey and Carter (2004: 88) suggest that, instead of cataloguing repetitions of regularly occurring events in the body of data, applied linguists should attempt to identify and explain the causal mechanisms which have led to the empirical evidence under consideration. As argued in the Introduction and developed further below, the opacity of social phenomena (including language-related phenomena) implies that empirical data does not “speak” to the researcher directly; instead, underlying causal processes must be gauged through conceptual means of inquiry, and recognized as powerful causal forces and as central elements in the development of explanatory statements.

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In response to the above critiques, some AL scholars, mostly sociolinguists, advocate interpretivism, often under the umbrella of social constructionism or poststructuralism, as a potentially viable alternative to successionist AL research. These approaches are principally concerned with explaining the non-linear, complex and highly variable nature of AL data, and the socio-cultural context around real-world language use, as understood by research participants themselves. The main point of interest for interpretivist researchers is how meaning is constructed among participants, and to reveal this process researchers interpret all the data gathered from the lens of social and cultural norms, constructs and relationships, and highlight the need for introspective analytical methods and researcher reflexivity. Despite this radical shift from successionism, interpretivism—like successionism—remains an inherently empiricist viewpoint. Furthermore, while interpretivist research has provided detailed accounts of the more granular aspects of language learning and teaching, has shown remarkable potential for dealing with complex social and linguistic phenomena, and has demonstrated how social reality is indeed partly constructed through discursive practices (Berger & Luckmann, 1967; Elder-Vass, 2012; Parker, 1998; Searle, 1995), one of its most problematic features is how discourse—not people—tends to be conceptually endowed with agentive properties or powers to negotiate meaning and, by extension, effect social change. Although Elder-Vass (2012) sees important connections between social realism and social constructionism, he rightfully points out that “when writers claim that some social phenomenon is socially constructed, we are entitled to ask what exactly it is that is doing the constructing” (p. 77). As the author clearly demonstrates, the interpretivist perspective offers very little of substance in this regard. In the analysis of discourse and discursive practices, without clearly identifying who or what does the constructing, we are left to conclude that it is discourse that is doing the constructing. With discourse as the main causal force and therefore as principal analytical foci, people remain conduits through which discursive processes unfold. This marked characteristic of interpretivism draws principally from Berger and Luckmann (1967), although Foucault’s earlier writings (e.g., Foucault, 1972) constitutes perhaps a more prominent source

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of influence. Claiming that it is discourse which constructs the social world—i.e., discourse as “shaping” things in the real world rather than the producers and consumers of discourse—and equipped with the Foucauldian argument that all knowledge claims are inherently claims to power, interpretivist AL scholars demonstrate a clear propensity towards (a) reducing social phenomena to power struggles, and (b) overemphasizing the causal potential of language/discourse. These problems leave researchers with the paradoxical challenge of having to use language to make knowledge claims regarding language. The realist solution to this particular conceptual problem posits that language and discourse do not produce social and educational realities: people do. People engage in discursive practices to achieve their aims, but at no point does discourse determine whether aims are fulfilled or not. At the same time, people are situated and their choices and actions are structured (and “cultured”) in various ways. As such, accounts of underlying generative mechanisms are also crucial to our understanding of social realities. Furthermore, language and discourse must be conceptualized as emergent products of the complex interaction between people and their structurally and culturally conditioned environment. This leads to the realization that emergence and causality—or as Sealey and Carter (2004: 86) put it with regard to language education, “how pedagogy and outcomes are related”—constitute fundamental conceptual aspects of AL research. Acknowledgements of this core principle prompts a review in this chapter of some of the most prominent critiques of how emergence and causality have been discussed by AL researchers to date. Central to this critical review are (a) Lass’s (1980) re-evaluation of current linguistic theory, including issues related to the status of and theoretical constructs behind the data studied, (b) Sealey and Carter’s (2004) point that much of AL research adopts the successionist model of causality and (c) Larsen-Freeman’s (2019) critique of the tendency among second language development researchers to view second language learners not necessarily as active agents but rather as recipient or mere experiencers of change. In this chapter, I also critique recent developments towards posthumanist AL, initiated largely by Pennycook (2019), and of seemingly growing interest among CDST adherents (e.g., Larsen-Freeman, 2019). Specifically, I ask How can a posthumanist AL (or a posthumanist

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feminism for that matter) work if elements such as human intentionality, beliefs, emotions and reflexivity are not conceptualized as distinct and emergent properties of human agency and not of other entities in the natural world? In other words, How can we have a viable critical AL without some sort of account of people’s unique powers to change their worlds? In asking these questions, my goal is not to promote an anthropocentric viewpoint but rather to emphasize the profound scientific agenda at the heart of all AL research endeavours. This agenda includes in part the tasks of classifying phenomena according to their distinct ontological properties and powers (Davis & Sumara, 2006), identifying underlying mechanisms, and revealing causal relationships between phenomena under scrutiny.

Variables and Social Categories in AL Much of AL scholarship to date has concentrated on the study of variables in language learning and teaching (e.g., learner errors, sequences in second language acquisition, language input/output, specific teaching methods, social factors, L1/L2, cognition, learner characteristics, learner strategies, learning materials, technology, etc.) and their causal effects upon one another. Pertaining to the social sciences in general, and honing in on the issue of causality, Ragin (1987: 26) describes the variable-based approach as a process in which, in a simple experiment an investigator compares an experimental group, which has been subjected to an experimental treatment, with a control group, which differs from the experimental group in only one respect— it does not receive the treatment. Only one factor, the treatment, is allowed to vary; all other conditions are held constant or randomized. If significant post-treatment differences between the experimental and control group emerge, these differences are credited to the experimental or treatment variable, and a tentative cause-effect sequence is established.

Sealey and Carter (2004: 91) similarly portray the variable analysis tradition in AL research thus:

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In each case, a language learning ‘problem’ is identified, and a number of factors are considered as potentially having a bearing on that problem. Investigations take the form of measurements of these factors and identification of their respective significance. The expression of each problem incorporates a fairly precise delineation of who is involved (‘advanced Chinese EFL learners at tertiary level’, ‘a small sample ... of high-school students in a rural community in Northern California’, ‘first generation immigrant children’), and what the language learning enterprise is. (‘French second language performance’, ‘[English] language achievement’)

Within a complex and contingent social realm, however, these “fairly precise delineations” are rather difficult to make, because the real-world phenomena to which research variables refer are complex, fluid, nonlinear and emergent realities. Moreover, given the limited space afforded by academic journals and the likes, variables in AL research—learner characteristics and beyond—also tend to be presented by AL scholars as common-sense realities (e.g., Everybody know what “task,” “appropriateness” or “ motivation” are), quantified and then measured through empirical means of measurement (e.g., attitude surveys, pre-test/posttest, etc.). In many cases, by comparing survey results with test results, AL scholars formulate causal claims which endow certain variables with causal potential to affect language learning in specific ways and not others. As Larsen-Freeman (2015: 12, emphasis original) explains with regard to much of AL scholarship prior to the introduction of CDST, “the prevailing assumption of individual difference research was one of stasis. Although characterizing individual differences as static was never stated explicitly, it is a fact that most researchers aimed to find correlations between certain learner characteristics theorized to be influential in SLD and language learning success at one time.” Again, variables such as learner motivation, for example, are not static phenomena but rather complex processes to be studied over time, and in relation with other complex processes. Instead of this, however, the common AL approach to the study of learner characteristics retains essentially a linear, mechanistic view of causality, or in the context of language education, a reduction of learner behaviour—what is after all reflexively grounded behaviour—to a mere stimulus–response process. The problem is that the behaviours

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of language learners (who, let’s remember, are reflexive human agents) simply cannot be accounted for through a linear view of causality which behaviourism requires. For one, explaining a language learner’s response to a task must consider elements such as learner awareness and intention, as well as contextual and historical factors conditioning agency in important ways, as also possessing causal potential. These elements and their complex causal relationship simply cannot be accounted for in the mechanistic terms offered by the variable-based approach. Instead, and as Chapters 6 and 7 on CDST will explain, we need to see learners and tasks as complex systems interacting together in complex ways. This view is captured by (Juarrero, 1999: 75) thus: The type of causal relations required to explain the relationship between organisms and their environment—and its past—must be able to account for the way organisms simultaneously participate in and shape the contextual niche in which they are situated, and to which their dispositions are attuned and respond. Developmentally as well as evolutionarily, parts interact to create systems that in turn affect their components: interlevel causality, in other words.

To provide grounds for the argumentation in this section, let’s hone in on motivation, perhaps one of AL scholarship’s most studied variables. Largely understood as one of the four main learner characteristics including language aptitude, learning styles and learning strategies, motivation is defined by Dörnyei (2009: 231) as “the affective characteristics of the learner, referring to the direction and magnitude of learning behaviour in terms of the learner’s choice, intensity, and duration of learning.” Motivation, as most would agree, is essential to sustained and effective language learning. However, Dörnyei himself admits that, if we take a situated and process-oriented perspective of SLA, we cannot fail to realize that the various learner attributes display a considerable amount of variation from time to time and from situation to situation. Indeed, [...] the most striking aspect of nearly all the recent [individual difference] literature was the emerging theme of context. [...] most ID researchers would now agree that the role of learner characteristics can only be evaluated with regard to their interaction with specific

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environmental and temporal factors or conditions”. (p. 232, emphasis mine)

One conclusion we can draw from this is that motivation is not an inherent aspect of learners, nor is it a fixed trait; instead, it is a constantly shifting process emerging from the structure–agency relationship. With this view of motivation as example, we can note that much of current variable-based AL research unfortunately tends to rely on some form of abstraction of complex phenomena from their contexts, for the purpose of transforming them into measurable constructs—e.g., motivation as an individual characteristic, recordable and measurable empirically. On this point, Sealey and Carter (2004: 205–206) offer a realist view of learner motivation which, in my view, both explains and provides necessary conceptual sophistication for dealing with the complexity noted by Dörnyei: The realist’s stratified ontology […] requires consideration of the properties of social structure which act to constrain or enable human intentions. So while learners’ assessment of the probability of being able to make use of the L2 may also be involved in motivation, that probability is associated with more macro structural factors such as the global economy, and the likelihood that facility in this particular L2 will lead to secure employment. ‘Motivation’, then, is conceptualized not as an individual characteristic, nor as a quantifiable variable possessed in different measures by different learners, but as emergent from relations between human intentionality and the social world.

Arguably, similar conclusions can be drawn with regard to other learner characteristics including language aptitude, learning styles and learning strategies, as well as other research variables commonly studied in AL scholarship, for not only internal characteristics help us understand human agents and language-related phenomena, but external ones as well. Specifically, variables in AL research must be conceptualized as emergent products of learners’ ongoing mediated interaction with structural and cultural constraints and enablements, in light of their goals and aspirations, all within a contingent social realm. This particular viewpoint will be developed further in Chapter 4.

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The main reason why AL scholars have so far demonstrated a marked preference for variable-based approaches is that, unlike natural scientists, AL researchers cannot depend on explanations and predictions based on “laws,” making AL an essentially post hoc endeavour (Lass, 1980)—a type of analysis happening after an event has happened, or in reaction to something which previously happened. Problems with post hoc analysis of social phenomena include (a) over-reliance on statistical testing (despite recent pushes towards data triangulation, or combinations of different analytical strategies), which tends to lead to (b) data dredging, or the desire to find patterns in statistically uncovered data by considering only statistically significant data while overlooking other elements deemed “random.” These problems considerably complicate our understanding of language-related phenomena, for random elements can—and often do—play important causal roles and reveal other salient types of correlations not previously theorized or anticipated (Maxwell, 2012). Despite these problems, variable-based approaches are effective in operationalizing the complex features of social realities, and indicating where potential cause–effect relationships might unfold. Variable-based studies have also demonstrated useful, for example, in identifying important epistemological concerns and in testing specific hypotheses about the relationship (or lack thereof ) between two or more measurable variables. However, while accounts of what relationships are deemed to exist between linguistic “facts” (i.e., the task of description) matter a great deal, of greater importance to AL research are accounts of why these relationships exist (or don’t) (i.e., the task of explanation), for science is not merely a descriptive but more importantly an explanatory endeavour. Another related issue is that, contrary to Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967), variable-based approaches depend on theory to come first, specifically in the description of, and justification for choosing, specific variables over others. In and of itself, this is not a major problem, for researchers do often begin their work from theory. The problem, however, is that variable-based approaches are not equipped to produce theoretical insight: they can only test the theories selected beforehand. More importantly, and as Lightbown and Spada (2001) rightfully point

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out, variables are not directly observable or measurable—i.e., empirical—since they refer to a broad range of often interrelated features. As Ragin (1987: 27) clarifies, rarely does an outcome of interest to social scientists have a single cause. […] causes rarely operate in isolation. Usually, it is the combined effect of various conditions, their intersection in time and space, that produces a certain outcome. Thus, social causation is often both multiple and conjunctural, involving different combinations of causal conditions.

By logical extension, a single cause does not have a single, linear effect on other things. Therefore, explaining which effect(s) happen or have happened requires consideration for variables, their interaction and their contexts, as complex and emergent phenomena. As subsequent chapters will show, both realism and CDST offer more or less parallel views on these issues. Related to concern for the causal potentials of variables is concern for the ontological features of social categories. Here, variable-based AL inquiries have also revealed to be problematic. Postmodernists and social constructionists often underline this problem in their critiques of objective knowledge, and in their relatively convincing attempts a revealing the constructed nature of social categories and social phenomena in a broader sense. One of their most salient observations is that it is very difficult to organize the social world into neat categories. As Rampton (2001: 275) argues, “people don’t sit contentedly in the social group categories that society tries to fix them in, and they don’t confine themselves only to those identities that they are expected to have legitimate or routine access to.” Sealey and Carter (2004) note that the reduction of people to social categories and the essentialization of people to specific variables do violence to the complexity of social life. The main reasons are that categories such as gender or age, being culturally laden concepts, (a) are discursive constructions themselves, and therefore (b) are not inherent features of research participants, and (c) mean different things to different people, including researchers and research participants. Therefore, using categories such as gender or age as “natural”

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analytical categories in a research project can be problematic. Coupland (2001a: 18) provides the following parallel argument: Sociolinguistics’ tolerance of independent variables such as sex, class or age readily essentialises people into these groupings, making the assumption that aggregate patterns of language variation are adequately explained by individuals’ sex, class or age ‘identities’. […] Social group membership is by no means static and ‘given’ by social attribute, or of course by language and speech characteristics themselves.

Variable-based AL research tends to be problematic also because variables and social categories can be of different kinds, with different implications for causal explanation. For example, social categories can be social collectives—i.e., dependent to some extent on personal choice, such as being a language learner or a teacher—or social aggregates—i.e., resting on factors beyond people’s volition, deemed of importance to a research project (e.g., belonging to a social class/culture/ethnicity, being of a certain age). This distinction is crucial to the issue of causality in variable-based research, for while a social aggregate is not formed out of reflexive human commitment by participants to particular projects or realities (indeed, they are often imposed by researchers), a social collective is to a large extent an emergent product of decisions made by people. Being Japanese, for example, says little about how a person speaks or acts. What explains a Japanese person’s actions/uses of language requires a view into how this person understands contextual resources, constraints and enablements, including (but not exclusively) elements and resources afforded by Japanese culture, and why (s)he draws from such resources or does not. Consequently, variables and social categories cannot be used uncritically, or as common-sense realities for the purpose of formulating causal claims: they must also be accounted for in terms of their distinct and emergent properties and powers before their influence on other things can be explained. Since language learners’ age bears relevance to many AL studies, it is worth paying additional attention to age as a social category. Particularly problematic is the marked tendency among scholars to refer to age mainly with regard to early socialization, thus largely disregarding the

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full scope of human experiences from birth to death. Coupland (2001b) discusses age as one of many under-developed, under-theorized social categories in sociolinguistic research, and argues that the variable has largely been conceptualized in terms of the socialization—primary and secondary—of the infant and child within the family and in the school context, whereas adults are seen as “socialized” or “complete” beings ageing through time, relatively untouched by social and cultural forces. This common understanding of age in AL research fails to consider that learning happens throughout life, thus unfortunately perpetuating a modernist view of agency and the human life course. To see why this view of age is problematic, let’s consider the following example. According to Ellis (2001), older language learners have an initial advantage over younger learners in terms of rate of grammar learning. In terms of description, this is a rather non-problematic statement. However, age—being a social aggregate and therefore not the outcome of humans’ reflexive engagement with the world—actually reveals little in terms of why this can be the case. Counter-examples are, after all, likely to be found, thus undermining the view of age as a causally efficacious variable. If, on the other hand, company workers (forming a social collective) learning a foreign language for instrumental reasons (e.g., to be promoted or assigned to a foreign desk) were deemed more effective at learning the grammar of another language than a group of schoolage teenagers, their age would necessarily matter much less as a causal factor than their instrumentally motivated commitment to their work. As such, the category “workers from Company X” could potentially bear greater significance to accounts of causality than age. Most likely, however, the category “workers from Company X” becomes a salient category when studied in relation to other factors including position in the company, perceived chance of success, language learning experience, degree of commitment to the learning process, etc. As Sealey and Carter (2004) cogently argue, this brings attention not only to the contingencies imposed by broader structural and cultural causal factors unto the experiences of language learners as human agents, but more specifically to the centrality of human agency in the explanation of social phenomena:

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If we want to explain why many adolescents are in the vanguard of linguistic change, and why some are not, we need to introduce a strong notion of social agency – an acknowledgement that people have some degree of choice over what they do, including how they speak. This in turn requires the use of social categories that recognize the relevance of actors’ own understandings. (p. 113)

For this reason, the authors recommend AL researchers to study more than the interaction between variables and social categories: they should focus on the “case” while considering the relevance of categories and variables later in the research process. Important in this process is awareness that while social aggregates can contribute to the description of empirical phenomena, they remain of limited use to causal explanation. In contrast, social collectives can be relevant to explanation if understood as complex outcomes of the structure–agency relationship. In sum, the use of social categories and variables must not only be selected but justified in causal terms; they must not be seen as mere labels for or inherent attributes of collections of people but rather grounded in a theory of causality, itself grounded in a robust social ontology. This issue brings attention to the theory–practice issue in AL. In addition to being mainly a post hoc endeavour, much of AL research tends to be limited to local concerns, or language-related phenomena accessed through empirical means. This is understandable, given that (a) the most readily available data is that which can be accessed through the sense, and (b) AL scholarship arguably needs to provide language teachers and practitioners with findings that can benefit practice on the ground. Nevertheless, fulfilling this particular responsibility becomes even more complicated when practical insight and advice are grounded in empirical data exclusively. Just as the act of reducing complex language-related phenomena to single variables does violence to their complexity, limiting our perspectives to what we can perceive and experience as human beings means that we can no longer appreciate the full ontological depth of these phenomena. If we aim to study the usefulness of a particular teaching approach to language development, for example, the pre-test/post-test approach can be beneficial to the task of revealing only some of the factors at play in the moment. But as Sealey and Carter

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(2004: 190) state, not everything can be revealed through empirical means: While, of course, the applied linguistic researcher will be concerned with situated activity (that is, with interviews aimed at assessing language proficiency, or on-line discussions, or encounters between police, detainees and interpreters and so on), we would advocate an awareness also of the relevance of differential distribution of funding for education, the history of relations between national governments – and, indeed, the biographical trajectories of individual participants in these social interactions.

This explains in large part why data cannot be gathered simply through interviews or surveys methods, for example. For one, there are important ontological differences between the unequal distribution of funding for education—itself a complex mechanism with antecedent and emergent properties—and people’s variegated understandings of it, as potentially revealed in survey and interview data. Stated simply, studying and undoing the unequal distribution of funding for education cannot be done exclusively through a study of what people think about it. Furthermore, what people say during interviews or their survey answers are mere traces of beliefs held and formulated in the moment, not the beliefs themselves, which cannot be perceived empirically unless by individual people having them in their mind at particular points in time. In short, to assume that empirical data (e.g., statistics, test results, survey and interview responses) is the most reliable source of information about reality remains, to put it bluntly, conceptually and methodologically misleading, and in Chapter 4 on realism I will further explain why this is the case. The main implication for methodology is that measurement (specific to the domain of the empirical) cannot offer a pure and unmediated view of the world. Instead, it “must always be understood as a theoretical tool, one by means of which we ‘translate’ the world into scientifically significant descriptions. It is on the basis of these that we then develop causal accounts” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 191). Moreover, results of statistical measurement cannot directly reveal causality either, for understanding causality in the social realm requires a theory of causality responsive to

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the specificities of social phenomena under scrutiny, and not simply the measurement of constant conjunctions in the Humean sense. Within AL research, instead of considering variables and social categories as fixed and deterministic social phenomena, we need to consider, for example, (a) how people within a specific age group can also be differentiated from other people in terms of access to and control over economic, educational and linguistic resources in a particular community or nation-state, (b) how within a particular socio-economic class, or even within one school or classroom, human relationships differ in terms of types and degrees of reflexive engagement, and (c) how people experience growth and change differently. As Coupland (2001b: 205) states with regard to age, “we should continue to model ageing in terms of change. But we should recognize that change involves an interplay between human developmental processes, historical cohort influences and the shifting contexts of social structure and culture, all subject to creative interpretation by people in their other demographic categories.” Again, we need to conceptualize the analytical categories in our AL research projects as complex, non-linear, stratified, emergent and evolving realities themselves. This section did not aim to discredit the value of variable-based inquiry in AL research, for as stated earlier this approach has numerous advantages. However, the delimitation of a variable or social category must emerge out of active and informed theoretical engagement with the fabrics of society and social phenomena. Indeed, variables in AL scholarship such as motivation or other learner characteristics can be understood to some extent as models of the world we perceive and experience. On this issue, Hedström and Swedberg (1998: 14) explain that, even in the most trivial description of a social situation, we are forced to be highly selective about which events to include and which events to exclude from the description; this choice, implicitly or explicitly, is guided by our prior belief about the essential elements of the situation. Thus even the most detailed descriptive accounts are always “models” of concrete social situations, and these descriptive models will always distort reality by accentuating certain aspects of the situation and by ignoring others.

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In order to mitigate the conflating tendencies within variable-based AL research, the development and use of analytical categories in AL research requires theoretical unpacking, while their causal potentials should be explained with reference to a causal model suitable to the object under investigation, itself something which emerges principally through conceptual work. Without dealing with the conceptual shortcomings of variable-based AL research, AL scholarship will face increasingly difficult challenges in attempting to contribute valuable and reliable insight into language-related phenomena, particularly insight of relevance to our understandings of larger groups and populations language learners and users across contexts.

Statistical Analysis in AL As part of the social sciences, and given its unique interest in how people learn, use and live their lives with language, it is understandable that some applied linguists focus their attention on people’s understanding of their own experience—in a phenomenological sense—and by extension, require qualitative analysis which allows them to reveal people’s complex and dynamic interpretation of meaning. However, Lazaraton (2000, 2005) found that, in the 1990s, approximately 90% of AL studies published in leading AL journals adopted some form of statistical analysis, a figure confirmed roughly a decade later by Loewen et al. (2014), who interpret this data to mean that statistical analysis (and by extension statistical literacy among AL scholars) is crucial to research in the field. The problem with the latter observation, however, is that the need for statistical analysis in AL research cannot be justified on the basis of how popular it is among AL scholars, but rather with regard to the theoretical and methodological benefits it brings to AL research, something which Loewen et al. (2014) fail to elucidate. Given that its main contribution relates to large groups and whole populations, the principal benefit of statistical analysis lies in its potential to reveal insight into phenomena occurring on a broader demographic scale, or broader sociological processes not immediately accessible through the senses. Statistical analysis therefore allows applied

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linguists to gain a view of what goes on somewhat beyond empirically accessible evidence. In addition to being useful to descriptive endeavours, statistical analysis can also be of use to the testing of theories, and in revealing potential traces of underlying causal mechanisms behind the emergence of social realities. Statistical indications of (although not evidence of ) social patterns and inequalities are examples of what can be initially identified through statistical analysis. Statistical analysis— a hallmark of quantitative research—has played and continues to play an important role in AL scholarship, and is often perceived as a way to strengthen the epistemological quality and authority of the work conducted in our field. However, being essentially about macro realities, statistical analysis bears limited relevance to people’s understandings of their own experiences, and to the study of individuals and small groups. Furthermore, even if statistical analysis can be helpful in testing theories, because its explanatory potential is considerably limited, direct application of statistical findings to the generation of theoretical insight is mistaken. As Hedström and Swedberg (1998: 17) indicate, many sociologists have had all too much faith in statistical analysis as a tool for generating theories […] the belief in an isomorphism between statistical and theoretical models, which appears to be an integral feature of the causal-modeling approach, has hampered the development of sociological theories built upon concrete explanatory mechanisms.

Because a central objective of theory is to account for the type of complexities in social life not immediately accessible through empirical means, the problem, as Ragin (1987) points out, is that statistical techniques and procedures simplify complexity through a series of assumptions, for example, that cause–effect links are assumed to unfold uniformly across contexts. Instead of including, or revealing, important features in the data which might help us understand the effects of contingent contextual forces, statistical analysis requires the elimination of a broad range of elements—notably contextual influences—usually deemed as “noise” in the data. In short, a statistical view inevitably reinforces a linear (as opposed to complex and contingent) view of social

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processes. To phrase the above point differently, assuming that statistical regularities are direct indications of cause–effect relationships is mistaken, for as Sayer (2000) cogently points out, how often we notice something happening in our data has little to do with why it happens. Sealey and Carter (2004: 209) identify the core problem with using measurement (including statistical measurement) as sole basis for causal claims thus: “Measurement is important in most research programmes, but it does not provide direct access to reality. […] whatever form of measure you use will rest on theoretical claims about social reality. ‘Facts’ never ‘speak for themselves’.” Sørensen (1998: 239) explain this unavoidable limitation of statistical analysis thus: The discipline of statistics is a branch of applied mathematics and has no social theory whatsoever. Statisticians never claim otherwise. It is the sociologists’ use of statistics that is at fault. Statistics provides tools for estimating mathematical models representing a conception of social processes. Unfortunately, sociologists […] have become less, rather than more, competent at translating theoretical ideas into models to be estimated by statistical techniques. Sociologists therefore estimate ad hoc statistical models of social processes, usually additive models that often represent poor theories of the phenomena being investigated.

The assumption that statistical data reveals causal links has a rather long history, originating mainly in Hume’s theory of causality as constant conjunction, and the philosopher’s reluctance to recognize causality as central to the existence and fluid nature of social phenomena. The Humean view of causality assumes that, whenever an event of type A occurs, it is followed by an event of type B. The idea we form that there is a necessary connection between A events and B events – some sort of natural force that A has to produce B – cannot, according to Hume, be justified; all we have good reason to believe is that there is a constant conjunction of A’s and B’s. (Elder-Vass, 2010: 41)

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Easton (2010: 118) explains that this “constant conjunction of elements or variables is not a causal explanation or indeed an explanation of any kind. It is simply an atheoretical statement about the world. It doesn’t answer the question why?” In other words, the Humean model merely provides descriptive—not explanatory—insight. In contemporary sociology and social theory, Hume’s approach to causality, or rather his rejection of causality, has largely been dismissed. According to Collier (2011: 4), “if Hume were right we would not need experiments, but we do because cause equals constant conjunction only when other things are equal, and in nature, other things never are equal.” This dismissal of the Humean model among social scientists is based on recognition that society is a radically open and contingent system, which means that to explain social facts statistical analysis must therefore be combined with a causal model grounded in a robust social ontology. Pertaining to sociolinguistics, Lass (1980) argues that the attribution of theoretical significance to statistical patterns is more of an assertion of belief than a process justified by sound principles of inference. In light of this, AL scholars must therefore ensure that their causal models and theories are explicit and clear, so that when evaluated by other social scientists they can be accepted or dismissed on sound and widely agreed upon causal principles which are responsive to the complexity of the social realm. If, as argued above and developed further in Chapter 4, we cannot know things directly from empirical evidence or statistical analysis, we must then revert to theory, which according to Lass involves a principled approach to inference. While statistical tools and related theoretical paradigms have certainly improved as a result of more sophisticated insight into social complexity, the inherent heterogeneity, non-linearity and contingent nature of society and the phenomena within it nevertheless require consideration for human agency and underlying causal mechanisms as important causal forces. Morgan and Winship (2012) explain that, in the 1980s and 1990s, quantitative approaches used in sociology underwent stringent and largely justified criticism for what the authors describe as “the overly strong causal assertions in the published literature [which] were based on misplaced faith in the capacity of linear regression results to generate warranted causal conclusions from the analysis of survey data” (p. 320,

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emphasis mine). Understanding of this problem calls for the application of qualitative research methodologies, arguably more appropriate to the study of contextual influences and the variability we inevitably find in AL data. Statistics, let’s not forget, play an important role in our work, but it is a specific one. Davis and Sumara (2006: 22, emphasis original) explain why this feature of mathematics matters to a complexity approach to education: While mathematics provides powerful tools that should not be ignored, the project of bottom-up computer simulations is necessarily oriented toward the identification of essential rules or principles that can then be recombined to generate complex happenings (or, at least, convincing simulations of complex happenings). There is no disagreement that mathematics and mathematical tools are useful for these sorts of endeavors. However, as helpful as a rule-based approach may be, it is inadequate for understanding all dimensions of complexity and it can in fact be a hindrance to these understandings.

With regard to sociological research, Sørensen (1998) suggests that, for statistical analysis to bear fruit, theory should be equipped with a mathematical model of social processes, while statistical analysis can serve to evaluate the validity of this model. Yet, estimation can only take social scientists so far, since social phenomena—e.g., people, classrooms, public opinions and election polls, etc.—are (or at least include) complex living and learning systems, which means that change is both expected and somewhat unpredictable. As such, statistical analysis can offer a clear view of a complex learning system momentarily interrupted in time, but as soon as this interruption is removed statistical data begins to lose its relevance. Again, the use of statistical analysis to AL research is justified when combined with qualitatively oriented work. While it is a cliché to state that AL research requires both qualitative and quantitative analyses, what needs to be stressed in this argument is that a qualitative–quantitative combination is necessary precisely in the formulation of causal claims.

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The Successionist Model of Causality and Descriptive-Causal Generalizations Adherence to the successionist model of causality can be noted by a strong preference for quantifying variables and extensive use of statistical analysis to advance causal claims. This model, which requires statistical measurement and quantification, is based on longstanding scientific notions including falsifiable hypotheses and dependent/independent/confounding variables. Monaghan and Boaz (2018: 175) state that successionism, adopts an external view of causation and seeks to ascertain whether a program or intervention works to deliver a desired outcome. For those working in this tradition, the randomised controlled trial (RCT) is seen as the gold-standard method for determining this kind of causality. By randomly assigning participants to a group within a study, one of which will receive an intervention and one that will not, researchers working within this paradigm seek to establish what they argue to be causation.

The successionist model has deep roots in the natural sciences which must deal with numerous closed systems. When applied to the social sciences, which must deal with complex, open, dynamic and emergent systems (see Chapters 6 and 7), successionism therefore poses considerable problems. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that, in many ways, this model has served the evolution of human knowledge rather well over centuries of research, for as Schumann (2015: xviii) cogently explains, The human mind has evolved to view the world in terms of singular causes and single chains of causality. From an evolutionary perspective, we can assume that such cognition must have been very important for the survival of our species. The experimental method itself may be a manifestation of our tendency to isolate a single cause, to see averages as the truth and to dismiss variation as noise. Complicating the matter, is the fact that the search for a single causal variable often works and has often been very informative; we have learned a lot from this way of thinking.

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However, the successionist model is aligned with a Humean view of causality which unfortunately does not allow scientists, especially social scientists, to make causal claims, only statements about a particular sequencing of events. According to Williams (2018: 27), this sort of explanation follows linear regression models “which aim to show the cause of an outcome by ‘explaining’ as much of the statistical variance in the model by fitting the independent variables to the model to give the best ‘fit’.” This particular approach to AL research remains prominent in contemporary AL scholarship, and is advocated and developed, for example, by Norouzian and Plonsky (2018). For Williams (2018), however, this is a considerable problem because it overemphasizes empirical knowledge at the cost of necessary conceptual modelling of causality. As argued earlier, statistical patterns in the data can only provide valuable hints that causal links might exist. Since statistical regularities do not constitute evidence of causal links, however, they simply cannot explain those links. As Monaghan and Boaz (2018: 175, emphasis mine) explain, meta-analysis based on successionist logic is poor at dealing with complexity and context is purposefully excluded from such studies. [In statistical analysis], correlations are observed and cause is established post hoc through techniques measuring statistical significance. In both scenarios, however, the aim is to reveal a pure relationship uncluttered by extraneous and confounding factors through the elimination of bias.

Awareness of this problem has led to convincing postmodern critiques of the successionist model, including the above observation that statistical patterns can only reveal potential traces of causal links. However, more radical postmodern perspectives have taken this point too far, concluding that society, as a radically open and contingent system, simply does not produce patterns, only fluid and situated realities. As I argue later in this chapter, this view is also mistaken, for if we consider the antecedent properties of structural realities such as money, educational systems, social classes, the ongoing oppression of women and minorities around the world, and the resilience of ideological constructs across the ages, for example, we cannot avoid observing that patterns do exist in society and that, as with anything else we study, they also must be

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explained in causal terms. The logical extension of this argument is that, unlike the postmodernist overemphasis on fluidity and constant change, some social realities can indeed be generalized beyond local contexts. Goertz (2012: 86) provides an example of such generalization: The social sciences have found strong generalizations that could be called covering law generalizations. By far the most well-known generalization in the field of international relations is known as the democratic peace […], which is typically stated in the form: democracies do not fight wars with each other. So while democracies fight many wars (think of the United States), they do not fight wars with other democracies. […] I call generalizations of this type descriptive-causal generalizations.

Similarly, complexity theorist Mark Mason (2008: 42) observes crucial patterns within educational contexts thus: We know that feedback from teachers powerfully enhances learning. We know that parental involvement in their children’s learning enhances learning; that good school leaders create effective learning environments through good management practices; that relevant and appropriately pitched curricular activities enhance learning more effectively than those that are not; that poor children provided with a school lunch learn more effectively than students who do not benefit from such a policy; that students who are likely to find employment learn more effectively than those who perceive little likelihood of work.

The fact that we don’t reduce these facts to mere narratives reveals our appreciation for historical and empirical phenomena beyond discourse – i.e., for objective realities—which allow social scientists to advance descriptive-causal generalizations regarding social processes and phenomena. This does not imply a return to positivism: we only have to think about our consideration for patterns and generalizations when formulating policy proposals or making predictions to show that understanding patterns unfolding across social contexts has always been an important part of how we understand and represent the social world. Also, patterns—as well as structure, as will be argued later in the book— should not be seen as rigid, for they rarely come without counter-patterns

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or exceptions. Goertz (2012) takes this point as reinforcing the links between the natural and the social sciences, arguing that the biologists indeed face similar issues to those faced by social scientists. Of course, observing patterns and generalizations is principally a Humean exercise in causality, marked by adherence to the covering law or successionist model of causality, and reveals little as to why such patterns exist. Porpora (2008: 200) explains that “the covering law model conceives of a cause exclusively as an event rather than a structure. […] The covering law simply links events: If one thing happens, then another thing happens. Thus, all that remains of causality is a conceptually thin empirical regularity, itself not much more than a covariation.” Expecting human processes to abide by a covering law inevitably leads to a deterministic view of social processes as unfolding in linear and non-creative fashion (Juarrero, 1999). Instead, AL scholars must conceptualize people in AL worlds (language teachers, learners, policymakers, etc.) as nonlinear, dynamic, creative and adaptable entities (or complex systems, if we adopt a CDST approach), and that their actions must consequently also be dynamic and complex. With this in mind, it is unlikely that AL researchers will find strong, empirically supported descriptive-causal generalizations about language-related phenomena. Nevertheless, possibilities are certainly worth exploring. After all, if researchers in other areas of the social sciences such as economics, history and political science (which also deal with humans’ reflexive potential and the openness and complexity of human processes) have been able to find some regular patterns in their data, it is entirely possible that AL researchers can do so as well. It is, in this sense, worth considering the possibility that few descriptive-causal generalizations about language learning and language-related phenomena have emerged in AL scholarship (at least according to the postmodernists) because we have not been looking for them as actively as other social scientists. Therefore, if we consider Goertz’s (2012) main criterion for a descriptive-causal generalization—that it should remain robust despite attempts to disprove it—then perhaps we can identify them in the available body of AL research. In this sense, we can appreciate the informative synthesis of AL scholarship by Ellis (2001) (and many

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other similar ones published since) along these lines, as providing valuable insight into possible descriptive-causal generalizations in existing AL research. Greater commitment on this path would obviously require more systematic approaches to identifying and assessing descriptive-causal generalizations, and of course a considerably large body of data gathered over time and in multiple contexts. There would also be a need to characterize descriptive-causal generalizations more in terms of strong probabilistic generalizations, or perhaps even mechanisms, rather than “laws” in the stricter sense of the term. There would also be a need for researchers to consider counterexamples, which help researchers evaluate the validity and strength of generalizations (Goertz, 2012). Also importantly, this potential search for descriptive-causal generalizations in AL research would need to reject the deductive-nomological model of causality—i.e., deducing the existence of a causal “law” based on observation that A leads to B—and consider the very likely possibility that a multiplicity of causes and underlying generative mechanisms are at play in emergent and contingent language-related phenomena.

Interpretivist AL Research So far I have identified problems with statistical analysis and the successionist model of causality in relation to AL research. In this section, I critique the other end of the spectrum: interpretivist (or constructivist) studies which concentrate, mainly through qualitative analysis, almost exclusively on the construction and interpretation of social meanings by situated individuals. Gaining increasing prominence in sociolinguistics and AL scholarship, this strand is generally associated with paradigms including constructivism, postmodernism, poststructuralism, critical pedagogy and socio-cultural theory. Cohen et al. (2007) identify the main goals of interpretivist social research as understanding, explaining, and more importantly, critically demystifying social reality from various perspectives. Rampton (1997: 12) explains and justifies interpretivist AL scholarship thus:

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Human reality is extensively reproduced and created anew in the socially and historically specific activities of ordinary life, rather than being the product of forces that actors neither control nor comprehend […] With learning seen as an interactional process and reality viewed as a social construction, the understanding of meaning in interaction becomes a central objective, and the analysis of discourse becomes a potentially vital tool.

The problem with this view, as I will argue in this section, is that there are indeed multiple forces and mechanisms that actors do not necessarily control or comprehend (e.g., the financial system, social class divisions, globalization, etc.) yet which nevertheless act as powerful conditioning forces in their lives. As such, to understand the complexity of people’s lived experiences requires more than people’s understanding of meaning in interaction. Interpretivist AL studies generally look at the embodied discursive construction of self (Kramsch, 2012) by concentrating on issues including identity, ideology and power relationships which, in the context of AL research, are studied in relation to language and discourse. One of the preferred methodologies in this type of research is narrative inquiry, which Norton and De Costa (2018: 104) argue can “illuminate identity negotiation, given that narratives are co-constructed and shaped by social, cultural, and historical conventions.” Other approaches include conversation analysis, linguistic ethnography, and critical discourse analysis. To gain a clear sense of this strand of AL research, readers are encouraged to consult the impressive Routledge Handbook of Language and Identity edited by Preece (2016). In terms of the structure-agency issue (to be discussed in the next chapter), most interpretivist AL studies explore agency, specifically people’s power to interpret and discursively construct their world. At the same time, because they must account for the situatedness of agents (e.g., Park & Lo, 2012), interpretivist AL are bound to periodically refer back to structure, even if the powers and properties of structures are often left unaccounted for at the level of theory. When structure has to be dealt with face-on, adherents of interpretivism in AL tend to diminish its relevance by presenting structure as a convenient label for a collection of

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individual experiences in an aggregate sense, and by characterizing talks about the causal potential of social structures as deterministic, reductionist, or simply modernist. Within interpretivist AL studies, theoretical modelling of analytical categories and causal structures is thus generally viewed as extraneous and somewhat suspicious; instead, the emic viewpoint of participants, as revealed through a study of discursive practices, gains centre stage, particularly as it is thought to illuminate the fluid and contextualized experiences of human agents. For these reasons, interpretivist AL scholars tend to favour ethnographically based methodologies, notably the interview which allows participants to formulate and express their own understandings, beliefs and hopes within the confines of situated interaction. The core analytical unit in interpretivist studies is discourse, and spoken and written texts as its empirically accessible instantiations. Based on these principles, “texts are deconstructed, read against themselves in order to reveal their aporias (i.e., self-generated paradoxes) and to expose the techniques and social interests in their construction. […] the determination of subjectivity [is conceptualized] as partial or incomplete in that discourses also create the possibilities for autonomy and resistance” (Morgan, 2007: 952, emphasis mine). Social realities under scrutiny are thus thought to be constructed through (or by, according to radical interpretivists) discourse, which is usually studied from spoken and/or written texts. In much of interpretivist AL research, particularly its poststructuralist strand, social contexts are seen essentially as sites within which unequal power relationships emerge and unfold through discursive practices. While not necessarily designed to capture broader structural realities, a clear benefit of interpretivist AL research is its ability to reveal insight into agency, specifically people’s understandings of their lived experiences. As such, while generalizability is understandably difficult to achieve in interpretivist AL, research outcomes can be very useful to teachers and learners, for example. As Kincaid (2012: 5) points out, this is a considerable advantage for the social sciences at large, for “some of our best science does not emphasize laws in the philosopher’s sense as elegant, context-free, universal generalizations, but instead provides accounts of temporally and spatially restricted context-sensitive causal

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processes as its end product.” For AL scholars and practitioners, interpretivist research can bring richer and more granular insight into actual language teaching and learning practices, and ultimately the design of more effective pedagogical strategies. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 210) explain, the purpose of research becomes to discover which circumstances are associated with progress for which learners. The replicability of studies is much reduced in salience, since the search for covering laws can safely be abandoned. This kind of research entails a case-driven methodology, which is able to connect outcomes with contexts and causes.

Given that causal claims require causal models, which are themselves products of conceptual work, interpretivist AL research should, in principle, be effective at establishing a range of causal models of pertinence to the study of AL phenomena. However, considering that interpretivism—notably its more radical poststructuralist strand—is not wholly committed to the idea of causality, this potential has yet to be fully explored. Nevertheless, although Clegg (2006) offers a trenchant critique of interpretivism and poststructuralism from the perspective of critical realist feminism, she also recognizes that interpretivist research has enriched identity research in profound ways. Weideman (2015) goes further by noting that interpretivist research has also introduced more theoretical and methodological plurality and flexibility to AL scholarship: The ascendancy of postmodernism created a willingness to acknowledge differences and variety in theoretical approach within disciplines. It thus introduced greater tolerance and recognition of a diversity in belief and commitment in scholarly work, and in the adoption of paradigms that express those commitments. Such recognition of variation took as its first point of departure that science cannot escape self-interest and institutional coercion, and is therefore never neutral. The reason for taking non-neutrality as starting point, in opposition to the commitments of modernism, was the demonstrable immersion of disciplinary work in political power plays within disciplines, universities and the academic publishing industry. (p. 4)

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But as argued below, the inherent relativism within interpretivism has led many researchers to adopt conceptually problematic views of the social world and of their objects of study. In this section, I identify five closely related problematic characteristics of interpretivist AL research: its overemphasis on discourse as constitutive of social phenomena, its marked preference for interview data, its empiricist tendencies, its ontologically flattened view of social processes, and its lack of commitment to (and at times outright rejection of ) objective knowledge.

Overemphasis on Discourse Partly explaining the ambiguous quality of some interpretivist AL research is the tendency among scholars to use the term “discourse” to refer to quite different things: as “whole-systems-of-thought-andaction” (Rampton, 2001: 262), as “language-in-action” (Blommaert, 2005: 2) and at other times simply to what people achieve when they communicate with each other. At face value, these varied understandings of discourse are not problematic, for they reveal different aspects of discourse as a stratified and emergent social phenomenon (see Chapter 4). Theoretical and methodological difficulties arise, however, when scholars are unclear about what they mean when using the term. From a realist perspective, Fairclough (2010: 3) provides a broad view of discourse as, a complex set of relations including relations of communication between people who talk, write and in other ways communicate with each other, but also, for example, describe relations between concrete communicative events (conversations, newspaper articles etc.) and more abstract and enduring complex discursive ‘objects’ (with their own complex relations) like languages, discourses and genres. But there are also relations between discourse and other such complex ‘objects’ including objects in the physical world, persons, power relations and institutions, which are interconnected elements in social activity or praxis.

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In order to be clear about discourse and recognize the important differences and relationship between discourse and non-discursive realities, the author recommends analysts to specify its internal and external relations with other “objects”: Discourse is not simply an entity we can define independently: we can only arrive at an understanding of it by analysing sets of relations. Having said that, we can say what it is in particular that discourse brings into the complex relations which constitute social life: meaning, and making meaning. (ibid.)

Unfortunately, this sort of conceptual refinement is often missing in interpretivist AL research, yielding in some cases problematic conflations between people’s variegated understandings of reality (epistemology) and reality as it exists independently of people’s understanding of it (ontology). This conflation is most evident in works by postmodernist analysts, many of whom work from the assumptions that (a) social phenomena are entirely constructed through discourse, and consequently (b) analysing the discourse produced by research participants is equivalent to analysing the social phenomena themselves. To be fair, many postmodernist thinkers acknowledge in their theoretical discussions that discourse is not the only thing that shapes the social world. At the level of analysis, however, the role of discourse in the constitution of the self and its positioning within the social realm (and to social continuity and change) tends to be overemphasized. Perhaps more troubling is a general lack of appreciation for the important links between discursive and non-discursive “facts.” Discourse also tends to be reduced to a situated performance. For example, by using Weedon’s (1987: 40) poststructuralist argument that “meanings do not exist prior to their articulation in language and language is not an abstract system, but is always socially and historically located in discourses” as justification, Kramsch (2012) essentially reduces identity construction to localized discursive processes. Also, by accepting the problematic notion that meaning does not exist prior to its linguistic articulation—i.e., meaning does not exist in books, dictionaries and other cultural resources—she simultaneously suggests that human agents

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can communicate—and thereby creating their worlds—entirely “from scratch,” without considering structural and cultural constraints and enablements, including those provided by language. As such, she overlooks the causally important antecedent properties of language as a relatively structured cultural resource, as well as the properties and powers of both culture and structure. Although not explicitly recognizing this conceptual problem in her work, Kramsch does admit that “a poststructuralist stance is an epistemic stance” (Kramsch, 2012: 497). This recalibration, however, simply reveals a lack of commitment to objective knowledge on her part. Even more problematic in this sense are the more drastic manifestations of interpretivism, which radicalize Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) work on the intersubjective nature of everyday social reality, by placing discourse as the sole generating force behind all social realities. As ElderVass (2010: 203) points out, “in the most extreme formulations of this tradition, language and discourse are taken to shape both individual behaviour and everything that we understand as ‘the social’, making conceptions of structure and agency redundant.” In other words, the core problem in radical interpretivism is ontological, as discourse is invested with causal powers it does not possess. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 178) clarify in their discussion of linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992), languages […] are human products, which, as cultural emergent properties, differ in important ways from objects in the material, natural world […] In our view much of the debate concerning language death and linguicide neglects this distinction, making extravagant claims about what language is, what it does and what it signifies. […] It is not, of course, English as a language that has resources, but various groups of speakers of English who do. It is not languages as languages that contribute to knowledge, but rather human beings, whose knowledge is linguistically communicated.

While there is no doubt that social reality is socially constructed partly via discourse, discourse remains one of the many emergent products of the structure–agency relationship. As such, it is not discourse which shapes the world but rather people, since it is people who possess agentive

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properties and causal efficacy. In addition, while society is partly discursively constructed, it is also important not to conflate social reality with people’s understanding of that reality. Those two layers differ ontologically in important ways, and to merge them together as one and the same thing is to limit one’s ability to explain cause–effect relationships with regard to discourse, the people who produce it, and the emerging social realities which ensue. Likewise, by both enabling people to express ideas and constraining what can be said and how, languages—as culturally emergent products of human interaction—condition part of the context within which social meanings and actions emerge, since they constitute an important medium through which we access, share and shape our “banks” of knowledge or the theories and beliefs we have about the world and ourselves. However, languages do not determine social action: people do. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 182) state, languages are cultural emergent properties and as such are: irreducible to either human agency (that is, languages are able to shape the context of social action) or to the material world […]; partially autonomous of individuals (that is, languages have some properties which are peculiar to them); causally influential in shaping the contexts of human action and linguistic choice.

In sum, missing from the interpretivist approach to the study of language, discourse and related phenomena are crucial conceptual and methodological distinctions between language, discourse, human agency and social structure. In other words, interpretivism provides a social ontology that is considerably flattened.

The Limitations of Interview Data Much of interpretivist AL research in recent decades has concentrated almost exclusively on qualitative interview data, specifically interview data. Since interpretivist AL research is specifically concerned with people’s interpretations of lived realities and the discursive coconstruction of communicative meanings and identities, this preference is understandable to some extent. Arguably, for AL scholars to reveal

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processes located at the level of human agency, interview data is beneficial and effective, since it can yield rich insight into how people make sense of the complex worlds in which they operate, and how people are not merely subjected to structural and cultural forces but rather engaged reflexively and often critically with these forces to calibrate their efforts in light of their goals and aspirations. In this sense, interview data analysis—especially that which provides insight for research participants themselves—can potentially offer valuable pedagogical and emancipatory perspectives. In terms of the statistical prominence of interview analysis in the social sciences, Briggs (1986) noted approximately 35 years ago that 90% of social research was based on interview data, and considering recent yet markedly growing interest by AL scholars in agency, it is fair to suggest that an increasingly larger proportion of AL studies to date adopts the interview as a preferred method of collecting empirical data about people’s interpretations of their lived experiences. However, the conceptual limitations of interview analysis must be underlined. The main problem with interpreting interview data as evidence of people’s interpretations of their situated experiences is that such data tends to also be interpreted as revealing insight into broader social processes and phenomena. For example, when teachers express views about educational policies, textbooks or classroom practices, these views tend to be interpreted as direct and unmediated explanations of the latter. More alarming in some cases, interviewees’ statements about broader structural and cultural processes tend to be considered as epistemologically equivalent to statements by scholars and experts. One possible reason for this problem is that interview data is rarely subjected to the same analytical rigour as other samples of discourse (e.g., policy discourse), as is expected in conversation, discourse and critical discourse analysis. Aware of these limitations, some interpretivist AL scholars emphasize the triangulation of interview findings with survey data. However, survey data—as self-report data—is also about people’s interpretations of lived realities at particular points in time. Arguably, the triangulation of interview and survey analyses remains an insufficient strategy to reveal the full complexity of agentive and structural processes within a contingent social realm. This lack of distinction between objective reality and people’s understandings of it, common in interpretivism,

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arguably leads to an ontologically flattened view of social processes as (a) constructed exclusively through discourse, and (b) existing in the minds of individuals. Even if the claim is made that such research provides an “epistemic stance” (e.g., Kramsch, 2012), such stance remains insufficient for the formulation of ontological statements about real-world phenomena, which is a core scientific objective. The problem, it must be stated, is not with interview data itself, but rather with how interviews are theorized and transformed into methodological and analytical strategies. Mann (2011) argues that in contemporary AL research, qualitative interviews have gained importance, but that they have largely been under-theorized. Also unfortunate is AL researchers’ often limited reflexive engagement with their own analyses (a problem seen within both successionist and interpretivist traditions). This lacunae has the effect of presenting the researcher as neutral participant and analyst, which is a considerable problem when considering the importance given to complex factors such as age, race, gender, and issues of power in interview data analysis (Mann, 2011), and how these also tend to be presented as common-sense “facts.” Although there is arguably greater awareness of researcher reflexivity as an important research element among contemporary interpretivist AL scholars, precisely how this reflexive engagement influences data analysis is often left unaddressed. At the same time, while methodological issues related to interview data analysis in AL are often the objects of critique, ontological issues in my view constitute the core problem in need of sustained critical attention. Specifically, we need greater theoretical unpacking of the claims made by interpretivist AL researchers regarding causality. Although an exploration of counterfactual possibilities is helpful—e.g., What data would have emerged if I had asked this question differently, if I had asked a different question altogether, or if I had made statements rather than asked questions? —and while AL researchers working in multilingual environment certainly need to account for a range of complex issues including translanguaging practices taking place during interviews, it is even more important to justify why interpretivist AL scholars have reached those conclusions about their data and not others. In Bouchard (2017), I explore this issue in relation to my own data. During an interview, a

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Japanese English language teacher working in a Japanese junior high school stated that Japanese students of English have difficulty improving their target language ability because Japan is an island country cut off from other nations. As I noted in my analysis, this statement can be interpreted in multiple ways: as an observation regarding Japan’s relative lack of ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity (compared with other industrialized nations), as a statement regarding the relative lack of resources available to teachers and students in the Japanese context, as discursive evidence of ethnocentrism, as a discursive example of cultural determinism, or simply as the result of a rather common tendency among people of any culture to conveniently conflate culture, nation, language and geography for the sake of simplicity and perhaps to avoid a face-threatening situation. There are, of course, many other possible interpretations of this statement, and mere data triangulation might not suffice in establishing which interpretation is more valid than others. This is precisely why interview analysts need to provide more robust theoretical and methodological bases for their observations regarding the causal links between various statements in the interview data (what people say at a particular point in time in a particular context for a particular purpose, compared with other statements made at different times and places), actions on the ground (what people actually do regardless of what they say about their own actions and those of others) and broader mechanisms and other social and cultural realities (e.g., ideologies, economic forces, etc.) which are not directly accessible through interview data analysis alone. Ironically, there remain clear traces of positivist thought in postmodernist and interpretivist AL scholarship. Despite its clear potential to reveal insight into agentive processes, the mere inclusion of reflexive statements about the presence of the interviewer in the data, although necessary, is insufficient. Instead, analysis of interview data must be grounded in a more robust social ontology which helps us understand the distinct and emergent properties and powers of people, structures, language, discourse and other research elements, so that their interplay can not only be interpreted in terms of the discursive elements at play, but also be studied in causal terms (the latter point will be further developed in Chapter 4 on realism).

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Empiricist Tendencies in Interpretivist AL Scholarship Earlier I stated that successionism and interpretivism in AL are both empiricist perspectives. Interpretivism’s overemphasis on interview data and on what people say about their lived experience can be understood as a manifestation of empiricism. Although not a markedly interpretivist AL scholar, Kramsch (2015: 455) reveals this empiricist tendency in AL research in the following statement: For me, Applied Linguistics was never the application of linguistic theory or any other theory to the real-life problem of language learning and teaching […] it has been instead the practice of language study itself, and the theory that could be drawn from that practice […] Rather than ‘applied linguistics’, I would have called it ‘practical language studies’.

One problem with that statement is that, even if she refers to linguistic theory, it is rather unclear what Kramsch means by “theory.” Instead, theory is simply posited contra empirical evidence, itself contained within the broad category of practice. Later in her article, Kramsch further reinforces this empiricist penchant thus: “[AL’s] object of study is the living process through which living, embodied speakers shape contexts through their grammars and are, in turn, shaped by them […] It is an eminently empirical field, from which emerges a theory of the practice” (Kramsch, 2015: 455–456, emphasis mine). By reducing a branch of the social sciences—applied or otherwise—to an empirical practice, however, we lose sight of (a) the relationship between theory and practice, and (b) the important and necessary relationship and mutual influences between empirical “facts” and underlying causal mechanisms, which as will be argued in Chapter 4 can be understood principally through theoretical deliberation. This problem becomes even more limiting in the context of critical AL scholarship, a strand within which Kramsch is a well-known figure. In an earlier paper, the author justifies her epistemological stance by comparing it with modernism: “Modernist approaches to applied linguistics have sought to empower the powerless—whether they be immigrants or ethnic and social minorities, whereas postmodernist approaches seek

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to eschew established binaries and resignify categories on a momentto-moment basis” (Kramsch, 2012: 498). Here, the author recognizes modernism’s necessary attacks against systems of oppression; in her own work, however, she dismisses those at the profit of an epistemology of fluidity and pastiche. Because the concept of system is largely rejected within interpretivism, this perspective is ill-suited to define and critique various forms of social inequalities and oppression as systems. Within interpretivism, oppression and its dismantlement are instead reduced to empirically apprehensible discursive exercises. In this sense, the critical potential of interpretivist AL research to contribute to the broader project of social emancipation is unsatisfactory because of its overemphasis on localized discursive practices. Although people’s understandings of their world and their experiences within it can be transformatory to some extent (i.e., people can indeed develop new ways of seeing the world in both individual and organized fashion), effects can only be local and considerably limited, for with empiricism what is missing is the consequential relationship between agency and structure/culture. From this ontologically flattened viewpoint, social emancipation (and by logical extension social oppression) is understood as emerging from people’s understandings of their lived realities. As such, the critical agenda Kramsch advocates is incomplete because people are only conceptualized as liberating themselves from systems of oppression by merely “talking differently” about them, about themselves, and about the world—i.e., by engaging in alternative modes of speaking, acting and being as solutions to social inequality. One can think many different things about systemic sexism or racism, and still be subjected to their oppressive forces, and without these systems being challenged in any significant sense. In the same paper, however, Kramsch (2012: 499) argues that “it is by understanding the deep contradictions of globalization that poststructuralist scholars can help multilingual subjects interrogate the larger flows of people, knowledge, and capital and their own vulnerability in playing the paradoxical roles that are required of them. Such a query is indeed an ethical transformative quest.” Although greater acknowledgement of the distinct and emergent properties of structures and systems of oppression is noticeable in this statement, the outright rejection of modernist

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principles in this statement still needs to be questioned. Specifically, one should ask: What processes and resources facilitate these acts of positioning in the first place? How can people “position” themselves if not in relation to broader structural and cultural realities as powerful causal forces? How can the deep contradictions of globalization be understood only through localized discursive activities? And finally, how can this quest be considered ethical if not based on a conceptual understanding of (a) portions of reality being unjust and inadequate, in need of reform, and (b) a reality that does not currently exist, yet which nevertheless guides our efforts to build a better and more equal world for all human beings? Interpretivism simply has little to offer in terms of viable answers to these questions. If critical social research is about dismantling an unfair present, it must inevitably rely on a vision of a present that could be—i.e., rely on a modernist viewpoint to some extent. As Brumfit (1997: 92) rightfully argues, “Any concern to redress linguistic inequalities demands some sense of universalities, for the very concept ‘inequality’ makes claims about an indivisible concept ‘equality’.” As argued later in this book, understanding and redressing social inequality and “the deep contradictions of globalization” requires more than empirical data or evidence of people’s understandings of inequality: it requires conceptually informed consideration for underlying causal mechanisms in society which, under certain conditions, serve to reinforce unequal distributions of power and resources among people. For that reason, any empiricist viewpoint must be deemed as ill-equipped to fulfil this task. Postmodernist critical inquiries are usually justified by a rejection of modernism as ideological, fixed and essentialist. Although not an entirely dismissible critique, postmodernist critique nevertheless contains a contradiction: to be critical, it must rely on unacknowledged modernist principles. Morrison (2008: 24) captures this contradiction as “the postmodernist’s dilemma of proscribing fixity and firmness yet holding such proscriptions fixedly and firmly.” Sayer (2000: 77) explains this odd epistemological twist in the following way: Too often, postmodernists fail to see that relativism is the flip side of foundationalism, so it is no surprise that it can produce similar effects.

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In other words, fragmentation plus relativism equals ‘ghettoization’. Relativism is no friend of feminism, anti-racism or any other kind of critical social theory. […] the consistent proponent of the equality thesis would have to grant equal status to racist and fascist beliefs.

Critical AL research—whether aligned with postmodernism, interpretivism or otherwise—therefore needs something more than what Kramsch proposes: it requires the ability to identify oppressive discourses and practices (a) as morally inferior to egalitarian and emancipatory viewpoints, and (b) as systems (and not merely the symptom of a “bad spirit”) and therefore as more than empirical phenomena. To effectuate this shift, critical AL inquiry should be grounded in understanding of discourse not as a self-contained system responsible for producing the entirety of social reality, but rather in relation to an objective, material reality as well. From this basis, critical AL scholars would then be in a more conceptually solid position from which to build their critique and advance moral claims.

Ontologically Flattened View of Social Processes As suggested so far, overemphasizing interview (and/or survey) data, and by extension prioritizing empirical data, leads to ontologically flattened views of social processes. Such a view is made explicit by Heller (2001: 212), a sociolinguist who rejects the macro–micro debate in social sciences by arguing that “conceptualising social life in terms of a dichotomy implies that there are different types of data for each, equally observable (or not, as the case may be), and that, in addition, the linkages should be identifiable. And yet, empirical work fails to identify such types.” In this statement, Heller is making three conceptual mistakes: (1) presenting structure and agency as dichotomous phenomena (as Chapter 3 will demonstrate, most strands of social theory have never quite advocated such a viewpoint), (2) reducing research to the study of empirical data and (3) assuming that the study of people and social institutions involves analysing the same kind of data, and that distinctions between them are merely scalar. The radical interactionism proposed by Heller is summed up in the following statement: “The problem of linkage between macro- and micro-levels becomes a problem of linkage

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among social interactions over time and (social) space” (Heller, 2001: 212). Here, the author reduces macro-realities to social interaction, which constitutes an upward conflation (Archer, 1995)—i.e., a reduction of structure to human interaction in an aggregate sense. What is also evident and problematic in Heller’s analysis is the claim that the material and symbolic resources valuable to (and unequally distributed among) human interactants can be explained exclusively through analysis of local interactions. The main problem here involves how the author conceptualizes structure. At times, she talks about exams and job interviews as merely “kinds of interactions,” thus sidestepping the material, institutional and structural conditions for exams and job interviews to exist (e.g., school systems, educational and social policy, employment structures, organizations, social and professional roles, various economic and social conditions, etc.). At other times, however, her discussion moves well beyond situated interaction to include references to (a) complex structural realities including “shifting economic conditions in Canada after the Second World War,” or “contingencies of the labor market,” (b) complex social and cultural mechanisms such as credentialism and bilingualism, (c) society-wide ideological forces such as “economic, social and political subordination and marginalization (for over 200 years)” and “the logic of the Franco-Canadian mobilisation movement,” (d) complex and broad historical processes such as a “modern world currently dominated by English,” as well as (e) complex institutional realities such as the “school as an institution of social and cultural reproduction.” The fact that Heller needs to include references to these five complex cultural and structural mechanisms and realities in her analysis shows that her empiricist perspective is theoretically insufficient because it is ontologically flattened. At the end of her chapter, the author attempts to mitigate her radically flattened viewpoint by stating that her study “has been modest and relatively local [allowing her to] unpack the workings of at least some dimensions of the construction of ideologies and categories in the realm of Franco-Ontarian life” (p. 232). However, this late conceptual recalibration contradicts her earlier claim that her work effectively dismantles the (said) macro/micro dichotomy. Looking more specifically at the issue of causality, Ylikoski (2012: 36) notes a similar problem in interpretivist research thus:

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Those methodological individualists who have suggested that a micro explanation somehow eliminates the macro properties are either metaphysically confused or just choosing their words badly. The talk about macro reducing to micro makes a little sense as the talk about reducing effects to their causes. […] individualists tend to make the claim that the causes have to be at the micro level. However, nothing in the notion of causation implies that the real causal work is always to be found at the micro level. Of course, […] every time we have a cause at a macro level, we also have micro level facts that constitute it.

While some interpretivists do provide interesting insight regarding the links between structure and agency (usually in the “Analysis” and “Discussion” sections of their works), they rarely frame discussion about structure and culture in conceptual and causal terms—i.e., within a robust social ontology. An example of this comes from Kramsch (2012) who, in part by adhering to Butler’s (2000, 2006) theory of performativity, argues in essence that people nowadays can be whatever they wish to be, and can do so via the deployment of specific discursive practices. Uncomfortable with Bourdieu’s acknowledgement of the importance of accounting for social structure and institutional power in identity research, Kramsch claims that Butler’s poststructuralist approach is better suited to explain “the agency of the subject in establishing both his/her vulnerability and his/her authority” (p. 491). In the same article, Kramsch criticizes Bourdieu’s work as placing undue emphasis on institutions as “performants” rather than people—i.e., as endowing structure with agentive potential. In a later article, oddly enough, Kramsch (2015) discusses Bourdieu’s work as a revelation because of his presentation of the language learner as active agent, with capacities for invention and improvisation. What is more alarming in Kramsch’s argumentation, however, is that in much of her work she (as with many interpretivist AL scholars) does not conceptually explain the important relationship between discourse and objective reality, which is after all an essential element in her analysis. This becomes evident, for example, in her description of “a sophisticated [non-native-speaker] of English who feels she lacks not the proficiency but the legitimacy to act like a [native-speaker] because of her position in history, and who therefore

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feels deprived of the agency to speak with authority” (Kramsch, 2012: 493, emphasis mine). She also makes the controversial claim—rightfully critiqued by Pennycook (2019)—that poststructuralism has the capacity to provide a fuller understanding of human agency. In the next chapter I explain in more detail why poststructuralism provides a much-weakened view of agency. Within interpretivist AL research, discourse and people are thus rarely conceptually positioned in relation to other social phenomena including structural and cultural forces, which also tends to result in them being attributed powers they do not necessarily have. This becomes evident in Kramsch’s (2012: 484) critique of the concept of authenticity in which she endows human beings with the capacity to “do as they please”: “Is there still such a thing as an inauthentic or illegitimate ‘impostor’ in a world in which you can be anything you want to be? ” In response, one must ask: If people can be anything they want to be, why is there enduring systemic oppression of the many by the few? Why are so many young people unable to go to any school and get any job they want? Are homeless people choosing to be so? This rather inflated view of agents’ ability to choose from a wide range of subject positions—central to postmodernism—is an example of a flattened ontology since it fails to consider the existence of powerful underlying causal mechanisms in society and that people’s choices and preferences are structured in important ways. This problem is also noticed by Coupland (2001b: 203), who notes that “when sociolinguists write about identity, they often interpret the term in rather anodyne way, as if ‘having an identity’ or ‘negotiating an identity’ were selecting and displaying options from a repertoire of equally plausible alternatives.” In agreement with Coupland, I must also note the intrusion in Kramsch’s perspective of a marked neoliberal ideology, particularly in the idea that identity alternatives are not only available to all but that they are “consumable” states of being, and that agentive choice entirely determines identity possibilities and work. Although perhaps an obvious point, the reason why we need critical AL research is precisely because, in our current society, people are not free to be whatever they desire: they are structurally and culturally conditioned in very important ways, and for many this complex process is not to their advantage. Studying the lived realities of people thus requires

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more than their interpretations of these: it requires looking at their structurally and culturally conditioned existence, and the reflexive engagements by people in light of structural and cultural constraints and enablements. Sealey and Carter (2004) argue that social research, including AL, is essentially about clarifying how people make constrained choices in structured contexts, as structured social relations “make certain outcomes more likely than others for the occupants of different class positions. These probabilities, however, are always conditioning rather than determining, and each individual has some degree of choice about how to respond to the contexts in which she finds herself ” (p. 119). Ylikoski (2012: 38) echoes this view thus: “proper sociological understanding requires that we understand both the mechanisms by which large-scale social facts influence the local decision-making processes of individual agents (the situational mechanisms) and the mechanisms by which individual actions create and influence macro social facts (the transformational mechanisms).” By itself, interpretivism is therefore ill-equipped to fulfil those purposes. Moreover, the causal potential of discourse should also not be magnified, as Morgan (2007) does for example when presenting a poststructuralist approach to AL as effective in providing “an understanding of how individuals use language to differentiate themselves or to resist and transform their categorization” (p. 950). Although a noble and justifiable point, we should also recognize that while language provides the context and resource with which people can achieve these complex objectives, people are the ones doing the resisting and transforming, not language or discourse. Furthermore, these actions are not the only things people can do with language. People also use language to reproduce the status quo, oppress others and inhabit both oppressed and oppressive subject positions. Why they do so or not is a question best answered by looking at the relationship between structure and agency, not by studying discourse exclusively. Especially within identity-based AL research, discourse tends to be conceptualized as the engine making identity positions possible. Two important points about identities as they relate to AL research must therefore be stressed. Firstly, identities are indeed discourse-dependent social constructions, although being so means that they are also about

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a reality outside discursive activities—i.e., they are not neatly contained within a self-sufficient discursive realm, created from scratch the moment we being to speak: they are instead complex, emergent and enduring outcomes of the structure–agency interaction. Secondly, our identities, as contingent discursive social constructions, gain emergent properties distinct from the discursive activities which lead to their creation over time. As we construct and perform them over the course of our lives and within social contexts populated by other identity-laden human beings, identities become part of the vast and complex network of cultural and ideational resources within the Cultural System (a realist concept explained in Chapter 4), and as such they can acquire causal potential of their own. For example, a young person coming to term with his/her homosexuality does not have to invent or conceptualize homosexuality from scratch: partners and role models in society already offer valuable points of reference which considerably facilitate the fulfilment of that project. In my view, this is what Coupland (2001b) means when referring to identities as both inescapably fluid and relatively fixed entities: identities are—as with any other social phenomena—ontologically “layered” entities. In sum, perhaps the most noticeable shortcoming of interpretivist epistemology is that, because it favours an empiricist viewpoint, resulting analyses come without much needed ontological depth. With regard to Norton’s (2000) famous and well-cited longitudinal study of immigrant women in Canada, Sealey and Carter (2004) explain that “there is no intrinsic reason why these accounts should be assumed to provide reliable information about, for example, the social structures which may be constraining or facilitating language learning processes.” As part of their theoretical deliberations, AL scholars must therefore conceptualize agency not as a negation of but rather in relation with structure and culture as powerful social forces. To this point, Archer (2011: 69, emphasis mine) explains that, structure and culture could only be deemed causally irrelevant if what were being mediated was, in fact, invented then and there by actors whose own personal powers were entirely responsible for it. [This] seems as untenable as holding that the wires bringing electricity into my house

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are entirely responsible for the workings of my lights and electrical appliances and that the existence of a national grid and electricity generators are causally irrelevant.

To avoid this conceptual problem in interpretivist AL research, a new understanding of structure is necessary. Unfortunately in many interpretivist AL studies, talks of structure are often dismissed with the rather facile argument that they merely reify structure—i.e., the notion that structure (not an empirical entity) is only a convenient term used by scholars to facilitate their work. But as Elder-Vass (2010: 196, emphasis original) explains, reification, is sometimes also taken to imply that in treating something as a thing we commit ourselves to the belief that it is static or unchanging and to a denial of the causal significance of its parts or of the agents that contribute to its causal significance. But neither of these […] reflects an accurate understanding of the nature of things. Social structures, like many other things, are far from static and like other things with causal powers, their causal powers always depend on the interactions between their parts. Social structures are indeed things, but they are dynamic things whose powers depend on the activities of people.

In other words, the structure–agency debate is not a problem, as many interpretivists would have it, for the debate is necessary to our understanding of causality in the social realm. The problem resides in how structure and agency are discussed. As will be developed later in the book, to transcend the complications imposed by interactionist AL, structure and agency should be understood as complex, distinct and emergent layers of social reality in constant interaction with each other, in the ongoing production of social life.

Lack of Commitment to Objective Knowledge What becomes evident from the above critique is that, in failing to (a) account for agency and structure as distinct and emergent strata of the social realm, and (b) explain their interaction in conceptual and causal

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terms, interpretivist AL fails in its commitment to objective knowledge. Postmodernists often justify this lacuna with arguments that social research, as a form of discourse, is inescapably biased. Widdowson (2001: 15) formulates this position thus: “since all enquiry is skewed by preconception and is never detached, no matter how rational it pretends to be, then we should give up the pretence of impartiality and cleave to our commitment. And the commitment, naturally, should be ethical.” Although the ethical portion of this argument has clear value to AL, social research is not exclusively ethical: it is also and necessarily about understanding our world the way it is. As such, epistemologies are not hopelessly relative: they are aimed at elucidating an objective reality we are part of yet do not have direct and unmediated access to. While the world exists independently from our understanding of it, epistemology is necessarily about ontology. As such, while we should do our best to get rid of biases in our work, we should certainly not give up our central goal as scientists of aligning epistemology with ontology. Ylikoski (2012: 41) makes a similar point with regard to narrative analysis, Explanation is factive. It is not enough that the explanation saves the phenomenon: It should also represent the essential features of the actual causal structure that produces the observed phenomena. So, if the explanation refers to the goals, preferences, or beliefs of agents, the agents should indeed have those mental states. Mere as-if storytelling does not suffice for a mechanistic explanation as it does not capture the relevant parts of the causal process.

Again, what social scientists say about their objects of study depends on these objects existing independently of scientific interpretation and explanation. As Porpora (1987: 49) explains, “a science cannot be entirely made up of logical propositions. A science must specify causal connections among events in addition to whatever logical connections it advances. If a science does not do this, it is not going to lead anywhere very interesting.” In this sense, all strands of social science, including AL, are not merely narrative exercises, or mere collections of statements about society: they are and must remain characterized by a commitment to objective knowledge.

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Although the notion of commitment to objective knowledge can be controversial within some AL enclaves, maintaining such commitment in our study of what actually happens when people (a) use language to communicate with others, (b) formulate ideas about the world, or (c) develop policies to maintain and improve language use and social life, can facilitate our work in many different and profound ways. For this to happen, interpretivist AL scholars must reconceptualize language, discourse, people and society as more than subjective phenomena negotiated in the moment. Sealey and Carter (2004: 119) help us in this regard, by explaining that language itself has objective properties which exist beyond the situated communicative moment: What makes a theory, a book, an idea – or indeed, a language variety objective knowledge is its ‘possibility or potentiality of being understood, its dispositional character of being understood or interpreted, or misunderstood or misinterpreted’ […] An individual who seeks to become a fluent speaker of a language not widely used in the locality faces obvious practical difficulties, while adopting the speech style of those who are widely seen as members of a different social category is likely to be viewed as a form of ‘crossing’ […] which may attract social censure. Nevertheless, such deviations from the supposed norms are possible, because language has properties which make it potentially available to any human speaker.

The properties highlighted by the authors grant language (as well as theories and ideas) a certain objectivity which can be noted in, for example, the existence of dictionaries, grammar books and communicative norms within a specific linguistic community. In Bouchard (2018), I attempt to explain this stratified view by suggesting that language can be conceptualized by AL scholars as a resource on the one hand and as a practice on the other. This does not reinforce a dichotomous view: it merely originates from a commitment to objective knowledge to state that, as a layered social phenomenon, language has different properties and powers depending on which social domain is under focus (Layder, 1997). As social scientists, AL scholars’ commitment to objective knowledge should not be seen as a throwback to positivism: it should instead be

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embraced as a necessary condition of the work we set out to accomplish. As Elder-Vass (2012: 131, emphasis mine) points out with regard to social research in general, While our concepts are socially agreed upon through [a normative process], one of the factors influencing that process is often that we have a common interest in developing concepts that reflect the world accurately and therefore enable us to intervene in it effectively. While our perceptions of the external world are influenced by our concepts, this is a two-way process in which we develop concepts that are ‘good to think with’ because they tend to produce reliable ways of intervening in the world.

Furthermore, for our commitment to objective knowledge to be sustainable within AL scholarship, we need a social ontology which helps us explain people’s understandings of their lived experiences as structured —i.e., in light of structural and cultural constraints and enablements. This robust ontology should also help us move beyond those interpretations so as to better capture the full ontological depth and complexity of processes under investigative scrutiny. In the next and final section of this chapter, I discuss a new development in AL scholarship which is even more radical than interpretivism in its ontological flatness.

Posthumanist AL Research With its rejection of modernist principles, and its emphasis on fractured and discursively fluid and negotiable subject positions, postmodernism/poststructuralism claims to transcend the positivist and anthropocentric tendencies said to have guided the social sciences since their inception. Similarly, although with a greater emphasis on material realities, posthumanism has come to be understood as an extension of poststructuralism in its sharp critique of anthropocentric social research and its emphasis on the embeddedness of human beings within a broader natural world. Pennycook (2019: 34) defines posthumanism as “part

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of that tradition of thought sometimes called postmodern or poststructuralist that questions the ways in which humans locate themselves at the centre of their own lives, thinking, making decisions, choosing, acting as free-willed, independent and sovereign subjects.” The major problem with this argument is that, on the one hand, posthumanism advocates a radical form of relationism whereby objects and phenomena are deemed as inexplainable (or “meaningless”) outside of their relationships with other objects and phenomena (in Chapter 6 I discuss some of the problems associated with relationism), while presenting a view of human beings as “free-willed” or as “sovereign subjects,” to use Pennycook’s phrasing. This is a contradiction, for as Juarrero (1999: 23) explains, saying that people have free will implies that “the mind does not require anything external to activate it, not even a final cause.” Similarly, to say that people are “independent and sovereign entities” is to refute that their choices, preferences, dreams, expectations, actions and so forth are structured. It is also not particularly well aligned with the marked relationist penchant within posthumanism. Posthumanism, however, differs from other postmodernist paradigms given its marked interest in understanding subjective knowledge. Specifically, it builds upon the notion of assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari, 2005)—a philosophical notion which defines the relationship between things, and between the constituting parts of things, as fluid, interchangeable and multiple—as the core process by which humans are flexibly constituted in situ, in relation with non-human entities. It also differs from postmodernism with regard to discourse. As discussed above, the latter justifies a marked propensity to explain social processes and phenomena as discursive products. By doing so, it advocates a form of sociologism which stands in sharp contrast with posthumanism. Collier (2011: 17) discusses sociologism as a prevalent form of “disciplinary imperialism,” and as guided by the belief that, all phenomena in the human world are to be explained socially, without reference to biology, geography or individual psychology. An example would be the idea that needs are socially constructed, a view which ignores the fact that whatever else human beings are, they are also biological organisms, which share numerous needs with other species. […]

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Postmodernism, which linguistifies all reality, and sociologizes language, is one source of contemporary sociologism.

In contrast—and perhaps to its credit—posthumanism rejects any form of human exceptionalism, instead promoting a specific view of the human agent as the “nomadic subject […] who transcends anthropocentrism through developing a strong sense of always becoming, that is, enacting ways of transforming his/her own vulnerable conditions in conjunction with more collective and communal strategies including the non-humans’ energy and participation” (Takaki, 2019: 584). This particular view of human agency as “more than just human” rejects the modernist tendency to place humans at the centre of sociological analysis and at the top of a hierarchy which includes, at lower levels, animals, other life forms and material objects. Instead, posthumanism attempts to break down the divisions between human and non-human entities by emphasizing their ontological similarities. Pennycook (2019: 16) suggests that, with posthumanist AL, “breaking down distinctions between interiority and exteriority allows us to understand subjects, language and cognition not as properties of individual humans but rather as distributed across people, places and artefacts.” The relational emphasis in assemblage theory thus introduces a form of relationism within posthumanism, positioning it in contrast with realist perspectives, particularly with regard to the issue of emergence. Pennycook (2019: 13) opines that anthropocentric assumptions are unfortunately part of the core of AL research, and can be denoted “when we talk of linguistic or communicative competence, when we suggest that people choose what items to use from a pregiven linguistic system and when we assert that humans use language in particular contexts rather than seeing these as profoundly integrated.” This anthropocentric penchant, as the author points out, comes from assumptions long held by AL scholars identifying language as the principal difference between humans and animals. A posthumanist approach to AL thus involves a redefinition of language as “embodied, embedded and distributed across people, places and time and not a determinate or determinable object of analysis” (Pennycook, 2019: 51). It redefines interaction as a

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process involving “pluralized agents [assemblaging] the linguistic, multimodal, spatial and semiotic resources in contingent, heterogeneous and centrifugal movements to renegotiate meanings” (Takaki, 2019: 592, emphasis mine). In parallel, notions such as bilingualism and multilingualism are replaced by metrolingualism, understood as a localized “semiotic relation in spaces in ways that meanings are associated with objects, people, animals, affect and places, without a fixed hierarchy among the senses and humans and non-humans” (Takaki, 2019: 593). It can therefore be argued that, when compared with postmodernism, the ethical component of posthumanism is much more explicit, especially when considered within the current context of climate change and environmental degradation. Posthumanism is arguably also more assertive in this respect because of its principle that, by rejecting anthropocentrism and by breaking down the boundaries between human and non-human entities, a more sustainable future can materialize. As a whole, posthumanism is potentially beneficial to AL because it encourages researchers to notice anthropocentrism as a problem, and to appreciate the complexity which inevitably surfaces when we study people in their social and natural context. At the same time, while this important ethical element in posthumanism aims to integrate humans within a broader natural realm in constructive and sustainable ways, it should not be equated with the types of social critique developed and conducted, for example, within postmodernism and critical realism. For one, education—an integral component of AL research and an inherently critical and emancipatory endeavour—remains a deeply humanist project. While it is arguably very important for learners to become aware of their biological and material constitution and their relationship with nature, all forms of social oppression (e.g., sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, etc.) remain essentially human processes, even if related to material realities to some extent. Also, while trees and animals do not need to grow or behave in accordance with ethical principles, humans certainly do. While the interaction between rocks and rivers does not lead to the emergence of structure or culture, nor can rocks and rivers willfully bring about systemic changes to their existence, humans can. This list of differences can be extended very far, although these differences share the same ontological basis, as argued

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by Archer (1995: 1) thus: “Social reality is unlike any other because of its human constitution. It is different from natural reality whose defining feature is self-subsistence: for its existence does not depend upon us, a fact which is not compromised by our human ability to intervene in the world of nature and change it.” Moreover, when we talk about the critical elements of AL research, we are also necessarily talking about a specific view of agency—i.e., a strong version of agency—and in my view this is where posthumanism is insufficient. Posthumanism is often said to share numerous parallels with Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005) and the notion of distributive agency (Bennett, 2010), whereby not only humans but non-human entities are also understood as “having” agency. The problem is that, in attempting to soften the boundaries between humans and non-humans, posthumanist AL scholars overlook humans’ reflexive potential as part of their distinct and emergent properties and powers. While no one can deny that “objects play an active role in human life” (Pennycook, 2019: 43), they do so in the form of resources, constraints and enablements, not as reflexively endowed entities. Equally important, while possibilities and limits are indeed distributed across ontologically heterogeneous social and natural fields, non-humans are not necessarily “vibrant objects in temporary assemblages (that include chairs, tablecloths, food, drink, cutlery, conversations) as actants that interpellate us into diverse forms of socialization” (Pennycook, 2019: 121, emphasis mine). Chairs and food can provide crucial resources, and both facilitate and limit human actions in important ways, but they do not act within the social world as humans do, since they do not possess agentive or reflexive potential. These important differences between humans and non-humans matter a great deal to how we approach the issue of emergence in AL scholarship, and by extension how we formulate causal claims. If we think of the numerous times we—as individuals and members of groups—have made decisions based on moral principles, decisions which have led to specific actions and changes in the social realm, we can begin to see how causality in the natural world is different from causality in the social world. As Juarrero (1999: 24) puts it, “agent causation must be different from event causation if moral attributions are to be possible.” In light of this, it is fair to conclude that agency remains an emergent property

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of humans, not objects, and that this has profound consequences for how causality is conceptualized in AL and the social sciences at large. In a review of Pennycook’s volume, Sealey (2019: 962) also notes this problematic understanding of the concept of emergence in posthumanist AL. Without denying the important links between human and nonhuman realities, the critical realist scholar Kaidesoja (2013: 124) explains that “there are specific ontological features that differentiate human agents and social structures from natural entities and, consequently, […] the specific methods of natural sciences are not directly applicable in the social sciences.” Similarly, Layder (1981: 9) explains that “social science, and sociology in particular, is concerned with the explanation of social action by human subjects who are endowed with the capacity to interpret and thus formulate or redefine their own actions […] these capacities cannot be imputed to the objects of study of the natural sciences.” These views echo Lass’s (1980: 134) warning that “it is a category error to extrapolate directly from the biological to the cultural.” Even if biology and AL are both devoted to understanding specific ontological entities interacting with other open systems in context and over time, and that because of this common emphasis both disciplines can share a great deal of insight, they remain essentially different types of endeavours: biology focuses on non-reflexive physical entities (the body is non-reflexive while human consciousness is the domain within which reflexivity unfolds), whereas AL focuses principally on language, a culturally emergent product of the relationship between humans, as reflexive beings, and their social (and to some extent physical) environment. Collier (2011) also stresses the importance of scientists recognizing that the natural and the social sciences focus on very different phenomena. He explains that, while social scientists can criticize ideologies, assumptions and theories held by people—as the very objects of their scientific investigations—natural scientists cannot criticize natural objects such as rocks or the weather: Because one cannot reduce the social sciences to natural ones, there may be ontological differences as well, due to kinds of being that the social sciences explain which the natural sciences do not – for instance, human

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minds. All sciences are theories, but social sciences are also in part about theories in people’s minds. Among the theories commonly held in any society, some will be about that society; and some of these may be false. So a scientific account of that society may include both knowledge about the theories held in that society, and knowledge that they are false. This enables social science to criticize a society, not in addition to explaining it, [but rather] by explaining it. (p. 8)

To say that the natural world is different from the social world does not, in my view, constitute a form of anthropocentrism or a manifestation of modernist, positivist, dichotomous thinking: it is merely an ontological statement which allows for a necessary conceptual basis upon which we can begin to explore the important causal interplay between the two. It is, however, a rejection of the radical relationism within posthumanism, which reduces phenomena to their relationship with other phenomena. This is problematic both theoretically and methodologically because, again, we then lose sight of their distinct and emergent powers and properties, knowledge of which remains of paramount importance to the formulation of causal claims. It is equally important to stress that the kinds of problems and issues studied in AL are profoundly social, even if related to the material and natural world to some extent. As such, it is entirely reasonable to approach AL research by emphasizing the distinct and emergent properties and powers of humans. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 1) underline, AL refers to “those areas of language description and analysis which locate language itself within the social world, and which understand language use as a form of social practice.” Extending this argument further, it is important to remind ourselves—as AL scholars and social scientists— that “human language is a human construct, so it is a truism that when linguists analyse its grammar and vocabulary they inevitably do so anthropocentrically” (Sealey, 2018: 224). As such, while understanding of the fundamental relationship between human and non-human entities can elucidate important details and features of human existence within broader social and natural worlds and hopefully lead to a more sustainable future for all, diminishing the relevance of the distinctions between the social and the natural—or even worse, dismissing these as

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remnant of modernist thinking—is, in my view, mistaken and therefore counterproductive to AL research. In promulgating posthumanist AL as a new form of materialism, it is important to note that Pennycook (2019) departs from many of his earlier poststructuralist stances towards discourse (e.g., Pennycook, 2001, 2013) by stressing the need to “understand the relation between discursive practices and materialization” (p. 32). In doing so, the author is arguably moving towards a realist viewpoint. At the same time, by aiming to collapse the ontological distinctions between human and non-human entities, the author cannot quite escape the conflationary tendencies which have marked his earlier works. This becomes clear when he argues that understanding the relation between discursive practices and materialization, and complexifying language and its relation to the world, are best achieved through an emphasis on performativity. Despite claims by the author to the contrary (notably his conceptually problematic suggestion that posthumanism offers a unique approach to performativity), the notion of performativity effectively reduces social reality to situated practice. Moreover, given that (a) trees and rivers do not “perform,” and (b) performativity requires a strong notion of agency to be conceptually and methodologically meaningful, performativity thus contains an obvious anthropocentric angle. Pennycook also fails to provide viable strategies for researchers to analytically move back and forth between the performance and the intransitive aspects of social reality, including structure, culture and underlying causal mechanisms. Instead, he merely mentions the need to “move beyond discourse towards materiality,” which is a vague, non-committal, anti-realist and scientifically problematic statement regarding structural and cultural forces as complex and causally consequential elements in the production of social reality. In sum, posthumanist AL currently remains an under-developed perspective which requires considerable conceptual and methodological improvements before it can offer viable solutions to the problems faced by AL scholars.

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Conclusion In this chapter I have tried to provide fair and balanced accounts and critiques of the successionist and the interpretivist strands of AL scholarship, and while I have noted some of the benefits of a posthumanist approach to AL I have also been highly critical of its claims to offer viable solutions to AL problems. I will argue in the next chapters that AL research is fundamentally concerned with language and related phenomena as emergent outcomes of the structure–agency relationship, and that to understand this complex process AL scholars need complexity-informed concepts and theories grounded in a robust social ontology provided by realism. This alternative does not merely fuse successionism and interpretivism into a single and unified paradigm, for while these two perspectives are two varieties of empiricism, they fit rather uncomfortably with each other both theoretically and methodologically. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 107) argue, “empirical descriptions of the world will always be incomplete, since that world is not fully or directly intelligible to its inhabitants (including, of course, social theorists and language researchers).” The complexity of phenomena studied in AL must therefore be dealt with largely through theory—i.e., with consideration for phenomena beyond the empirically accessible. A core argument grounding this stance is that, for a practice-oriented science such as AL, causal models are necessary, and for these we need theory. At this point in the history of AL scholarship, with increasing interest in elucidating the links between linguistic and social realities, and with how individuals and communities experience and deal with social and cultural forces, it is fair to note that interpretivism is becoming gradually more prominent. The problem, as already suggested, is that understanding the connections between individuals and society requires more than insight into localized human understandings. On this subject, Maton (2013: 6) discusses the tendency among contemporary social researchers to adopt a false dichotomy between positivist absolutism and constructivist relativism: That is, they posit a choice between understanding knowledge either as decontextualized, value-free, detached and certain or as socially

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constructed within cultural and historical conditions in ways that reflect vested social interests. Of these options, they then choose the latter, and thereby dissolve knowledge. In other words, having (re-)discovered the obvious point that ‘knowledge is socially constructed’, many approaches take this to also mean ‘… rather than related to something real’. By committing the ‘epistemic fallacy’ of confusing epistemology with ontology […], social construction is extended from knowledge to reality.

And when ontology and epistemology are conflated thus, understanding the connections between individuals and society becomes a considerably difficult task. Specifically, it leads to knowledge-blindness, or the overemphasis of the social influences upon knowledge. As Chapter 4 will explain, realism makes this epistemic fallacy one of its main points of critique (Maton, 2013). As we attempt to move beyond anthropocentrism to understand the interaction between individuals, society and nature, we are also compelled to explain real causal mechanisms, not merely revealing statistical regularities or simply formulating narratives about human experiences. In this regard, Sealey and Carter (2004: 193) explain that successionism and interpretivism are equally ill-equipped to fulfil this scientific requirement. While the quantitative approach indicates traces of structural distributions in the patterns it identifies, it does not provide evidence of how social class relations are experienced by people themselves. By contrast, the interpretive approach indicates how social actors experience social class processes, but has little to say about the structural features of these. […] applied linguistics shares with many other social science disciplines a need to respond to wider debates about how we can know the social world, and, in broad terms, it also participates in the struggle between methodologies which are more inclined towards measurement and those which are more inclined towards interpretation.

In this chapter I have also identified specific reasons why AL—as a relatively young area of the social sciences—needs a renewal, a critical re-evaluation of its core principles, or as Weideman (2007, 2009, 2015) suggests, a philosophy. Furthermore, while the ideas that knowledge and

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its uses in real-world contexts are closely related and that research should aim to improve human life do have some credence, Kramsch’s reduction of AL research to an empirical practice or to its practical uses is considerably problematic. This viewpoint in our field is more than a mere pragmatic approach to research: it is a problematic teleological stance which runs the risk of relativizing theoretical knowledge to its practical uses. Likewise, while I agree that value-free knowledge is an illusion, acknowledgement of this should not diminish our commitment as AL scholars to objective knowledge. On this note, Sealey and Carter (2004: 105) provide, in my opinion, perhaps the most convincing argument for the need in AL research for greater and more consistent theoretical engagement: It is the very opacity of social life that requires us to develop theoretical accounts if we are to grasp those features of it that are not given in our everyday, phenomenal experiences. […] It is partly because the social world is not transparent in this way that we experience its force in the form of constraints – and its power in the form of enablements – and that we need to develop novel, frequently counter-intuitive, theories about what it consists of and how it works.

Indeed, claiming that theory can only be good if it is useful to practice is misleading. After all, how can interpretivist AL scholars claim the epistemic privilege necessary to formulate ontological claims about language and related phenomena, while criticizing this very privilege as mere narrative, in the hope of valorizing the experience and understandings of those they study (Sealey & Carter, 2004)? This position can only be acceptable if grounded in an ontologically flattened view of the social realm. More importantly, and as I will reiterate throughout this book, if we accept the position that AL—as an applied field of inquiry—is mainly about helping practitioners on the ground, we must then also pay closer attention to how social processes and phenomena are caused . In other words, AL’s practical mission necessitates causal models, which are developed at the level of theory. In the next chapter, I hone in specifically on the structure–agency debate in social theory by highlighting core issues related to social ontology as they relate to both social research and AL,

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and explain the shortcomings of flattened ontologies and the benefits of perspectives which attempt to provide stratified views of society and its constituting parts. This work will form the basis for my analysis of both realism and CDST in AL in subsequent chapters.

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3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL

The Vexatious Fact of Society The structure–agency relationship has been characterized as a “vexatious fact of society” (e.g., Archer, 1995, 2004; Archer & Tritter, 2000): humans are the creators of, and responsible for, society, social stability and change, while also being profoundly conditioned and structured by it. It is vexatious because of the inherent ambivalence of society: if society is neither the product of humans’ limitless freedom nor the total determination of their actions by forces beyond their reach, then what is it? It is vexatious because we cannot explain one by reducing it to, or conflating it within, the other. It is vexatious because the need to explain in detail the very nature of that relationship stubbornly resurfaces at every turn, yet clear and reliable answers applicable to the study of all or most social “facts” seem to escape our grasp. The various ontological perspectives available (notably those summarized in this chapter) are, in this sense, attempts to deal with this vexatious fact by, in part, providing theories, models and concepts to explain the complex and ambiguous interplay between both strata of the social realm. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_3

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Dealing with this vexatious fact is, in a sense, an inherent part of social research, including AL. To understand the centrality of the structure–agency relationship to AL concerns, we must first identify AL as a social science, thus as fundamentally concerned with the structure– agency debate. The reason is simple: “as soon as we observe the ways in which speakers use language we are engaged with the analysis of the social world” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 34), and that to understand this social world we need to understand how structure and agency are related in causal terms. The relationship between language and social studies, however, is not one-directional, since other areas of the social sciences— sociology, anthropology, economics, policy studies, etc.—must also deal with language as a socially emergent phenomenon. Yet, theories about language and its social reality have necessarily followed their own developmental trajectories over time, which means that claims made about language by social scientists at different periods of history have not always been informed by the most sophisticated and complexity-sensitive theories about language. Part of this problem, as I have already mentioned, is the reluctance among many scholars to fully engage in transdisciplinary efforts. In light of this, Sealey and Carter (2004: 2) argue that all social sciences must also be concerned with language and deal with insight from linguistics—applied or otherwise—because of “the unique status of language, as both an object of knowledge and the means by which that knowledge is comprehended, expressed and discussed.” The structure–agency debate, however, is certainly not new to AL: whatever paradigm we choose to adopt—structuralism, social constructionism, poststructuralism, critical realism, etc.—AL issues can be understood as outcomes of the structure–agency interaction, or how social forces influence language-related phenomena, and how agents (e.g., language learners, teachers, policymakers, etc.) deal with structural constraints and enablements (e.g., tests, materials, language policy, educational systems, socio-economic realities, etc.) in light of their goals and aspirations. As such, limited conceptual engagement with the structure–agency debate by applied linguists comes at a cost. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 34) rightfully argue, “insofar as the issue of structure and agency is inherent in the concerns of applied linguists, neglect of the work carried out by social theorists will lead to underdeveloped accounts

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of the social world.” Neglect of social theory by applied linguists does not come only in the form of avoidance: it also comes in the form of sweeping claims about the death of an era and the emergence of a new world out of the ashes of the old one. Larsen-Freeman (2015: 11; 2020: vii), for example, announces that “no longer can we be content with Newtonian reductionism, a Laplacian clockwork universe with its deterministic predictability and the use of statistics to generalize from the behavior of population samples to individuals.” Although this statement is justified with regards to perhaps the more radical applications of successionism in AL, we must also remind ourselves that no social theorist, and very few social scientists to date have adhered to such a hydraulic view of human processes. If Larsen-Freeman is right—i.e., if such radical tendencies are more common within AL circles—it would indeed be a clear indication of a general lack of engagement by AL scholars with the structure–agency debate. It is worth pointing out that sweeping claims about deaths of eras and births of new ones are rather common in the social sciences, and reveal a unique feature of the field. According to Maton (2013), cultural studies in general depend a great deal on the perception of radical schisms, or critical deconstructions and transformations of knowledge previously developed. Rather than building upon previous knowledge and finetuning it over long periods of time (as would be more common in the natural sciences), social scientists tend to declare new beginnings, redefinitions and even complete ruptures with the past. The social sciences then give the appearance of undergoing a permanent cultural revolution, and ownership of revolutionary ideas then becomes central to the legitimacy of the researcher—or “expert interpreter”—within a specific field. In parallel, progress in the social sciences tends to be measured by the addition of new voices advocating the rejection of past paradigms and theories and the introduction of new, often more radical ones. As revealed in the previous chapter and further discussed in the present one, clear evidence of this can be found in the passion expressed by so many contemporary social scientists and applied linguists for anti-positivist, postmodernist and posthumanist perspectives which, as I have already pointed out and will do so in this chapter and subsequent ones, remain largely underdeveloped, thus considerably problematic.

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The following summary of the evolution of the structure–agency debate demonstrates that, while AL theory and research practices at times differ in important ways, there has actually never really been a time— at least not since the beginning of the twentieth century—when people were conceptualized in purely mechanistic terms—i.e., as mechanical parts of a closed, deterministic system. It is also worth underlining the point that positivism—the most common target of postmodernist critique—has more or less become a defunct perspective, as Davis and Sumara (2006: 68–69) observe: The “sciences” that were rejected within much of 20th -century structuralist, poststructuralist, and related theories were the sciences of 1700s and 1800s—the orientations and emphases of which […] were actually dismissed or eclipsed through the 1900s within the sciences. […] to assume that those accounts are still appropriately applied to all of contemporary scientific inquiry is to succumb to a crude parody or caricature to the ever-evolving scientific project.

Also common and somewhat problematic among contemporary AL scholars, particularly those who adhere to various forms of interpretivism, is a rejection of the structure–agency “dualism” altogether. This rejection, as Elder-Vass (2010: 3) points out, is indeed rather difficult to maintain consistently: Many contemporary authors […] reject the implication that structure and agency represent a binary choice: that either social behaviour is determined by structural forces or it is determined by the free choices of human individuals. Indeed, if we look more closely, it is striking that many apparently structuralist thinkers have been unable or unwilling in practice to dispense with agency and apparently individualist thinkers have been unable or unwilling in practice to dispense with structure.

As the following summary aims to reveal, social scientists and social theorists have, for the most part, considered both agency and structure as important elements in the shaping of society (except perhaps adherents to more radical strands of postmodernism and social constructionism). It

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will also become apparent in this chapter that the social theories developed over the past century have never actually excluded either agency or structure entirely; instead, what distinguish them are the different emphases on one or the other, and their approaches to conceptualizing how the structure–agency relationship unfolds. As such, to label talks about the structure–agency relationship as products of “dichotomous thinking” is mistaken. Layder (2006: 144) succinctly states that the idea that some authors or schools of social theory are entrapped in a false notion of an individual-society split is […] quite misleading. The important question is not whether some sociologists posit a solitary individual cut off from society. It would be odd indeed if any sociologists attempted to do this. The question is, which of the accounts most adequately expresses the fundamental connectedness of the individual and society?

To explain this tendency among some social scientists to reject talks of structure and agency, the author explains that “many proponents of ‘radical new breakthroughs’ get carried away with the romance of being on the cutting edge of discovery, rather than dealing in a systematic and careful way with what theoretical knowledge we already have and using its valuable aspects in a cumulative and co-operative manner” (Layder, 2006: 98). Although the lure of new scientific beginnings can indeed be strong, it can unfortunately also encourage intellectual amnesia. The short and selective history of social theory presented in this chapter is partly aimed at encouraging AL scholars to become more familiar with social theory in general and understand how it informs their work. In the process, I hope that readers of this book—most of whom I suspect are AL scholars and practitioners—will not see in this summary a mere intellectual exercise distantly related to AL concerns, but instead develop a sense of what is involved in the creation of a robust social ontology, as a necessary basis for a re-evaluation and reshaping of AL scholarship. It is also my aim to demonstrate how the structure– agency discussion has evolved over decades as the product of a cumulative and cooperative effort by social scientists from a variety of disciplines. After reading this chapter and the next, I hope that readers can see how

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ideas about the structure–agency relationship have always built upon each other, not necessarily through outright rejection of ideas previously offered, but rather through an organic borrowing and fine-tuning of existing insight, as is characteristic of most evolutionary trajectories documented in the natural and the social sciences. I begin with Talcott Parsons’ structural functionalism, follow with Marxist social theory and structuralism, symbolic interactionism and phenomenology, postmodernism, poststructuralism, structuration theory and finally end with Bourdieu’s theory of social practice and Habermas’s lifeworld/system distinction. Throughout this account, I will also make the point that Bourdieu and Habermas, although not realist thinkers, have nevertheless provided much insight of value in the formulation of the stratified ontology provided by realism and which will be discussed in Chapters 4 and 5. Much of the content for this chapter is drawn from Derek Layder’s wonderfully discerning volume Understanding Social Theory (Layder, 2006), which I encourage all readers to consult. At the end of each section, I explain the links between social theory and specific AL strands and/or studies. Due to limited space (and given that this book is actually not about social theory), the following summary only considers broad features of specific (i.e., selected) paradigms. This, however, has the unfortunate effect of reducing the complex evolution of social theory over the years. It is therefore important to remember that all strands of social theory are characterized by both strong and weak versions, and in some cases multiple varieties in between. For example, weak social constructionism argues that our knowledge of the world is socially constructed, while strong social constructionism builds on that notion to reject the possibility of an objective description of reality external to discourse and human experience. More radical social constructionists posit that social realities can only exist if they are thought of and talked about by people. In general, stronger, more radical accounts of the social world are easier to reject on the basis that they provide flattened ontologies, thus doing violence to the complexity of social reality. As a general rule, weaker versions of specific paradigms tend to be compatible with the realist ontology summarized in the next two chapters.

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A (Selective) History of the Structure–Agency Debate In Understanding Social Theory, Layder (2006) provides a history of how the structure–agency relationship has been collaboratively conceptualized over the years through multiple borrowings and fine-tunings of ideas proposed by researchers and theorists over decades of intellectual development. In sharp contrast with common portrayals of the structure–agency relationship, Layder prefaces his work by arguing that sociology and social theory has not been beleaguered by ‘false’ problems and divisions (such as those expressed in the pairings of ‘individual and society’, ‘agency–structure’ and ‘macro– micro’). In my opinion these dualisms represent not so much false problems as contested issues about which are the most adequate ways of thinking about the interconnections between different features of social life. (Layder, 2006: ix)

Despite divergences, the structure–agency “dualism” is not merely a convenient conceptual distinction of salience to armchair theorists: it identifies two social strata consequential to our variegated understandings of society. To come to term with this viewpoint, we only have to think of how human beings and society are different things—i.e., how they differ ontologically—and how we need different terms and concepts to talk about each of them. To illustrate this point, we can define an education system as a human creation and as the outcome of collective human effort on the one hand. On the other, while we can also say that an education system (because of its distinct and emergent powers and properties) can undergo processes such as restructuration, standardization, overhaul and dismantlement, human beings simply cannot undergo the same changes. Likewise, while people can hate or fall in love, institutions cannot. More importantly, and as Layder’s statement above suggests, structure and agency are not realities inherently positioned against each other, pulling in opposite directions, in an ongoing struggle for power and dominance: they are two core strata interacting together in the ongoing production of social life. As such, the central

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task in social theory is explaining specifically how agency and structure are linked. To conceptualize structure, Ylikoski (2012: 27) explains that “macro social facts are typically supra-individual : They are attributed to groups, communities, populations, and organizations, but not to individuals. There might be some attributes that apply both to individuals and collectives, but typically macro social properties, relations, and events are such that they are not about individuals.” Similarly, one can say that structure, or macrosocial facts, are not the mere aggregates of individual beings and actions in context: they are emergent outcomes of those interactions, with distinct and emergent properties and powers of their own. Sealey and Carter (2004: 10–11) explain how structure and agency are different things in the following way: The distinctive properties of social structures include their anteriority: the fact that, for example, legal systems and property relations precede us, are always already features of the world into which we are born. This points to another distinguishing property of social structures: they are relatively enduring. Amongst the powers possessed by social structures are those of enablement and constraint […] Amongst the distinguishing properties and powers of agency are self-consciousness, reflexivity, intentionality, cognition, emotionality and so on.

Stated differently, structure refers to objective, pre-existing sets of social and institutional relations we experience throughout our lives as social beings and as a result of being and acting in the world. They are also antecedent structured relations in that they existed before we were born and will keep on existing after we die. Providing an explanatory account rather than a descriptive one, Layder (1981: 3) refers to structure as the pre-constituted conditions of interaction, and as “underlying generative mechanisms which give rise to certain observable manifestations.” The notion of structure as pre-constituted conditions of interaction leads to the realist observation that structure and agency are related to each other in a-synchronous fashion—i.e., processes and phenomena within both strata unfold over different timelines. As a set of relations

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providing material and contextual cues for the performance of people’s multiple everyday behaviours, structure is also subjective in the sense that it requires the enactment of social actions by people. Again, however, structure is not merely the aggregate result of individual subjectivities or agentive actions: it is also—and quite importantly to the making of social realities—an emergent product of those actions, with emergent properties and powers of its own. For example, while an education system—as one of the many emergent outcomes of human interaction—makes specific social roles (e.g., teachers, students, school administrators, policymakers, etc.) available, it is people who occupy those roles. This does not imply that people are only logs in the system. However, the education system, as a structural entity, generally survives changes brought to it (e.g., through policy and curricular initiatives, people retiring and being hired, shifts in the socio-political landscape, etc.). People can continue to enter and exit the system without the system losing its properties and powers. In other words, social structures are relatively enduring. As active agents in the real world, people can certainly combine their powers and change social structures in fundamental ways, as the American, French, Russian and other revolutions throughout history have clearly demonstrated. However, we also depend on structures to operate and achieve our individual and collective projects in society. Two powers germane to social structures include the distribution of resources in society (enablement) and the imposition of limits on human action (constraint). The distribution of resources, of course, can be unequal, in which case it can also serve to further constrain agency. Structures, in a broader sense, allow us to do certain things, albeit within certain limits, and this constraint/enablement combination differs depending on socio-historical and socio-economic contexts. The study of structure thus involves looking at organizational power, the deployment of social and cultural resources, and reproduced patterns of power and organization in specific contexts and historical periods. Essential to this study is an analytical distinction between constraints and enablements, something which López (2001) sees as considerably difficult to achieve. According to the author, failing to analytically distinguish structural enablements and constraints “leads to an association of ‘enabling’ with transformation, and ‘constraining’ with reproduction.” This is a

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problem because, from this basis, some analysts then distinguish between a desirable form of agency (“enabled” agency) and an undesirable one (“constrained” agency). The study of social structures should therefore begin with the notion that people are able to make some choices and perform some acts in structured fashion. Two important observations can be made from this notion: (a) people do not act entirely as they wish, and (b) their hopes and dreams are also structured realities. From this basis, scholars can then concentrate on the degrees to which structure constrains and enables within a particular context, involving particular agents, over a certain period of time. Agency, on the other hand, involves both individuals and groups of people with the power to do things in the world—i.e., to be actors. A commonly cited definition of agency is provided by Ahearn (2001: 112), who defines it as “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act.” However, as Bouchard and Glasgow (2019) explain, this definition has often been used to justify the problematic view of agency as “free will,” a view which Ahearn herself rejects. The problem with free will is that it completely detaches agents from structural and cultural conditions—i.e., only enablements, without constraints—and fails to consider that our aspirations, worldviews, hopes and strategies for living in this world are also socio-historically conditioned phenomena. It is therefore somewhat surprising to see traces of the free-will paradigm in talks of human agency in AL scholarship, notably among some contemporary social constructivists and poststructuralists. As we saw in the previous chapter, Pennycook (2019: 21–22) identifies a marked humanistic, or anthropocentric tendency in AL research, noting a strong emphasis on choice and free will: a central focus here is on the freedom of the individual to make ethical choices free of religious dogma and moral prescriptions. Such an emphasis on the freedom of the individual clearly depends on a specific cultural and political understanding of what it means to be human. […] In constructing this vision of the emancipated individual it gave no space to all that inhibits such freedoms: language, class, gender, race, sexuality, discourse, ideology, subconscious desires, discrimination and much more.

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Kockelman (2007) lists three common approaches to agency in Western academic discourse: agency as free will , agency as resistance and agency as mediating force, with the latter being exemplary of a more classical sociological tradition. He describes the view of agency as free will as a product of “modern Western morality” thus: The prototypic representational agent is usually a single human individual who inhabits all three roles at once: thematizer, characterizer, and reasoner. Depending on the semiotic process in question, we call these prototypic agents ‘actors’, ‘speakers’, and ‘thinkers’ (even if it means, as it usually does, that we radically decontextualize the ways in which any individual act is enabled and constrained by a manifold of multiple and distal, contingent and contestable acts). Moreover, we tend to categorize and hierarchize entities as a function of the degree of agency we take them to have […] And we positively valorize higher degrees of agency than lower degrees of agency and hence more agentive beings over less agentive beings. (Kockelman, 2007: 386)

A more nuanced, less culturally laden view of agency therefore needs to gain prominence within AL scholarship, one which proposes that while people are not passive recipients of social effects, neither do they have the choice to sidestep all structural and cultural constraints when desired. The study of agency thus involves looking at how people and groups creatively mediate structural constraints and enablements, in the pursuance of their projects within a contingent social realm. With this basic understanding of structure and agency, let’s see how their relationship—this vexatious fact of social life—has been tackled since the late nineteenth century.

Parsonian Structural Functionalism Structuralism is often understood as offering a view of human beings entirely subsumed by structural forces beyond their control, reduced to clogs in the vast engine that is society. In this particular interpretation of structuralism, structure wins outright. Yet as this section will demonstrate, structuralism, notably the version most often associated with

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the works of Durkheim, Weber and Parsons’s structural functionalism, agency never actually disappears from the equation, even if structure clearly gains the upper hand. Moreover, a closer reading of works by Parsons, Durkheim and Weber reveals an “attempt to think and to provide concepts that might adequately represent the distinctiveness and the specificity of the social level as some type of organized complexity” (López, 2001: 87, emphasis original). In other words, the labelling of structuralism as providing a deterministic view of the social world is somewhat reductive. Asking himself Why don’t people do more as they please or commit more crimes?, Parsons (1949, 1951) attempted to explain social order and relatively stable patterns in society. This perspective, as it pertains to the social sciences, is captured by Davis and Sumara (2006: 66) thus: Structuralist theories are principally concerned with the manner in which certain phenomena – including culture, language, and individual cognition – are organized. These theories inquire into the relational webs that afford such phenomena their coherence. While they are, of course, concerned with the dynamics that give rise to and that inhere in their objects of study, in the main those interests are secondary at best.

At the centre of structural functionalism is the idea that some (although not all) of people’s values, beliefs and the social norms which extend them to the social sphere, play a central regulating function in the production of social life. Borrowing from the works of Durkheim, specifically the notion of core beliefs as shared and bonding social elements, Parsons developed a social ontology in which social order could be explained as the outcome of people adhering to particular belief systems which limit their tendency to prioritize self-interest, while helping them mitigate the need for external social punishment. Within Parsonian functional structuralism, Layder (2006: 22) argues that “processes of socialisation serve to instil the central values and norms of society in its members. These ‘pattern-maintaining’ elements reinforce the core values in society, by promoting consensus and by ensuring that there is a basic level of conformity.” According to Parsonian structural functionalism, humans bridge individual and social realities by embodying particular

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social roles, which in turn involves coming to term with both structural and cultural “facts” of social life. People are able to live both private and social lives by reaching compromises between themselves and the society in which they live; and social roles both constitute the conduit through which such arrangements become possible, largely by providing individuals with particular sets of norms and values of relevance to particular situations. As such, people do not exercise free will when attempting to mediate structural and cultural constraints and enablements; instead, choices become possible because of the very nature of the relationship between humans, social roles, values and society. Put differently, social roles demand certain choices to be made while condemning others. The choices people make are thus largely understood from this functionalist perspective as epiphenomena of the social roles themselves, thus revealing a tendency within structuralism to reduce human agents to passive assimilators of rules and norms associated with their specific social roles. Consensus is central to a Parsonian social ontology, essentially making it an ontology of the status quo. Indeed, Parsons’ overemphasis on consensus through adherence to specific role-mandated values and norms fails to account for rather common instances in everyday life of people and groups misunderstanding, flouting and even resisting cultural and social norms and values. As Porpora (1987: 119) argues, “actual humans often do not behave in the normatively prescribed ways. Even when they do behave normatively they simultaneously resist and otherwise circumvent the norms and structures that bind them.” Structural functionalism unfortunately cannot account for these phenomena. It is also ill-equipped to explain (a) how social/cultural norms emerge in the first place, (b) the corruptive and coercive uses of social power, and more broadly speaking (c) social change in any meaningful way. Given these considerable shortcomings, the view Parsons offers must, to some extent, be understood as a prescriptive view of the social world—i.e., less a reflection of what social reality is than what it ought to be, from a particular ideological standpoint. As Layder (2006: 36) clarifies, at the core of Parsons’ ontology lies the problem of reification, which refers to

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the mistaken assumption that the products of human endeavour (material objects as well as social arrangements such as institutions) are, in fact, the work of non-human entities, such as Gods or mystical forces. In relation to society, this involves the idea that social structures and systems ‘seem’ to have a life of their own, somehow disembodied from human beings absorbed in their daily business.

It is precisely this notion of structural “detachment” which has subjected structuralism to virulent criticisms for decades. There is no doubt that presenting structural realities as the main forces behind social processes constitutes a conflation of agency within structure. Although Parsons never quite gave up on the idea of a social agent, he was never able to develop an ontology capable of accounting for anything beyond social order, with individual/social agents waiting to be called upon to consent. At the same time, the Parsonian focus on beliefs, values, norms, rules and consensus in social life is not entirely dismissible. Indeed, some paradigms developed after the emergence of structural functionalism in social theory—notably Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, as will later be discussed—owe a debt to Parsons. Moreover, structural functionalism introduced an element crucial to realism—the idea that the social world is stratified. As Layder (2006: 37) points out, “perhaps the great virtue of Parsons’s theory is its appreciation of society as something which has ‘ontological depth’. […] society is made up of elements of fundamentally different kinds, but which are completely and inescapably linked to each other.” While we are justified in criticizing structural functionalism for its weak version of agency, we should not dismiss its relevance to the development of a stratified social ontology. Structural functionalism finds many conceptual and philosophical parallels in anthropological functionalism, which also draws much inspiration from the sociological work of Durkheim, and with perhaps Malinowski as its most illustrious theorist and advocate. In anthropological functionalism, society, institutions and related social roles also constitute the focus of inquiry. Cultural life (populated by ideational forces such as norms, beliefs, religions, etc.) is, by extension, conceptualized within this perspective as an important domain within which the

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preservation of social structures is achieved. Consequently, anthropological functionalism also fails to conceptualize the distinct and emergent properties and powers of agency; rather, agency is viewed very much in terms of how it contributes to the maintenance of the social and cultural status quo. In linguistics, structuralism is most often associated with the works of the Swiss linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure. A common target of postmodernist critique, Saussurean (or structural) linguistics begins with the notion that language is a system, a self-contained relational structure composed of langue (including the synchronic aspects of phonology, morphology and syntax) and parole (the diachronic aspects which include semantics, pragmatics, discourse, etc.). The focus in structural linguistics tends to be placed more on langue than parole, since the latter is seen as subjected to multiple external influences, thus as a less systematic, more fluid and complex domain of language. Consequently, the central problem in structural linguistics, as explained by Sealey and Carter (2004), is that meaning is defined as the result of the relationships between the synchronic features of language, largely leaving the diachronic features out of the equation. Saussure’s theory thus fails to consider both how languages are actually used by real people in real-world contexts, and by extension how social, cultural, political and historical factors are also consequential to this process. Acknowledgement of this problem (i.e., the setting aside of parole) allowed for the emergence of a much needed postmodernist critique, which has been rather successful at elucidating the fluid and complex nature of language, as well as the links between language and politics, language and colonialism and so forth. Although warranted, many critics of structural linguistics up to this day have shown a tendency to caricature Saussure’s work. Problems surface when criticisms of his (said) lack of consideration for parole are used by (notably) social constructionist, phenomenologist and poststructuralist applied linguists to justify a rejection of the systemic features of language altogether (i.e., reducing language essentially to its situated uses). This strategy, however, is not fully justified. Harris (2003: 8) clarifies that, “For Saussure, the system as (la langue) has no intentions: it merely provides resources for those individuals who do have

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intentions, i.e., its speakers.” In other words, there is acknowledgement by Saussure of the important role played by the agent as language user. Saussure’s main interest, however, is on langue, or the synchronic features of language. This relative misconstruing of Saussure’s views also reveals a seemingly persistent confusion regarding the langue/ parole (i.e., synchronic/diachronic) distinction, a confusion which may be explained by (a) Saussure himself not providing a unified and consistent theory of language; and of course (b) Saussure’s ideas travelling through history not through his own writings but through notes taken by his students during his three separate lectures at the University of Geneva between 1906 and 1911. As such, we must also recognize that various conflicting interpretations and critiques of Saussure’s ideas potentially cloud our understanding of his intentions and body of work. Concerned with this particular problem, Harris (2003) concludes that contemporary interpretations of Saussure’s ideas tend to be formulated in order to serve the purposes of another theory, not necessarily that of Saussure. He also observes philosophically that “the binoculars of historical hindsight can distort and foreshorten, just as the contemporary microscope can sometimes give a close but too restricted view” (p. 11). In addition, not all critics of structural linguistics agree. Pennycook (2001), for example, recognizes the important contribution made by Saussure to AL, noting that structural linguistics was particularly effective in improving the zeitgeist of early twentieth century epistemology, since it helped move thinking away from a hierarchical view of values with primitive languages, cultures, and societies on the bottom and developed languages, cultures, and societies on the top. Instead, it urged us not to judge or evaluate from some external position but rather to describe from the inside. What mattered was how the internal structure of things worked, not their external relations. Not only were linguists then able to explore the complex inner workings of languages (showing indeed that so-called primitive languages were highly complex), but they were also able to argue that all languages were equal in that they served the needs of their speakers equally. (p. 31)

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What most critics of Saussure fail to recognize, and what Pennycook acknowledges, is that Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole remains “a major development in human consciousness, [because it is] one of the first attempts at developing a stratified view of language” (Bouchard, 2018: 5, emphasis mine). This notion is central to the realist view of language presented in Chapters 4 and 5. In large part, the importance of this stratified view is that it allows for an understanding of symbolic communication, or the emergence of an important abstract “layer” of language, as explained by Layder (1997: 30) thus: Instead of being restricted to ‘gestural’ or physical signalling as are animals (such as the baring of teeth in dogs or the emission of various sounds in fighting cats), the use of language in humans allows for truly symbolic communication. This abstract feature of language enables a degree of detachment from the demands and exigencies of the immediate circumstances and this creates a cognitive space in which a considered response (rather than an immediate reaction) may occur.

To exemplify Layder’s point, we only have to think about the language found in academic books such as this one. What structural linguistics also makes rather clear is that, when people use language, they do not create language “from scratch,” but rather with reference to language as a culturally emergent resource, with constraining and enabling potentials outside situated interaction. In other words, despite its considerable problems with regards to agency, structural linguistics nevertheless manages to introduce a complex view of language by bringing attention to its synthetic aspects as important features of human communication. Chomsky’s work on language, notably his theory of universal grammar, constitutes another notable example of structuralist linguistics, although it is also widely credited for ushering in cognitive linguistics, an important contribution which helps us distinguish the work of Chomsky from that of Saussure. By emphasizing the centrality of human cognition and of humans as entities capable of thinking, memorizing, understanding and creating meaning, cognitive linguistics can also be defined as placing a stronger emphasis on the human agent as

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communicator and creator of meaning. Despite this important distinction, the similarities between Chomsky’s work and structural linguistics are clear: both were indeed interested in analyzing the underlying reality, or more abstract features, of language. Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008) explain that Chomsky “invoked a different dichotomy [from that of Saussure] motivated by the same goal, i.e., to get at the systematic nature of language. Chomsky distinguished mental competence or the idealized native speaker’s knowledge of his or her language from performance, the actual use of the language” (p. 90, emphasis mine). Chomsky wanted to develop a view of language as a system as represented in the minds of language users (i.e., as a linguistic competence), which is why Chomsky’s contribution has often been characterized as “mentalist,” with limited concern for social influences on language use, and rooted in the vision of an ideal speaker or language user—i.e., the “native speaker.” Rampton (1997: 329) explains that the emergence of Western sociolinguistics in the 1960s was very much “an attempt to refute Chomsky’s assertion that linguistics can be most sensibly defined as the study of the ideal speaker-hearer in a homogenous speech community.” In sociolinguistics, and more specifically within the field of intercultural communicative competence research, principles associated with cultural determinism—a conceptual feature of anthropological functionalism which posits culture as determining agentive behaviours, thus reducing agents to essentialized ethnic and/or cultural categories—have long been rejected in principle, although we can still find echoes of it here and there. Often cited as an authority in intercultural communication research, Hofstede (2009) provides a relatively recent example of such conflationary viewpoint by reducing culture to a set of “unwritten rules for being an accepted member of the moral circle” (p. 85), as well as an unavoidable presence deeply ingrained in the minds and lives of individuals. He also defines cultural communities as moral circles in which members are understood as reproducers of shared standards of moral rules. Similarly, Seargeant (2009: 36) defines culture as “shared patterns of learned or symbolic behavior, the aggregate of which constitute a culture, in so far as they are promoted as being essential for (or linked to an essentialist understanding of ) group identity, and are seen as distinct from the behaviors of others.” In Seargeant’s view, there is

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the additional problem of culture being merely the sum of all cultural “facts,” an aggregative view which does violence to both agentive and cultural processes by overlooking their respective distinct and emergent properties and powers. In Bouchard (2017) I argue that the view of culture as “shared” (a) excludes those who may not agree with the consensus, thus qualifying them as “a-cultural”; (b) overlooks other important cultural realities which may be seen as lying at the margins of cultural life yet which remain vital to explaining cultural change, and (c) fails to specify who specifically formulates the consensus and who does the agreeing. Reducing much of social and cultural life to a consensus is, in other words, tantamount to reproducing the myth of cultural integration, defined by Archer (1996: xvii) as “appropriated by sociology from early anthropology, which perpetuates an image of culture as a coherent pattern, a uniform ethos or a symbolically consistent universe.” Furthermore, in intercultural communicative competence research inspired by anthropological functionalism, there is the related problematic tendency to equate countries with societies, and then with cultures. Hofstede (2009: 91) clearly succumbs to this tendency when arguing that “almost all countries themselves try to function as ‘moral circles’.” Given its enduring prevalence in sociolinguistics and much of the social sciences, Archer is indeed justified in characterizing the myth of cultural integration as having “projected an image of culture which proved so powerful that it scored the retina, leaving a perpetual after-image, which distorted subsequent perception” (p. 2). To sum up, anthropological functionalism promotes the idea that human agents are cultural replicators, inescapably tied to specific, essentialized ethno-cultural heritages which directly determine their cultural choices and actions. The causal potential of human agents might still be recognized in some form or other, but in a dramatically limited fashion. A similar critique can be made with regards to structural functionalism.

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Historical Materialism Although one of the pillars of structuralism, historical materialism (also sociological Marxism) differs from the approaches of Durkheim, Weber and Parsons due to its explicit critical angle and its focus on the material aspects of social life. The central target of Marxist critique is the capitalist mode of production leading to class divisions, or the structurally determined unequal distribution of resources in society, limiting the ability of large segments of society to fulfill basic needs such as shelter, food, clothing, etc., while privileging the very few at the top. This emphasis on the material/economic features of society, according to Marxist ontology, allows for a clarification of broad social processes, including culture and other particular modes of thought germane to a specific historical period, while offering a framework for understanding the very structure of social relationships. Historical materialism is less concerned with norms/beliefs acting as regulating forces, instead concentrating on economic inequalities which are understood as core underlying mechanisms in the production of social life. In this sense, Marx moves even further away from concerns related to human intersubjectivity than Durkheim, Weber or Parsons. Instead, he wants us to map out specifically how social positions and functions are distributed as one of the many outcomes of the capitalist mode of production. To do so, he proposes a historical approach to social analysis, specifically one which attempts to describe how social classes and related social positions and functions are achieved in a particular period of human history, with reference to the period that preceded it. The assumptions grounding this approach to sociological analysis are that each period contains specific forms of social relations and class inequalities, not only influenced by past forms but also being changeable forms—i.e., they are not “natural” but rather modifiable conditions of social life. Understanding these relations and how they work thus requires a historical perspective which, in hindsight, has the clear advantage of elucidating causal links—and by extension the potential for developing models of causality—in the social realm. Interestingly, certain aspects of historical materialism can be found in critical realist ontology, notably a mutual appreciation for underlying

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causal mechanisms and historical analysis. Porpora (2011: 164) explains the critical realist approach to studying social structures and their causal potentials thus: “Because the social world is open […] it should be no surprise that history becomes the paradigmatic form of explanation in the human sciences. Historical narratives not only capture the temporal dimension of human life, they are uniquely able to encompass the operation of multiple causal properties of all sorts.” However, the crucial difference between historical materialism and critical realism is that the former is essentially concern with a single, overarching and deterministic source of causal power or causal mechanism—the capitalist mode of production—whereas critical realism views causality as multiple and the social world as non-deterministic. Critical realism therefore offers a more complex view of social reality than the one conceptualized by Marx, who saw history not as merely conditioning but rather determining social “facts.” Despite its emphasis on the material, objective features of society, mainly through an emphasis on economic production and resulting unequal social relations, historical materialism also includes some degree of appreciation for the ideational features of social life. This element in Marx’s theory surfaces in his attempts to explain the processes by which capitalist structures are maintained. He argues that capitalism is effectively maintained through a very specific type of ideological mechanism understood as false-consciousness, a conceptualization of ideology introduced by Marx, further developed by Althusser (1971), Lukács (1971) and Freire (1972), and which still retains the attention of critical social scientists today. Despite their stringent attacks on Marxist philosophy and sociology, some poststructuralist thinkers including Butler (2000) seem rather comfortable with Marx’s views on ideology. As an ideological process often equated with hegemony, false-consciousness is said to be generated, solidified and intensified by the bourgeoisie, aimed at controlling the proletariat by keeping them from developing awareness of their own oppression. Since hegemonic power can be challenged by a wellinformed population, the purpose of ideology as false-consciousness is to impede the dominated population’s access to knowledge of their own subjugation. This goal is achievable by initially creating a system of delusion which appears as nonthreatening (i.e., which appears to serve the

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perceived needs of the population); and second, to convince the targeted population that this system is the only “true” social reality available. In short, false-consciousness facilitates social control through a form of ideological pacification of the dominated population by the bourgeoisie. One ontological question remains unanswered, however: how does this population accept this pacification process? To answer this question, one needs a strong version of agency which, as with structural functionalism, is largely absent from historical materialism. As mentioned above, historical materialism is generally less concerned with ethnographic accounts of the realities lived by situated human agents, while the possibilities afforded by group mobilization towards change attract much more attention. At the same time, the negative impacts of unequal power and resource distribution are also explained with reference to how people suffer within this oppressive system. Specifically, the effects of capitalism (which again is seen not as a natural but rather as a historically emergent mechanism of oppression) on human agency must also be conceptualized as psychological in nature, effects grouped together within the larger category of alienation, or a feeling of estrangement or loss of one’s humanity, as one realizes (s)he cannot escape the oppressive, systemic and mechanistic effects of social class divisions. For postmodernist and poststructuralist thinkers, the emphasis on the capitalist mode of production in historical materialism offers a hopelessly reductive and essentializing view of social life. They are especially dissatisfied with “its attempt to give a comprehensive overview of history and society” (Layder, 2006: 40), or a “grand narrative.” Much of this critique, however, was originally not aimed at Marx himself but rather at one of his followers, Louis Althusser, whose occasional critique of structuralism itself led in part to his influential and controversial work on ideology. Specifically originating from Foucault—a student of Althusser—critiques of historical materialism and of ideology as falseconsciousness centered on the problems posed by the notion of ideology as a “truth-excluding” mechanism. Seliger (1977) and Thompson (2007) argue that, while ideology can reasonably be understood as a distorted representation of reality, conceptualizing ideology as false-consciousness transforms ideology into a tool used exclusively by the bourgeoisie,

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thus characterizing the proletariat essentially as ideologically neutral. This assumes the existence of a non-ideological state of affairs opposed to ideology. The authors also argue that false-consciousness reduces ideology to an instrument of coercion and deceit, leaving other important aspects and effects of ideology (e.g., ideology as sense-making process, ideology as a potential force for emancipation) unexplained. Although important to the development of twentieth century thought and to realism in particular, Marx’s work should be considered with caution for the following additional reasons. Firstly, and as with structuralism in general, historical materialism fails to integrate the creative and generative powers of agency: “The individual is thought to be simply a ‘support’ (although perhaps an unwitting one), of the economic and political system in which she or he is enmeshed through ideological delusion” (Layder, 2006: 48). Secondly, poststructuralist accusations of “grand narrative” are justified to some extent in that much of the development of historical materialism has been a rationalist endeavour fuelled much more by theoretical deliberation than by empirical investigation (notably ethnographic research). Thirdly, it is also clear to ethnographers that power in society does not come exclusively from a single source, as Foucault demonstrated convincingly by presenting power as “capillary” acting through the social body, as part of our everyday social practices. Although most realist thinkers would moderately object by stressing that power occasionally does come from the top—e.g., wartime acts, government interventions in the economy, a student being expelled from a school for bad behaviour, etc.—it is undeniable that power also unfolds in multiple directions at the local level, notably in the ways we place expectations upon each other and regulate each other’s behaviours. Fourthly, and closely related to the three previous points, by reducing social life to economic production, historical materialism overlooks much of the complexity of social life. As Layder (2006: 56) underlines, “the range of cultural and counter-cultural activities that are a routine feature of the everyday world indicates a diversity of forms of life that go well beyond the exclusive and narrow terms of a critique of political economy.” At the same time, Marx’s work keeps on being discussed to this day precisely because it has produced much valuable insight. Unlike

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Parsonian functionalism, for instance, historical materialism is not a paradigm of the status quo, as it affords room for resistance: “the individual has a ‘dialectical’ relationship with the social order and may actively resist its effects. The space for individual resistance, avoidance and dissent is created because social relations contain contradictions and there is never a perfect ‘fit’ between the individual and the social order” (Layder, 2006: 53). However, how resistance is conceptualized within historical materialism remains problematic nonetheless, largely because, as mentioned above, it is not equipped with a strong version of agency. While we can argue that false-consciousness largely overlooks human agents’ creativity and powers, we must also add to our critique that ideological effects on populations are never determining or totalizing (Bouchard, 2017): contradictions between ideological structures and empirical reality are bound to emerge throughout people’s variegated experiences of social life. This important understanding of ideology and human emancipation occupies a somewhat uncomfortable place in Marx’s work, yet gains greater importance within ontological perspectives developed subsequently, particularly in the groundbreaking work by the critical discourse analyst Norman Fairclough. In terms of the study of language, historical materialism has influenced developments mainly within the domain of critical discourse analysis, notably by conceptualizing language as a tool with which to achieve ideological effects (see Vološinov, 1986). Marx’s analysis, for one, was largely focused on economic, political and historical texts, making him one of the first critical discourse analysts in history. Fairclough and Graham (2002) describe Marx’s view of language as sharing a dialectical relationship with material social processes. Within AL more specifically, Block (2015) calls for greater appreciation of Marxist principles, arguing that AL is marked by a sort of social class denial: What there has been, to be more precise, is social class erasure, as social class has tended to receive little or no attention in publications that deal with issues around identity and social life. And where it actually is introduced into the equation, this is almost always done in a very cursory, partial, and superficial way. (p. 2, emphasis original)

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This view is also expressed by Block et al. (2012), who provide an insightful and timely analysis of neoliberalism in AL scholarship. Specifically with regards to sociolinguistic research, Block (2015: 14) sees a rather generalized social class myopia among AL scholars: It is difficult to study linguistic variation of any kind without linking it to larger social structures, something which Hymes (1974) argued for long ago. What sense does an analysis of language socialization make if no link is made to how all social phenomena are linked to the economic base of society (e.g., the means of production, in Marxist terms)? How can one analyze immersion education without considering how it intersects with the division of society along class lines? And, is it even possible to develop a thorough understanding of the apparent choices made by people with regard to speaking one language or another, or speaking one variety or another, without acknowledging and exploring how ongoing communication is always enmeshed in the material existences of those making these choices?

A realist take on the issues raised by Block (himself a critical realist) would suggest that the main value of historical materialism to AL scholarship is its focus on underlying causal mechanisms. However, for Marxism only one mechanism matters—the capitalist mode of production—whereas critical realists would rather look at multiple intersecting mechanisms at play in the production of both society-wide and localized social phenomena. In the next section, I summarise symbolic interactionism, a radically different ontological perspective from that of Marx and Parsons due to its departure from the notion of generative mechanisms and its marked emphasis on local realities in the production of social life.

Symbolic Interactionism Originally developed by Mead (1967), and further developed by Blumer (1969), one of his students, the central concern in symbolic interactionism is to counter structuralism’s perceived dehumanizing potential by placing the individual as the centre of social life. The focal point

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of interest for symbolic interactionism is two-fold: how people generate and share meanings and how these symbolic worlds shape individual behaviour in return, thus making symbolic interactionism “the approach within social science that seeks most explicitly to develop Weber’s insights about the meaningfulness of social action” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 36). Society is conceptualized not as an objective reality (as in structuralism) but rather as subjectively constructed, or as an aggregate of local interactions between people. Society, in other words, is a shared project: it exists and is preserved through ongoing interaction between individuals. From this perspective, the notions of structure and system become problematic because they are understood as both reducing and determining situated agentive acts. Sealey and Carter (2004: 8) explain this aspect of symbolic interactionism thus: “social structures are sometimes reduced to the status of convenient sociological descriptions […] or viewed as simply the accumulation of habit and routine; or as the discursive product of social conversation.” Therefore, social realities such as norms, traditions, collective beliefs and so forth gain salience to explanations of social processes when understood as emerging from networks of relationships, particularly as they are “filtered” through many individuals’ sense-making capacity. In this way, symbolic interactionism locks society and people together. Society does exist since it is already there when people are born into it; however, its antecedence and causal potentials are of limited concern. Rather, what matters most is society’s “ongoing-ness” as experienced empirically through human interaction. Layder (2006: 73) explains that, from a symbolic interactionist perspective, “if there is a general merger of the individual and society then it follows that the distinction is a false one in the first place. Similarly, if there is no such thing as society apart from the individuals who produce it in their daily interactions, then the so-called distinction between macro and micro processes is also bogus.” It is on these conceptual grounds that symbolic interactionism can be identified as providing a flattened ontology. In symbolic interactionism, since causal primacy is concentrated on individuals, and that the “social” is conceptualized merely as an aggregate of individual realities, structure is then robbed of its distinct and emergent properties by being reduced to a mere product of agentive processes, making the distinction between structure and agency

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irrelevant altogether. This problem has attracted a great deal of justified criticisms against symbolic interactionism. With its impoverished view of structures, symbolic interactionism unfortunately cannot afford accounts of the emergent properties of collective decision-making, institutional processes and structural and cultural constraints and enablements (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 8). In this sense, symbolic interactionism is ill-equipped to deal with phenomena such as an educational system, the global language learning/teaching industry, and of course critical sociological and sociolinguistic issues such as language shift, social injustice/oppression, intersecting inequalities, and quite importantly, why inequalities persist in society and throughout history (i.e., their antecedence and enduring properties). The only possible answer offered by symbolic interactionism is that these are the outcomes of “joint activities,” a clearly unsatisfactory answer (Layder, 2006). Symbolic interactionism—as another instantiation of empiricism— is also afflicted by a form of theory-blindness, because underlying generative mechanisms and structural realities do not constitute important analytical categories. Layder (2006) highlights the shared interest in the process of situated and fragmentary meaning construction in symbolic interactionism, humanism and postmodernism, and identifies their “anti-theoretical strain and […] distrust of the search for objective truth which is the hallmark of conventional scientific enquiry” (p. 73). This, as we saw earlier, considerably complicates the study and critique of systemic forms of inequalities. Moreover, a denial of structure does not necessarily make way for a more comprehensive account of agency, one of the central purposes of symbolic interactionism: Agency too is a problematic concept. Some, at least, of the problems are reflections of the problem of structure: some more voluntarist thinkers see agency as the exercise of human reflexivity, of conscious decision making about our actions, while other, more determinist authors see it as flowing unthinkingly from sets of dispositions that are acquired, equally unthinkingly, from our social context. (Elder-Vass, 2010: 2)

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In other words, agency tends to be developed within symbolic interactionism through the limiting conceptual lenses of either human rationality or socialization. Symbolic interactionism’s emphasis on language, symbolic communication and meaning-making has attracted a great deal of attention in AL and sociolinguistics research, largely because of their shared interest in language use. Specifically, symbolic interactionism has influenced much research in pragmatics and conversational analysis, with grounded theory offering a well-known conceptual parallel. Dillon (2013) associates grounded theory with symbolic interactionism within AL research, and explains its general methodological approach thus: The analyst’s work is to view the problem under study through a flexible lens, free to shift as new knowledge is gained, in order to correctly situate the phenomena under study. Because of […] its focus on understanding the nature of experience, the importance placed on generating theory grounded in reality, and the belief that researchers must get into the field in order to understand phenomena, GT [grounded theory] is termed fourth generation symbolic interactionism. (p. 2421, emphasis mine)

Interactionist research on second language acquisition was developed notably by Pica (1994) into a perspective which, as Gass (2002) explains, is mainly interested in elucidating meaning-making processes within second language learning environments, and how “learners use their linguistic environment to build their knowledge of the second language” (p. 170). Again, however, symbolic interactionism’s flattened ontology considerably limits its potential to inform AL research beyond immediate face-to-face interaction. For example, if researchers are interested in explaining how specific phrases are used by interlocutors to achieve specific effects (e.g., politeness), the only available sociological insight is the notion that people are differently positioned with regards to power and control over the communicative situation. It does not explain power, or why people are differently positioned in relation to it. Furthermore, the underlying mechanisms which lead to and reinforce particular social positions, and how these affect the lives of their occupants, are left

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unexplained (López, 2001). As such, symbolic interactionism is only able to provide a surface understanding of interaction, and fails to explain how interaction is related to action and how both discourses and actions can be—and often are—structured . As the next section reveals, these considerable shortcomings are even more pronounced in phenomenology/ethnomethodology.

Phenomenology/Ethnomethodology Originating in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is mainly concerned with individual consciousness and how humans experience the world empirically, i.e., through sensory perception. Similar to symbolic interactionism, phenomenology also reacts against structural functionalism, particularly its emphasis on external social forces shaping human actions. At the same time, we can find echoes of Parsons’ views on social consensus in phenomenology, although these tend to reduce consensus to localized agreement between people rather than agentive consent with broader social and cultural forces. In phenomenology, “the common, shared nature of social life is attributed to the ‘shared’ normative commitments that social actors are given by the processes of socialization” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 39). To elucidate how people deploy this shared normative commitment within local contexts, researchers adhering to phenomenology specifically look at how people perceive society, and how these multiple perspectives help them make sense of their lives, with the resources available to them in the moment. Layder (2006) argues with regards to phenomenology that the ways in which people experience reality is crucial to how they formulate goals and act intentionally, reflexively and purposefully. With this emphasis on individual consciousness and localized shared commitment comes an even more radical rejection of the historical and material conditions of social reality. While symbolic interactionism prioritizes social explanations emerging from analysis of human interaction, phenomenology’s focus on the individual is even more pronounced, since what matters to social analysis is how the world appears to people and how they make sense of it. Human consciousness, from this perspective,

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has two important social components. First, it is partly social because “knowledge is socially distributed in the sense that different people know different things because they deal with different things on a day-to-day basis (accountants know more about accounting than they do about nursing)” (Layder, 2006: 93). Secondly, individual consciousness also depends on shared knowledge—i.e., the fact that we can understand each other through the sharing of common-sense ideas—with language understood as revealing the social aspects of individual consciousness. In addition, the process of typification is seen as allowing agents to collectively develop and share worldviews through social interaction. Fernandez (2016: 41, emphasis mine) explains typification thus: Whenever we experience something as something – which is to say, whenever we experience any meaningful entity at all – we necessarily experience it as belonging to a type, kind, or category. [Typification] gives order to an otherwise chaotic field of awareness, allowing us to discriminate and make sense of the myriad people, objects, events, and situations that we encounter in everyday life.

Typification thus involves tacit or common-sense knowledge shared in everyday communication. Although there is some degree of recognition in phenomenology of social influences on individual consciousness, the social never stretches very far beyond the individual. Structural and cultural constraints and enablements are not of much interest to phenomenologists, who see them largely as mere products of academic discourse. Objective reality is thus “bracketed,” requiring individuals to suspend all considerations of the natural world in order to fully concentrate on their experiences. While Husserl’s phenomenology offers a philosophical viewpoint, the study of individual consciousness is conducted through ethnomethodology, which borrows principles directly from symbolic interactionism to elucidate how people construct common-sense notions through everyday interaction. This interaction, in turn, is seen as including not only the use of language but also and rather importantly, non-verbal means of communication. Ethnomethodologists, however, see meaning as an even more fragile, fluid and constantly negotiated phenomenon than symbolic

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interactionists, requiring ongoing fine-tuning and adjustments by interactants. Layder (2006: 101) explains that, from an ethnomethodologist viewpoint, “the orderliness of interaction has to be understood as an ongoing ‘accomplishment’ created by people from within situations. Much importance is therefore attached to the accounts that people give of their behaviour, that is, how they describe and explain what they are, or were, doing in particular situations.” Together, phenomenology and ethnomethodology help researchers unpack the complex internal lives of human agents, thus offering a marked humanist perspective into the social sciences. Layder (2006: 97) argues, however, that this concentration on the individual’s experience is at the expense of an awareness of the influences of wider and more impersonal structural factors. […] in phenomenological sociology there is very little analysis, if any, of social forms like organisations, political and economic institutions and their structures of power and so on, which are partly (though not wholly) independent of the activities of particular individuals and groups.

With phenomenology/ethnomethodology, the rich internal lives of individuals matter most, but they are lives conceptualized as unfolding independently from an objective reality. Knowledge and symbolic communication instead are seen as constituting the very fabric of society, further reinforcing an aggregative understanding of society as a mere collection of individual realities. This unfortunately produces an ontologically flattened view of individual human experience, for as Archer and Tritter (2000: 8) point out, “one good reason why we cannot reduce collective entities away is precisely because people think and act in terms of them.” Harré (2001: 28) elaborates on this point to argue that it is precisely because we are human beings that we are concerned to get rid of structures such as Nazism, bureaucracy and the capitalism which is threatening the very life of the planet. It is because we want to redeem the situation that we have to take seriously the ontological question of whether structures, either unconscious or social, are real.

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Ethnomethodology’s ontologically flattened viewpoint, according to Layder (2006: 103), leads to a fundamental contradiction: ethnomethodology has two rather contradictory views on structural phenomena. The first underlines (and probably overstates) the importance of human knowledgeability. This suggests that, unless people are aware or somehow conscious of structural factors like power or class, such factors have no place in social analysis. Researchers and theorists who use structural concepts are operating with creations of their own imagination. They are not real empirical phenomena. The second view somewhat contradicts this by saying that anyway, even if lay people (as opposed to sociologists) believe structural factors like class and power to be real, this does not mean that they are real. The first view takes the lay perspective to be the most authoritative while the second denies this.

In short, when phenomenologists refer to social structures they tend to present them as empirical phenomena, as they appear to human agents. Although this “view from the bottom” is justified by phenomenologists as a way to overcome the said structure–agency “dichotomy,” one has to seriously question this claim, given that only one side of the equation is favoured over the other. In the ongoing perceived tension between structure and agency, the latter clinches an almost total victory. As Layder (2006: 108) points out with regards to phenomenology, To reduce power, institutions, organisations and the distribution of various resources to local practices is to confuse and conflate very different kinds of social phenomena. It leads to a one-dimensional vision of society and a form of social analysis that lacks penetration, explanatory power and empirical scope. Such a position does not transcend the macro–micro debate.

Instead, to an even more radical extent, phenomenology and ethnomethodology limit our ability as researchers to develop a fuller understanding of the interaction between distinct and emergent parts of society as well as the local, institutional and global causal mechanisms at play.

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In AL scholarship, ethnomethodologists essentially see the systemic and formal aspects of language as unimportant; what matters is the study of localized social interaction. Zlatev (2010) posits phenomenology as a potentially new philosophy for cognitive linguistics grounded in experience, with a particular emphasis on the role played by the living body. More concerned with sociolinguistic microanalysis which, according to Erikson (2001: 177): “can show us how the more and less solidary kinds of relations among interlocutors come to happen interactionally,” ethnomethodologists prefer methodological perspectives including narrative inquiry, autoethnography and conversation analysis, three perspectives often used in teacher education and training. Defining this approach to AL research is Barkhuizen (2008), who suggests a threedimensional narrative space including the participants in the story, the time when the story takes place and the physical context where the story takes place. Johnson and Golombek (2002: 3) describe this type of inquiry as “an epistemology of practice that characterizes teachers as legitimate knowers, as producers of legitimate knowledge, and as capable of constructing and sustaining their own professional development over time.” With autoethnography, we see researchers engaged in deeply reflexive narratives unpacking not their experiences per se but rather their own understandings of these experiences. Together, conversation analysis, narrative inquiry and autoethnography are highly reflexive approaches to social research, focused on the process of meaning-making, whereby participants deploy personal practical knowledge of their experiences to articulate and interpret stories of practice, with the aim of guiding future behaviour. Given these important features, ethnomethodology is often presented as an inherently transformational approach. However, these claims are somewhat presumptuous. For one, while people’s perceptions of structural and cultural forces are crucial to our understanding of precisely how the latter constrain and/or enable agentive movements, subjective knowledge does not actually explain these forces. As Erikson (2001: 177) states, we still do not have a good way of accounting for why […] interlocutors are sometimes more and less cordial, more and less charitable in their ‘readings’ of one another – within occasions of interaction and from

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one occasion to the next and when the interlocutors come from similar demographic backgrounds or different ones. The variability in how local interlocutors treat one another is empirically apparent but not yet well explained theoretically.

For example, I might understand the Stock Exchange as a specific social phenomenon with particular effects in the world, but my understanding of it bears no relevance at all to what the Stock Exchange actually does or does not do or how and why it affects my life, nor does my understanding of it radically affects the influences of broader economic forces on my situated existence. In other words, while it is entirely possible for the Stock Exchange to impact my ability to earn a living directly, my experience and understanding of it can only influence it to an extremely minimal extent. I can learn to make different choices, of course, but ethnomethodology cannot help me understand why my choices are profoundly structured. In other words, while our lives are profoundly influenced by broader social processes, our understandings and experiences of these do not constitute evidence (or accurate reflections) of the latter, nor are they of much consequence to these. Despite its emphasis on human agency, ethnomethodology offers a considerably flattened ontology, which means that it can only offer a very narrow perspective into both local and broader social realities. In addition, narratives of personal experiences can be formulated differently at different times, with different emphases and effects. Within the context of language teacher identity, Norton and Early (2011: 421) are clear in that narratives “do not necessarily create a coherent sense of self, but highlight diverse identity positions in everyday interactive practices, and are highly significant for identity work.” What needs to be added here is that what people say and do are not necessarily homologous phenomena. This is not to dismiss people as disingenuous or merely “liberal with the truth”; rather, it is a postmodernist stance which acknowledges human agency’s limitations, either in terms of their computational capacity, sense-making capacity, time and interest (Gigerenzer, 2002; Simon, 1972), or in their ability to formulate a vision of the world with much ontological depth. Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008: 236) similarly question the modernist assumption that

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agency “is always rational, that decisions are always based on accurate information, that human behaviour is immune to cultural and individual differences, and that it does not change.” Although phenomenology rejects any claims of social phenomena being fixed, in placing agentive rationality at the centre of social inquiry it paradoxically reaffirms a positivist/modernist view of human agency. These considerable problems and limitations remind us of the importance for AL scholars not to reduce social realities to mere identity work. Contra Maulucci et al. (2015), it is also crucial to underline the limitations of narrative inquiry in revealing the complex dialectical relationship between agency and structure. Sealey and Carter (2004: 43) identify both a radical empiricist angle and a radical moral neutrality in ethnomethodology and conversation analysis thus: “by forcing attention on to the practices of meaning production, rather than the meanings themselves […] these approaches avoid the problem of truth.” Consequently, it is misguided for AL researchers adopting narrative inquiry, autoethnography and conversation analysis to claim that these approaches allow for the exploration of the socio-historically situated experiences of individuals or small groups (e.g., Drew, 2005) since, again, these approaches cannot provide conceptually robust accounts of mechanisms including socio-historical forces. This means that they cannot explain why things at both local and societal levels are the way they are and not otherwise.

Postmodernism/Poststructuralism Although I have already discussed postmodernist and poststructuralist AL earlier in the book, considering (a) its broad popularity in AL, (b) postmodernist/poststructuralist AL scholars’ often inconsistent uses of postmodernist/poststructuralist principles and (c) fundamental theoretical and methodological difficulties these two perspectives impose, it is worth revisiting this particular (and surprisingly dominant) strand of social theory here, in part to understand its contribution to the structure–agency debate, but also identify a broad range of problems largely left unaddressed within AL scholarship.

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While structuralism and historical materialism emphasize structural constraints, and symbolic interactionism and phenomenology emphasize the creative sense-making potential of human beings, both strands do recognize to some extent agency and structure as ontologically different phenomena (e.g., human agents are seen as conscious, and so they must be ontologically different from structure). However, postmodernism (more closely associated with art and literature critique) and poststructuralism as its recent offshoot (more closely associated with philosophy and social research) reject agency/structure discussions as products of foundationalism, dismissing these as “grand narratives” or metanarratives. The denial of ontological properties of structure and agency is thus radically more pronounced. Sayer (2000: 72) explains the postmodernist aversion to grand narratives by stating that they are perceived as “distinctive of modernism and ‘the Enlightenment project’, in which the construction of a grand, overarching system would allow humankind to rid itself of illusion and domination, and control its destiny and progress.” According to postmodernists, research itself is a form of discourse, which means that it is never neutral. Because grand narratives are said to impose a particular order onto the world by identifying a “center” (or a main engine) of social life, they are understood as privileging the voices of their authors (Slater, 1992). By advocating the notion of a decentered human subject, postmodernists/poststructuralists present scientific knowledge as deeply discursive and power-laden, and therefore as necessitating critical discursive deconstruction. Alternatively, they present social phenomena as embedded in relationship webs, not navigating around any particular centre such as the individual human being or institutions, but rather localized and dispersed throughout society. This view is closely linked to Foucault’s (1979, 1980) notion of power as capillary, which occupies a prominent place in postmodernist/poststructuralist ontology. Postmodernism emerged in large part out of what is commonly called the “linguistic turn” in philosophy and the social sciences, and out of recognition that both society and people are not fixed or patterned but rather characterized by constant change, fluidity and a decentered heterogeneity. Instead of looking at people as autonomous rational beings, postmodernists/poststructuralists concentrate on the discourse of rationality. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 45) explain, “this fragmentary self

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spells […] the end of any unitary or mechanical relation between human subjects and the class or power positions they occupy – this is the ‘post’ element of poststructuralism.” Postmodernism presents the human subject as a social construction “produced through social discourses (language, thought, symbolic representations) which position subjects in a field of power relations and within particular sets of practices” (Layder, 2006: 117). Also within poststructuralism, ideology is no longer the ubiquitous false-consciousness imposed by the powerful (constituting one of the main divergences between the philosophies of Althusser and Foucault), but rather part of a vast network of intersecting discourses and practices, themselves outcomes of everyday competition and unequal power exchanges. Within postmodernism, instead of trying to explain human sense-making processes and motivations, researchers concentrate on discourse because they see it as revealing, more importantly to their eyes, the effects of power on how people construct identities and engage in particular social practices. Again, discourses are the main social movers, not people. Of particular relevance to postmodernist inquiry are localized manifestations of discourse, because social life is itself reduced to a discursive practice. Embedded in discursive contexts which stipulate specific sets of practices, people are “subjectified” by discourses throughout socialization (Sealey & Carter, 2004). With poststructuralism, Clegg (2006: 314) rightfully argues that “both ontology and epistemology are reduced to effects of power. The result is perspectivism.” With discourse now occupying centre stage, discourse and practice are fused together, becoming a single analytical unit, and sociological inquiry then becomes invested in studying the effects of discourse rather than its content. This radical shift introduces numerous conceptual and methodological problems. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 48, emphasis mine) ask, how do we establish empirically what the effects of a discourse are? How do we distinguish these from the effects of other discourses? [This] makes difficult analysis of their specific properties and the ways in which these may influence practices, and at the same time needing to render them distinct in order to account for people’s decisions to construct certain forms of identity or to utilize certain types of narratives. The status of

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discourse is indeterminate: it is both a constitutive practice and yet it circulates as a resource.

The reduction of social reality to discourse, or discursive effects to be more precise, is considerably problematic and limiting. For one, if society and the people and phenomena within it are discursive constructions, then why is it extremely difficult for people to construct a better, nicer, more equitable, more sustainable society simply by modifying their approach to discourse? If people are oppressed, and if oppression is a social construction, surely by “changing the conversation” will people overcome oppression, but why isn’t it the case? If sexism, racism, homophobia, ageism, ableism, etc. are mere discourses, how can we account for their antecedent, systemic and enduring properties, including their marked influence on material, objective realities, including the bodies of flesh-and-blood human beings? Answering these questions would require, as a starting point, acknowledgement of the following realist concepts: (1) society is structured , partly as an emergent outcome of human interaction, itself being in relation to an objective, material reality; which means that (2) social structures and people are ontologically different; which means that (3) social structures possess antecedent and enduring properties and powers not possessed by people, properties and powers beyond situated interaction; which also means that (4) people, including their discursive activities, are also structured. As Elder-Vass (2012: 138) cogently points out, there are important links between natural and social (including discursive) realities which are left unaccounted for in postmodernism: It is not language alone that produces our sense of the kinds of things the world contains. On the contrary, the world itself influences that sense, and it can do so because there are natural kinds. While there are various types of natural kinds, all of them depend in some way on the microstructural features – which we may call essences – that are common to members of the kind, and the similar causal properties that arise from these micro-structural features. Our categories – linguistic signs – arise from social processes that are sensitive to our shared empirical experiences of these properties. As a result they can sometimes reflect these natural

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kinds and thereby refer to features of the world that exist independently of our categorisation of them.

In addition to exaggerating the importance of discourse to social life, poststructuralism offers a much-weakened view of human agency, since through the effects of discourse agency becomes essentially determined by (unequal) discursive exchanges of power. Although statistically speaking Norton and De Costa (2018) are justified in claiming that the poststructuralist view of identity has become the approach of choice for researchers looking at identity and L2 learning, the problem is that identity-based AL research requires a strong version of agency, something which poststructuralism simply does not provide. As Pennycook (2019: 34) points out, poststructuralism “has been critiqued precisely for its lack of attention to agency (from a poststructuralist point of view, the subject is a product of rather than a producer of discourse).” It is therefore paradoxical for postmodernists AL scholars to argue that agency is an essential feature of language learners, and that poststructuralism allows for a privileged view of it. In my view, the most significant contribution of postmodernism to social theory is the Foucauldian notion of power as permeating society from within it (Foucault, 1979, 1980). Accordingly, people are not “structured” by some kind of omnipresent and overseeing social force, but rather conditioned into behaving in certain ways and not others because of the gaze of others (Foucault, 1994). To say that power is capillary is to say that it comes from multiple sources, operating between people in local settings, within specific contexts and for specific purposes. This view of power, it must be underlined, has considerably (and in my view, rather productively) influenced the development of recent critical social research by radically recalibrating research strategies, including how to identify the main agent(s) involved, the data to be analyzed and how to analyze it, and how to develop emancipatory programmes. In short, by bringing power from the top down to the level of people, postmodernism has drastically influenced how social problems are explained, and how transformative strategies are developed and presented. Martin Rojo (2017: 77) raises important methodological issues arising from the

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adoption of a Foucauldian view on power, two of which bear relevance to the current argument: First, if […] power is not concentrated in a single place, such as the state apparatus, but is, instead, ubiquitous and at once visible and invisible, present and hidden, research cannot focus merely on state policies, institutional regimes, and the discourses of the elites, but should rather focus on a multiplicity of nodal points and/or relations in which power is exercised. Second, if power is not a thing or substance but rather a network of relations […] and if no one, strictly speaking, has an official right to power and, as a result, power is not always exercised in a single direction, with some people on one side and some on the other, it will be difficult to ascertain who holds power in a precise sense.

However, in prioritizing this capillary view of power, postmodernism does overlook the realities of state power, political oppression, legal systems, armies and police forces, ministries of education, etc., as other consequential causal forces in society. Concentrating exclusively on power coming from everywhere and unfolding between people through discourse introduces, in my view, an unproductive form of relativism which does not allow researchers to distinguish between different sources of oppression. It also limits researchers’ ability to conceptualize oppression in terms of systems, which is of central importance to critical social research, as third-wave feminists have convincingly argued with regards to intersectionality (e.g., Clegg, 2006; Crenshaw, 1991; Francis, 1999; McNay, 2000; Walby, 2007). As Norton and De Costa (2018: 94) point out, “intersectionality is important because social categories are often overlapping and interdependent.” At the same time, and this must be underlined, a poststructuralist take on intersectionality is considerably limiting because, by defining oppression as a mere discourse, we lose sight of its systemic properties. Within poststructuralism, the capillary view of power—which has important conceptual benefits, let’s not forget—unfortunately tends to be interpreted by scholars to mean that discourse is power, and that it constructs not only knowledge but also the knower (Erikson, 2001). This problem is noted by the feminist scholar Clegg (2006: 322), who stresses that

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at the concrete level, if the and/and logic of poststructuralism is to be read as anything more than a playful aside designed to tease the ‘other’ who cannot think outside outmoded binaries, then the question of how we might theorize agency as other than (just) a fiction becomes important. The recalcitrance of the question is not just theoretical.

McNay (2000) similarly warns against what she calls the negative formulation of the subject in poststructuralist feminism. Clegg (2006: 309–310) explains that “agency, both individual and collective, is at the heart of the feminist, and indeed, all radical political projects. […] poststructuralism as an ontology and epistemology is incapable of providing the tools for the theorization of personal and collective agency, and selfhood.” In defense, however, poststructuralists including Davies (1997) argue that in critical, emancipatory projects the discursive construction of the self is central, the core premise being that people can emancipate themselves if they are discursively reconstructed as powerful. This response, however, is unsatisfactory because it leaves three important questions unanswered: 1. Who actually does the deconstructing and reconstructing of discourses and subjectivities, what resources are drawn from in this process, and where do these come from? 2. Are power inequalities only discursive, or do they also include nondiscursive, material elements? 3. Does discourse, as a cultural and ideational social phenomenon, actually possess causal powers to reshape social and individual realities so profoundly? In other words, there seems to be a general misunderstanding among postmodernists of (a) the properties and powers of discourse, (b) the decentered self and (c) capillary power. In response, critical postmodernists merely move back to a symbolic interactionist standpoint to reiterate that discourse is constitutive of social phenomena. Once this basis is accepted, clarifying whether localized shifts in discourse practices actually lead to broader social emancipation matters less than the intellectual project of analyzing everyday

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discourses and practices, specifically how discourse is said to allow for alternative identity positions. While power relationships and acts of resistance retain some analytical salience, the point in poststructuralist critique is to reveal exactly how these are fragmented and negotiated through discourse. This does not make much sense, for once we reach the Foucauldian idea that knowledge itself is a product of power relationships—a Nietzschean concept at its origin (Clegg, 2006)—the human subject then becomes a product of social processes rather than the producer of social realities, which again considerably undermines the agent’s potential to achieve emancipation. Clearly, systems of oppression in society—and one’s experiences of them—cannot be reversed simply by “changing the conversation.” Rich people are, after all, not simply “better talkers” or more aware of the discursive forces at play in society than poor people, and persistent social problems such as domestic violence and the oppression of minorities around the world are not resolved simply by changing the way we talk about them. Although there is no doubt that phenomena such as identities, oppression and parochialism are, to a large extent, social constructions, they have real—i.e., objective—effects on real people in real contexts. Once we recognize this, we must then move beyond the confines of discourse and ask different sets of theoretical and methodological questions than those proposed by poststructuralism. In this sense, I entirely agree with Clegg’s (2006: 314) nuanced recalibration of critical social research: I am not seeking to deny or undermine the power of deconstruction as a productive methodology, indeed not everyone who employs these devises is a poststructuralist, but what I do want to claim is that at the meta-theoretical level poststructuralism’s ontological claims make theorizing agency problematic. […] The problem of poststructuralism lies not in the uses to which it has been put in much of the work on gender and education, but rather with the historical project of poststructuralist thought as such, whose dynamic runs counter to the very idea of agency (despite hints of a counter direction in the late Foucault).

In their critical endeavours, poststructuralist researchers are indeed faced with the problem of “squeezing in” agency within a profoundly

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anti-humanist ontology. Clegg (2006: 315) explains this problem with reference to Foucault’s later works thus: “in attempting to theorize the grounds of resistance, he too was beginning to wrestle with how to reinstate a version of agency through the notion that power acts on some form of pre-given subject.” In other words, the notion Foucault struggled with in his later works is precisely the ontologically stratified or layered nature of social phenomena. If people aim to extricate themselves out of oppressive situations, they cannot remain “decentered”: they need to act upon some knowledge of how the world is and how it should be (a characteristically modernist concept). In order to do so, they must first have a view of the social realm as ontologically stratified, then reflect on how to deal with a broad range of structural and cultural constraints and enablements. As Clegg (2006: 317–318) notes, while poststructuralist analysis can show the subtle and multifaceted changes taking place in the discursively constituted possibilities for newer subjectivities, it cannot disentangle the conditions of possibility for these new discursive frameworks and the need for carefully derived, historically specific, forms of generalization. […] what is missing is a convincing account of how to theorize the relationship between the discursive and the structural.

Given these fundamental conceptual problems, it is rather confusing to see postmodernist/poststructuralist sociolinguists and AL scholars such as García et al. (2017), Kramsch (1998, 2015), Kubota (1999), Kumaravadivelu (1999), Martin Rojo (2017), (the earlier) Pennycook (2001) and Shohamy (2006)—to name only a few prominent voices in our field—more or less claiming that poststructuralism is de rigueur in critical AL scholarship. Particularly confusing is their shared argument that, unlike structuralism, poststructuralism somehow helps people in periphery communities to assert their latent agency (Kumaravadivelu, 2006). Within the context of feminist scholarship, Clegg (2006: 313–314) explains why this appropriation is unjustified: While feminist poststructuralists in their work in education have very persuasively demonstrated aspects of unfixity, and the fragmented, the theoretical resource to explore a non-unified, but nonetheless powerful

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sense of self, and the powers that might flow from that self cannot be found in poststructuralism. At the level of ontology this is because, despite the seeming openness of the and/and formulation, rather than either/or, there remains an ontological claim for the primacy of the discursive, and the non-knowability of a prediscursive self.

More importantly, and as Block (2015) cogently argues, poststructuralist AL research reduces social reality—including the reality of social oppression—to discursive practices by considering only “the most immediate interaction of individuals and their interpretations and constructions of events and activities in their lives” (p. 27). This is a considerable conceptual problem because structure can only be understood as an objectification unfolding either in the minds of social agents and/or through situated interaction (Bouchard, 2017). Poststructuralist AL research also overemphasizes the indexical properties of language use (i.e., the social meanings or implications related to the particular uses of a language) while mostly sidestepping the referential properties of language use (i.e., the fact that language also refers to an objective, material reality beyond discourse). Perhaps most alarming, the conceptual problems mentioned above with regards to discourse reveal one of the central contradictions in postmodernism: since AL researchers need to use language to make knowledge claims about language and its real-world uses, and since language cannot escape power issues, on what grounds can postmodernists or poststructuralists formulate any claims about language, discourse, and the world we live in? As Sayer (2000: 74) points out, “if all knowledge is fallible, then the critique of foundationalism is as relevant to local knowledges as it is to grand narratives. Neither epistemology nor antiepistemology can help us evaluate the relative qualities of grand theory and local knowledges. It is an a posteriori matter.” The author adds that this type of relativism leaves postmodernists unable to distinguish between emancipatory and racist or fascist discourses on moral terms. Furthermore, the poststructuralist overemphasis on situated language use as complex, dynamic, unpredictable, personal and creative, and the associated rejection of language policies as contrary to (said) “real” language in the “real” world (see Pennycook, 2013; Shohamy, 2006) reveal another

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glaring contradiction: poststructuralist AL scholars are able to develop and publish their ontological claims and worldviews largely because their work is deemed by an audience of peers as “academically valid”. This accomplishment not only requires understanding and mastery of standardized academic discourse (a phenomenon which exists in large part in books and journals, thus beyond localized discursive practices), poststructuralist academics must must also share a common commitment to objective knowledge and consider the correspondence theory of truth as a pivotal factor in the public acceptance of their work. As a power-laden discourse on the one hand, and as a discourse made up of ontological claims about the nature of the social world on the other, postmodernism thus leaves researchers with insurmountable theoretical and methodological contradictions. There is also a marked relationist tendency in poststructuralism, a conceptual problem discussed in the previous chapter with regards to posthumanism, and in Chapter 6 with regards to some aspects of CDST. Contrasted against structuralism, historical materialism, symbolic interactionism and even phenomenology, poststructuralism is even more radical in its relationist outlook. In their attempt to break free of the (said and much reviled) structure–agency “dualism,” poststructuralist thinkers have prioritized the relations between things to the point where phenomena can no longer be understood outside their relations with other phenomena. If we look at people from a relationist perspective, for example, we would be compelled to overlook their distinct physical attributes (e.g., body, brain, etc.), or their distinct worldviews and aspirations, and instead claim that people only have sociological “meaning” when in relation with other people. This drastically limits researchers’ ability to account for the rich inner and reflexively endowed lives of flesh-and-blood people. In light of the numerous conceptual problems it poses, poststructuralism has understandably received a great deal of criticism in the social sciences, well before its introduction within AL scholarship. Recent examples of poststructuralist critical AL research are provided by García et al. (2017) and by Martin Rojo (2017). Building on Foucault’s view of power as capillary, the authors describe three technologies of power: normalization, governmentality and subjectivation (García

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et al., 2017; Martin Rojo, 2017). Instead of being merely an oppressive force (as it tends to be viewed within the Althusserian tradition), power becomes a productive mechanism whereby subject positions are generated and performed in everyday interaction, allowing interactants to understand themselves, their relationships and meanings in a broader sense. However, the authors cannot escape consideration for power also as a top-down phenomenon, arguing that a “critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics studies language practices in interrelationship to the socio-historical, political, and economic conditions that produce them” (García et al., 2017: 5). As I demonstrated in the previous chapter, AL researchers including Heller (2001) and Kramsch (2012), who adopt poststructuralism, are also compelled to make extensive references to structural processes and phenomena beyond localized discursive constructions of self, thus undermining the theoretical basis for their work. The view of language as a system of rules and norms is also strongly rejected by poststructuralist AL scholars, leading some to even question the ontological status of language altogether. García et al., (2017: 5) explain that, within poststructuralist sociolinguistics, the focus is on “how and why speakers perform language practices in a framework of complexity and unpredictability […] languages are […] linguistic human work, the consequence of deliberate human intervention and the manipulation of social contexts.” This view is aligned with that of Shohamy (2006), another poststructuralist sociolinguist who defines language as “a living organism, which is personal, dynamic, open, energetic and creative, spreading beyond fixed boundaries towards freedom of expression” (p. 1). Of central importance here is the concept of translanguaging, explained by García et al., (2017: 8) as “part of a larger movement within critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics to challenge bounded notions of language.” Translanguaging begins with a distinction between place (a material, physical condition) and space (highlighting the centrality of practice and the complex production and consumption of social meaning not through language in a strict sense but rather through discourse). Accordingly, languages are not anchored in specific geographical localities but rather used and shared across physical locations. Online communication offers a very good example of this. Furthermore, associated with the

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concept of translanguaging is the idea that communicators do not simply reproduce a unitary, fixed and entirely rule-governed language but rather use a broad range of linguistic and semiotic means at their disposal. Arguably, these principles have much value to a CDST-informed realist approach to AL research, although preference for the term space in poststructuralist sociolinguistics reveals its rather exclusive emphasis on language use, or the diachronic features of language. This view of language, however, not only reveals traces of a functionalist, or teleological, viewpoint, it also comes at the detriment of the distinct, antecedent and emergent properties of language as a cultural resource, as well as the material, objective features associated with language and its realworld uses (e.g., objects of communication such as signs and printed materials, the biological preconditions for human speech, etc.). Indeed, AL scholars including Shohamy (2006) and Pennycook (2013, 2019) at certain points in their argumentations go as far as to advocate a denial of the very existence of languages such as English or Japanese and their relation to geographical locations. While it is entirely appropriate to claim that English is not a fixed entity found within fixed geographical boundaries, it is also important to recognize that the locality of specific languages and language practices also matters a great deal to sociolinguistic analysis. After all, specific languages also tend to be used in some corners of the world and not others. Pushing this argument further, we can also suggest that academic discourse, although not necessarily contained within a specific location, nevertheless can be strongly associated with universities, which are also physical/material realities possessing non-discursive properties. In short, when emphasizing the fluidity and complexity involved in language(s) and related behaviours—i.e., their transitive dimension—it is also important not to dismiss their intransitive elements in the process. Although it is perfectly reasonable to observe that languages are dynamic, open living organisms in a metaphorical sense, it is crucial to recognize that it is people who are creative, not languages or discourses. This realization inevitably introduces a radically different view of human agency than the decentered postmodernist subject. Moreover, while Shohamy (2006) is entirely justified in presenting languages as personal, languages are also deeply social. This point is made clearly by Sealey

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and Carter (2014: 273) thus: “one of the properties of languages is that they enable mutual intelligibility among their speakers, which means that innovation is always constrained by the need to be understood.” And to be understood, antecedent cultural points of reference and shared worldviews (which also possess antecedent properties) are necessary. The potential for poststructuralist sociolinguistics to deconstruct discourse to reveal embedded forms of oppression should certainly not be dismissed, for this potential is essential to a critical sociolinguistics. García et al., (2017: 6) explain that “the language ideological perspective adopted by critical poststructuralists disrupts foundational notions of classical sociolinguistics, including disglossia, the native speaker, language policy and planning (including concepts such as language maintenance, language revitalization, language endangerment, language education policy), and multilingualism.” This is not a trivial contribution to AL scholarship and critical social research. As discussed in the next chapter, realism integrates to some extent the postmodernist notion of social reality as constructed, and sees discourse as important to this process. As such, both poststructuralism and realism are both antifoundationalist: they both reject claims of absolute truth. However, and as Sayer (2000: 69) explains in his critique of postmodernism, “the rejection of notions of absolute truth need not stop us differentiating between statements such as: ‘No one died in the Gulf War’ and ‘Thousands died in the Gulf War’. Nor need we reduce the warrant for such statements to pure agreement or power.” Layder (1981: 1) makes a related point about the relationship between structure and agency thus: The fact that human beings possess certain creative capacities, interactive skills and intentions which in some sense enables them to apprehend, come to terms with, and sometimes even ‘fashion’, the social realities in which they are routinely engaged is by no means compromised by the parallel idea that interaction is also governed by external constraining structures.

In short, objective reality and our commitment to understanding it still matters. Social research is not a simple power game whereby only some narratives gain the upper hand in some contexts at the detriment

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of others. Science remains our best attempt at understanding a world which, it must be reiterated, exists partly independently of our understanding of it. Furthermore, although postmodernism provides valuable insight into discourse as mechanism of empowerment/disempowerment, Sayer (2000: 71) also reminds us that discourse and reality are indeed different things: “names and concepts are important, but not as important as the things (including people and practices) to which they refer. Which should we fear more: war or the concept of war? What is needed after the ‘linguistic turn’ is a further ‘practical turn’.” As we will see later in this chapter, Bourdieu (who, it must be noted, has been erroneously identified as a poststructuralist thinker by some scholars in our field) devoted much of his work to the formulation of a theory of practice which includes, to some extent, an ontologically layered view of social reality.

Social Constructionism Social constructionism is also rooted in a rejection of the modernist project, and as with poststructuralism it questions the socio-political and historical origins of social phenomena. In doing so, however, this paradigm is (slightly) less concerned with discourse than with beliefs, values and people’s understandings of social reality, how they experience it, and how they negotiate meaning through discourse and social interaction. However, while symbolic interactionism is micro-oriented, social constructionism looks at how beliefs and meanings are developed at the group level. Accordingly, humans actively create, invent and (re)shape society, making social phenomena the products of interpretive and productive discourses and actions in part by individuals, but more importantly by groups. Social constructionism also highlights the multiple roles played by language and discourse in conditioning beliefs, which then constitute important elements in the formation of norms, institutions and structures (Elder-Vass, 2010). It encourages the exploration of how people invest behaviours, objects and processes with specific meanings through discourse, and how this in turn leads to the emergence of other behaviours, objects and processes. In short,

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human beings are seen within social constructionism as possessing causal primacy in shaping social reality, largely through their capacity to use language, while structures are conceptualized as products of people’s thoughts, habits, behaviours and discourses. Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) volume The Social Construction of Reality is perhaps the most widely quoted social constructionist reference in the social sciences. In this seminal volume, the authors expanded on the work of Durkheim and Mead, although they rejected their structure–agency “dualism” by arguing that, while society is a human product, humans are a social product. In other words, what matters is how the two are related, not how they differ. As with postmodernists and poststructuralists, the structure–agency debate is seen by social constructionists as an artificial sociological issue largely dependent on the (said) inadequate language of sociologists. Layder (2006: 141) explains that, within social constructionism, false distinctions between individuals and society, subject and object, inner and outer and so on, are abandoned in favour of the idea of interdependent chains or social networks between acting human beings. […] There is no separate (or pre-social) individual: people are always intimately interwoven with others through the interdependency chains that form the fabric of society.

As such, there is a marked relationist tendency within social constructionism. One of the conceptual implications is that, while agency gains the upper hand over structure in social constructionism, the agent remains very much a recipient or experiencer of socialization. The problem with identifying socialization as the main force behind human agency, as Hamlin (2002) argues, is that it still does not explain the sense-making process necessary for agents to believe or act in certain ways and not others, a crucial element if we want to understand why people either follow social rules/norms or “do otherwise.” As the author explains, social norms and beliefs have different values for different people, since “the force of conviction comes not from socialisation, but from the actor’s faith that the beliefs and actions are founded on reasons which can be argued for” (p. 61). Instead, social constructionism gives

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us homo sociologicus: it depersonalizes the agent by defining him/her as inevitably subjected to the forces imposed by social roles. As Archer’s (2004: 4) critique explains, the human agent is socially derivative, as social constructionism presents all our human properties and powers, beyond our biological constitution, as the gift of society. From this viewpoint, there is only one flat, unstratified, powerful particular, the human person, who is a site, or a literal point of view. Beyond that, our selfhood is a grammatical fiction, a product of learning to master the first-person pronoun system, and thus quite simply a theory of the self which is appropriated from society. This view elides the concept of self with the sense of self: we are nothing beyond what society makes us, and it makes us what we are through our joining society’s conversation.

Lack of concern for the structure–agency relationship in social constructionism is problematic because the question of how society and the self are intertwined is left relatively untouched (Layder, 2006). This marked relational viewpoint is also inadequate in dealing with, for example, the facts that people are also biological entities, and that they also inhabit a private realm by engaging actively in ongoing internal conversations through which they make sense of the world and their place in it, capacities which are not possessed by social roles, institutions or society. Contra relationism, explaining social phenomena (including human agents) in terms of their relationship with other phenomena requires appreciation for their distinct and emergent properties and powers, and for the different kinds of relationships they are engaged in. For example, when language learners and teachers are engaged in a specific classroom task, they are actually engaged in two different kinds of relationships. First, they are committed to face-to-face communication, building and negotiating meaning together in an organic fashion. They are also sharing a necessary and impersonal social relationship between themselves as human agents and the school, the Ministry of Education and various educational, political and economic institutions, which together provide the structurally (and culturally) conditioned context for classroom-based language education. These broader and more abstract

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institutional realities influence people on the ground in important ways, namely by providing constraining and enabling resources. At the same time, both these relationships and the participants in these relationships are different. As argued in the next chapter on realism, this appreciation is indeed central to explanations of causality in society, for if we fail to conceptualize things first and foremost as ontologically different, and fail to consider the type of relationship involved, we will have considerable difficulties explaining how they can affect each other causally. Layder (2006: 145) provides another example: It is perfectly feasible to talk of the relatively independent properties of individuals as long as they are understood to have an organic connection with social processes. […] For example, a concentration on the socially constructed nature of sexuality or self-identity, as they can be traced over long periods of development, must be distinguished from a specific individual’s identity and sexual development.

In short, by arguing that society is a human construction, and that humans are socially constructed, social constructionism offers a problematic view of the social world because it conceptualizes both humans and society as possessing roughly the same properties and powers, thus fusing structure and agency into one large social reality. The effect is a blurring of the causal links between constituting parts and wholes. As Layder (2006: 151) explains, adopting this viewpoint is to radically misconstrue the nature of both situated activity and institutions. […] the defining characteristics of institutions are not to be found in the connectedness of people as such. Rather, they are defined in terms of the influence of reproduced practices on the behaviour of many people, many of whom have no connections with each other and are unlikely to have face-to-face contact.

In addition to its relationist penchant, social constructionism also holds an ambivalent view of objective reality. Archer (2004) explains how social constructionists’ rejection of the objective (often material) conditions of social life—central to their emphasis on interrelatedness—can also lead to problematic conclusions:

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Unsurprisingly, our physiological embodiment does not sit well with social constructionism. Of course, social constructions may be placed upon it, but the body is stubbornly resistant to being dissolved into the discursive. It does not just lie back and allow society to trample all over it. Instead, because it has properties and powers of its own, it is active in the environment and the results of its activity challenge the passivity accorded to it in this account which holds that all we are is a gift of society. (p. 111)

Finally, radical social constructionism—e.g., von Glasersfeld (1998), who posits that, since people have no way of knowing what reality is, they can only construct their own reality—yields even fewer analytical possibilities for researchers. Its markedly relativistic approach to social research has inspired some of its adherents to claim that rational evaluations of and comparisons between diverging theories and concepts are impossible because of their constructed nature. This position would hold, for example, that the current chapter on the history of the structure–agency debate is but a pointless endeavour. More alarmingly, this marked relativism would also fail to identify racist/sexist/homophobic viewpoints as inadequate perspectives because they are morally inferior to social emancipation, for example. In other words, social constructionism does not recognize that theories can indeed be deemed as weak or inferior to others precisely because their principles and concepts consistently clash against objective reality (which again exists independently of our understanding of it). Despite its considerable conceptual limitations, however, certain aspects of (weaker) social constructionism are compatible with a realist viewpoint. The social constructionist approach to language, discourse, culture and knowledge, for example, is useful to realism’s stratified ontology in that it elucidates the role of language and discourse in the formation of dispositions and beliefs, which then play an important role in the emergence of normative institutional structures (Elder-Vass, 2010). In AL scholarship, social constructionism occupies a rather comfortable place, given the field’s central concern with language and

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discourse. Heller et al. (2018), for example, adopt social constructionism/constructivism in relation to what they call critical sociolinguistics. They justify their characterization of research in sociolinguistics as “experience” with the argument made earlier that a constructivist viewpoint “posits that knowledge is a human creation and that it takes place in social contexts where persons interact with each other to achieve specific ends” (p. 7). Later on, they present ethnography as the adequate methodological partner of social constructionist sociolinguistics thus: Knowledge is a social, historical and political animal – one raised, tamed and produced by us. […] we see doing research as a fundamentally social experience, in which everything we do is for interlocutors. […] we see social life as produced by people as they engage with each other. This view lies in opposition to some social scientists who consider that social meanings, behaviour or social phenomena are the expression of underlying structures, laws, norms or symbolic systems that operate at an abstract level. To us, on the contrary, any social phenomenon is “located,” i.e., any form of organization, idea, role, norm, conflict, text must have been produced by people at some moment and at some particular place (or many have been reproduced by many people at many different moments and places). Whatever is “social,” including language, stems from social practice. (p. 8)

As this statement reveals, and as will be further explained in the next chapter, the parallels between social constructivism and realism are indeed limited, notably due to their opposed viewpoints regarding underlying mechanisms, laws, norms and systems. More importantly perhaps, they also differ in terms of their approaches to the structure– agency debate: while realism provides a stratified view which considers both the interrelationship between structure and agency (and, let’s not forget, between discourse and objective reality) as well as their distinct and emergent properties and powers, social constructionism simply flattens the social landscape into a very broad network of human relationships in which people and society possess more or less similar properties and powers. As pointed out earlier, social constructionism simply rejects the more abstract, intransitive aspects of social reality (e.g., causality, systems of oppression, ideologies, etc.), which remain core analytical

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elements in critical social research. Heller et al. (2018) reveal this particular shortcoming by arguing (rather oddly and a-critically in my view) that their critical investigation “is not the place […] to discuss in full how social science is inscribed in the political and the economic” (p. 9). Indeed, social constructionism is “not the place” for such talk precisely because, due to its flattened ontology, it remains a radically empiricist paradigm with little to say about the sources of social oppression, which are after all the objects of critical social research. This problem considerably undermines the authors’ presentation of a critical sociolinguistics informed by social constructionism because social processes (and their analysis) are reduced to mere situated conversations. The next section looks at structuration theory which, although equally resistant to analytical dualism and almost exclusively devoted to humanist principles, pays more attention to structure and agency, leading Layder (2006: 157) to define it as having “a foot in both camps of the dualism debate.”

Structuration Theory The paradigms described thus far offer varying approaches and demonstrate varying degrees of engagement with the structure–agency debate. They can generally be distinguished from each other by how they prioritize either structure or agency. In contrast, Giddens’s structuration theory (Giddens, 1979) constitutes a more comprehensive attempt at explaining how both structure and agency are active forces in the production of social life. To achieve this purpose, Giddens offers duality of structure as a notion which, according to him, is aimed at overcoming the agencystructure divisions by emphasizing the various points of convergence between both strata of the social realm. Layder (2006: 164, emphasis mine) explains that, in structuration theory, “rather than two separate and opposed phenomena, we should think of one, in this case structure, which has a dual nature. [Structure and agency] are two sides of the same coin.” Stated differently, structure and agency are two equally important aspects of the same thing, and what bind them together are social practices, or what people do every day. By combining agency and

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structure through action, Giddens places social practice as the main point of interest for social scientists. Unlike Durkheim, Weber and other early sociologists, Giddens does not adhere to the idea that sociology can directly adopt principles from the natural sciences, with its search for universal natural laws, largely because of humans’ reflexive powers and the resulting implication that, unlike that of rocks, the weather and other natural phenomena, human behaviour can never fully be predicted. One problem with this argument is that social life and its components features are not hopelessly chaotic: some degree of prediction can be expected. As Williams and Dyer (2017: 3) point out, despite what the social constructionists would say, it is possible to explain and predict the social world, partly because it is rule based and partly because agents in it act inductively on past experience, which mostly exhibits a large degree of predictability. In other words, in our everyday lives, we are aware of and (mostly) obey social rules, and those people with whom we interact also do this and exhibit relatively predictable behaviour. This permits good enough lay explanations and predictions.

At the same time, this type of predictability is not of the same kind found in the natural world. While people’s discourses and actions do follow patterns to some extent, they are not as rigid and predictable as, for example, water (almost always) freezing at zero-degree Celcius. More to the point, Giddens’s theory is marked by a commitment to humanist principles, as revealed by the prominent place occupied by agency in structuration theory. Layder (2006: 159) explains structuration theory’s attempt at delimiting agency’s distinct and emergent properties thus: People are intrinsically involved with society and actively enter into its constitution; they construct, support and change it because it is the nature of human beings to be affected by, and to affect, their social environment. Unlike the molecules, atoms and force fields of the natural sciences, people do not remain unmoved by their own feelings and motivations. They are not simply compelled by forces outside of themselves (as are natural phenomena), they do not act mechanically and blindly as

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if compelled by laws of nature. By reflecting on their own behaviour and circumstances they always have some choice in the matter. They are always capable, to some degree, of resisting the constraints imposed on them by society and of influencing and transforming their social situations.

With these principles, structuration theory essentially rejects what Giddens calls “objectivism,” or the idea that social structures act as external constraints on people’s actions. This leads him to argue that structures do not inhabit a life “outside” that of human beings. Methodologically, this position implies that structure possesses properties which can only be analysed with reference to human reasoning and emotionality, or how structure appears to and is appropriated by people on the ground. Again, social practice is what matters most in structuration theory. For Giddens, sociology and social theory should concentrate on real-world behaviours by flesh-and-blood human beings, whose experience of social reality is crucial to its production. In this way, structuration theory includes numerous principles from paradigms which emphasize agency over structure, and despite its view of structure as possessing a dual nature, structuration theory demonstrates a clear penchant towards conflating or reducing structure within agency. Layder (2006: 164) makes a similar point thus: “human beings create meaning and social reality from within social settings, and therefore social forms such as institutions and structures have no existence apart from the activities they embody.” A central problem with this overemphasis on agency in structuration theory is that limited insight is afforded into social reproduction, or why phenomena such as patterns, routines and systemic oppression emerge and echo through time in society. Giddens is particularly concerned with this issue, and again places social practice as a possible solution. Accordingly, as people engage with others on a daily basis, they draw from structural and cultural resources which have gained their attention as a result of socialization and education, for example. Giddens identifies these resources as part of people’s interactional skills. The effect of this, however, is that structure and agency become even more inseparable. Yet,

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while structural and cultural influences come into play, people’s individualities also introduce an important degree of complexity and creativity within social life. As Layder (2006: 166) explains, the rules and resources we draw on are the medium of our activity in the sense that they enable us to do things and to have intentions. At the same time, they also represent the outcome or consequence (largely unintended) of our activities insofar as we endorse their value by using them, and therefore contribute to their further continuance.

In structuration theory, there is thus limited space for a critical agenda, including the study of ideology and hegemony, as consensus and collective endorsement of rules and norms tend to be the main points of interest. At the same time, structuration theory does not actually give us homo sociologicus: Giddens is primarily concerned to show that whatever goes on in society and its institutions does not go on ‘behind the backs’ of people. For research purposes in particular, it is important to take note of the manner in which actors’ reasons and intentions are centrally involved in the creation and recreation of social life. […] In Giddens’s theory an essential ingredient of human existence is ‘ontological security’, which refers to a person’s elemental sense of safety in the world and includes a basic ‘trust’ of other people. (Layder, 2006: 167)

This is where the marked preference for humanist principles in structuration theory becomes evident. However, Giddens also rejects the idea that people are free to act as they please. Accordingly, while we engage in a broad range of social practices on a daily basis, we engage in specific social relations, meaning that we embody specific social roles. This, in turn, implies that not only do we draw from structural and cultural resources, we are also both limited and facilitated by these antecedent social forces through the rules and obligations they impose. Yet, for Giddens, humans are never at the mercy of structure or culture: they always have the means and resources to extricate themselves from unwanted conditioning and oppressive situations. To explain this, he offers the notion of the dialectic of control as an inevitable process

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wherever and whenever power is involved in the constitution of social phenomena. Giddens sees structural constraints and enablements as two different types of resources: allocative resources (i.e., what allows people to do things) and authoritative resources (what can be used to control human beings). These resources do not act against people’s intentions and desires but rather produce the kind of power necessary for people to generate social realities and change. In other words, they are also potentially transformative resources. Yet, perhaps because of its marked humanist penchant and its integration of structure within agents’ reasons and motivations, structuration theory cannot quite escape the problems associated with various forms of methodological individualism which grant agency causal primacy over structure. Even if structure and agency are understood within structuration theory as different features of society, they remain conceptually indivisible. As such, structuration theory commits a central conflation (i.e., fusing structure and agency together, as two sides of the same coin) (Archer, 1996). Because structure cannot exist “outside” human action, it cannot be understood in terms of its distinct and emergent properties (e.g., its antecedence and relatively enduring properties and powers, the fact that it unfolds within a different time frame than that of agency, etc.). As Layder (2006: 171–172) explains, structure is ‘internal’ to activity – it has no existence beyond the situations in which people are acting. In this sense, structure does not have a continuous and tangible (real) existence. Rather, it has a ‘virtual’ existence, which can be understood first, as traces in the memories of the people who draw on the rules and resources that constitute it. Secondly, structure exists only at the instances in which the rules and resources are actually being employed in the activities of people. This is what Giddens means when he says that structure only exists in its ‘instantiation’ in human action.

To exist, structures must therefore be (re)produced continually through practice, and so we come back to a relatively flattened ontology. Indeed, the suggestion that structure and agency are two sides of the same coin does not resolve the structure–agency debate: it more or less nullifies it. The goal in structuration theory is not to explain the complex

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causal interaction between structure and agency as ontologically distinct and emergent features of social reality, but rather to concentrate on social practice as the site where these two features are said to merge together. This is a considerable problem for social research, for as Layder (2006: 174) points out, while there is nothing wrong with saying that social relationships and practices are produced and reproduced in the activities of people (their reasons and motivations) […] there does seem to be something odd about the idea that they have no existence beyond these things. This seems to imply that reproduced practices are virtually the same thing as people’s reasons and motivations. […] social systems have more durability and independence than Giddens seems to want to admit.

By overemphasizing the interdependence of structure and agency, the use of structuration theory in the production of causal claims is also considerably limited. As Layder (2006: 176) points out, “the very fact that it is possible to concentrate attention on either ‘institutional analysis’ or ‘the analysis of strategic conduct’ seems to suggest that these represent rather different aspects of social reality, even though we might also accept that they are interdependent and interwoven.” In other words, while underlining the fundamental and complex connections between structure and agency as real and constitutive for both strata is crucial to our accounts of causality in the social realm, we also need to remember that causal relationships are such because they unfold between ontologically different things. Therefore, to explain the effects of one thing upon another, we must begin by defining both strata as different—i.e., we must account for their distinct and emergent properties (including their causal powers) before we begin to discuss their causal connections. However, by claiming that structure and agency are two sides of the same coin, structuration theory can only offer a rather weak view of causality in the social realm. While structuration theory allows for explanations of how rules and resources available to humans come into play, it fails to consider the underlying generative mechanisms at play in the production, reproduction and transformation of society, including the antecedent and ongoing unequal distribution of power and resources in

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social contexts around the world. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 10) explain with regards to Giddens’ work, since structure and agency are held to be mutually constitutive, their properties are not real except in conjunction with each other, and it is impossible to examine the interplay between them. […] we would also argue that social relations shape such interactions in ways that the people involved in them may not be fully aware of.

In contemporary AL scholarship, Giddens’s work has been used, for example, in the field of translation studies by Van Rooyen (2013), who notes multiple benefits of the theory, notably when exploring the complex interaction between translation structures and translators as agents. Block (2006) also sees value in using structuration theory to the identity strand of AL scholarship. As the author argues, “identity is an emergent process, taking place at the crossroads of structure and agency. This means that while identity is conditioned by social interaction and social structure, it at the same time conditions social interaction and social structure. It is, in short, constitutive of and constituted by the social environment.” However, in arguing that structuration theory allows researchers to see identity as a fluid rather than fixed condition or process, in my view the author unfortunately fails to make an important distinction between structuration theory and poststructuralism. In educational research, Shilling (1992) advocates the use of structuration theory, presenting it as the most effective approach to overcoming the structure–agency “dualism.” The author identifies two strands of educational research: one which focuses on the study of social systems and national policies (i.e., large-scale social phenomena), and another strand which concentrates on case studies of individual schools and localized, situated interaction. He then argues that this division is the unfortunate consequence of a persistent dualistic mentality in the field, an argument rather common among adherents of structuration theory who share the consensus that analytical dualism constitutes the greatest problem in the social sciences. On this basis, Shilling suggests that Giddens’ theory offers a valuable way out by allowing for an account

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of social change. In short, structuration theory’s fusion between structure and agency—again, a central conflation—is generally perceived by its adherents as a reasonable resolution of the structure–agency debate. From a realist angle, it is mistaken to conclude that Giddens’s theory transcends the structure–agency “dualism” (Archer, 1996). Again, the concept of duality of structure does not resolve the debate inasmuch as it dismisses it by fusing both sides of the equation into one, thus making it impossible to examine (a) the distinct and emergent properties of structure and agency, and (b) their causal relationship. As Archer (1995: 87) explains, “the intimacy of mutual constitution thus means that the only way in which structure and agency can be examined ‘independently’ is through an artificial exercise of ‘methodological bracketing’.” This is achieved in part by Giddens with unsatisfactory results, as structure and agency are distinguished in his work principally in terms of face-to-face versus more distant forms of human interactions involving groups rather than individuals. Moreover, Giddens’s emphasis on language and discourse to explain social practice—echoing poststructuralism, social constructionism and symbolic interactionism—fails to consider physical, material and non-discursive elements closely linked to practical consciousness. Archer (2004: 160) explains that practical consciousness “comes in chunks or stocks rather than in linear sequences such as sentences […] it is stored by being embodied in the seat of our pants rather than in the declarative memory […] it may be accessed by all of our senses.” Indeed, practical consciousness cannot be entirely generated nor captured by language or discourse, since much of our perceptions and actions in the real-world are physical (Bourdieu, 1990; Bourdieu & Eagleton, 1992), while our communicative powers constitute only one part of our distinct and emergent properties as human agents.

Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice Bourdieu’s theory of practice has influenced a great number of sociological analyses and speculations over the past decades, and has often been

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hailed as the most comprehensive account of the structure–agency relationship to date. This explains to some extent why his work has been appropriated by a number of researchers and adherents of a variety of (at times contradictory) ontological perspectives, with some labelling him a poststructuralist thinker, others placing him within the structuralist camp or identifying him as a realist. Although not entirely aligned with Bourdieu’s ontology, the realist sociologist Elder-Vass (2012) claims that Bourdieu successfully combines realism and social constructionism in his account of social class. Parallel to Giddens, Bourdieu (1990) proposes that social practice binds structure and agency. Both theorists diverge, however, in their views of objective reality: while Giddens is more comfortable reducing social analysis to a study of discourse and interaction, Bourdieu leans towards a realist standpoint by arguing that the objective world and the realm of situated human communication and behaviour differ ontologically. An important element in Bourdieu’s theory is a critique of the tendency among social scientists to explain actions as caused by discourse, or human agents’ said capacity to consciously verbalise their knowledge of rules, norms and relationships. Bourdieu and Giddens also differ in how they integrate a critical agenda into their work. While Giddens offers surprisingly limited insight into systems of oppression and emancipatory programmes, Bourdieu (1990) explicitly emphasizes the potential for sociologists and social theorists to clarify power relations, leading to the potential formulation of strategies for dismantling them. To bind structure and agency, Bourdieu offers the notion of habitus, defined by Layder (2006: 195) as a cognitive and motivating mechanism which incorporates the influence of a person’s social context and provides a conduit or medium through which information and resources are transmitted to the activities that they inform. Thus the mutual influences of objective context and the immediate situations of activity are translated back and forth through the medium of the habitus. While the habitus sets the wider parameters of a person’s activities, people have also to be understood as creative beings. In particular situations people have to ‘improvise’ on background resources

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(of the habitus) in order to be able to deal with the unpredictable situations that are a constant feature of everyday life.

Bourdieu argues that habitus is developed through the family inculcating basic moral and practical rules and norms (primary socialization), and in part through schooling (secondary socialization), in which we find attempts to bring this baggage of unconscious knowledge up to the level of consciousness. However, what largely takes place in schools, at least in the view of Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), is social reproduction and the production of a shared practical unconscious. Beyond schooling, people share particular social roles and positions with other human beings at work and in other spheres of social life (or “fields,” to use Bourdieusian terminology). As such, they come to share very similar resources, opportunities and constraints, or a common habitus. This process evolves over time, and is often accomplished not through conscious, rational, calculated judgement but rather “naturally”—i.e., through the body, gestures, acts, etc. This position has led Bourdieu to reject the notion of ideology as discourse, instead preferring the notions of symbolic violence and doxa, the latter being a non-linguistic, naturalized, subtle hegemonic force operating below consciousness (Bourdieu & Eagleton, 1992). As a pre-disposition for action, or modus operandi, habitus is conceptualized within a Bourdieusian ontology as the internalization of objective structures (Mander, 1987). It does not determine what people do but rather mandates specific actions as “appropriate” or the likes, and endows human agents with a creative, generative capacity to act in specific ways and not others, depending on the situation. Bourdieu talks about habitus as a creative force instilling in humans a potential to improvise, not necessarily through conscious, verbal deliberation but rather through the body. It is “a spontaneity without consciousness or will” (Bourdieu, 1990: 56). Overall, through his extensive conceptual and analytical work, Bourdieu offers extensive valuable sociological insight, notably in terms of a critique of culture and the cultural industry, including educational systems and institutions. He also offers a thorough sociological research programme which balances statistical and interpretive analytical approaches.

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However, Bourdieu essentially offers a theory of social and cultural reproduction. Swartz (1997: 110) observes that this focus in Bourdieu’s work also comes with a rather “hydraulic” view of causality: “Bourdieu sees the internalization through socialization of external opportunity structures as a straightforward and nonproblematic process.” As with social constructivism, the effects of socialization are not unpacked with reference to people’s sense-making capacities—i.e., people accepting and following social norms also because they make sense to them. In Bouchard (2020), I observe in Bourdieu’s work a tendency towards conceptualizing human agents as inescapably affected by socialization and other forms of dominant cultural pressures, more or less forcing them to reproduce oppressive social and ideological structures. This problem is largely due to Bourdieu’s relative neglect of human consciousness in the formulation and manifestation of habitus (Elder-Vass, 2010). Granted, many things we do every day take place without the need for active reflection and deliberation (e.g., preparing breakfast, showering, putting our shoes on, driving, greeting people, etc.), but it is reductive to describe human being as merely reproducing social and cultural life unconsciously, as a result of being located within a field-specific habitus. Political discourses and practices offer clear examples of how people, being also purposeful and equipped with reflexive powers and metaawareness, are also conscious agents actively deliberating on the nature of social reality and their discourses and actions within it. Furthermore, Bourdieu’s acknowledgement of structure as distinct from agency also has limitations, principally because he (as well as Giddens, although differently) dissolves structure into activity. Layder (2006: 196) observes that this makes it very difficult to understand social systems as patterns of domination which endure and have effects beyond the situations of their actual implication in practice. Thus, wide-ranging and variegated fields of influence such as gender, class, power and organisation, existing at different levels of closeness to activity and producing variable effects on practice, tend to be compacted into a flattened-out social terrain.

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In short, by reducing both structure and agency to practice, Bourdieu envisages structure as embedded within individual agents, who are mere reproducers of social structures. As with Giddens, Bourdieu thus commits a central conflation. By extension, his theory limits our ability to account for the full range of structural and agentive emergent properties and powers. Archer (2004: 6) points out that the approaches suggested by Bourdieu and Giddens generically preclude one from disengaging the properties and powers of the practitioner from the properties and powers of the environment in which practices are conducted – and yet again this prevents analysis of their interplay. Instead, we are confronted with amalgams of ‘practices’ which oscillate wildly between voluntarism and determinism, without our being able to specify the conditions under which agents have greater degrees of freedom or, conversely, work under a considerable stringency of constraints.

This central conflation is avoidable by conceptualizing structure and agency as distinct and emergent strata of the social realm, which then provides more solid conceptual grounds upon which we can analyze their interplay. More to the point, it is not only possible but necessary to do so in our attempts to provide not merely descriptive but explanatory insight. Although the ways we talk and act in the world are closely connected to broader, society-wide structures, systems and discourses, the fact that we use different terms and approaches when analyzing interaction on the one hand and structure on the other reveals our awareness as human beings that those layers of society are not homologous. Structure and agency also do not differ only in terms of scale, since they possess distinct and emergent properties. Equally important, structures are not mere echoes of situated interactions, and our everyday practices are not simply micro-versions of structural and cultural processes: they possess distinct and emergent powers and properties of their own which need to be accounted for. As Layder (2006: 202) explains, it is possible to study social relations from an objective viewpoint without losing sight of the active subject. In this sense it is possible to talk about

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properties of the social system or social organisation (or, indeed, the interaction order) without reference to individuals or activity as such, while in no way denying the reality of subjects and their active implication in the production and reproduction of social relations and processes.

Bourdieu has so far enjoyed a great deal of attention within AL and sociolinguistics, partly because his own writings demonstrate a marked interest in both language and education, but also because throughout his body of work Bourdieu also provides numerous trenchant critiques of modern-day linguistics. Contra Saussurean or Chomskian structuralism, Bourdieu sees language specifically as part of social action, leading him to reject, for example, the reification of language in theoretical linguistics. Similar to Shohamy (2006) and Pennycook (2013), Bourdieu dismisses the labelling of language in terms of essentialized and territorialized entities. He also rejects the notion of grammaticality, instead describing the processes of symbolic power and the legitimization of specific language outputs over others based on realities beyond the situated language act. He also understands the meaning-making process not as static or arbitrary, as in the Saussurean sense, but rather as an emergent process unfolding within specific and uniquely structured social spaces or fields, with their specific sets of habitus and resources. Bourdieu therefore rejects mentalist or cognitivist accounts of language and language-related phenomena, because he sees the latter as inevitably taking place within specific social contexts which offer a range of influences and resources. Grenfell (2011: 55) explains that, within a Bourdieusian perspective on language, “no one acquires a language without acquiring a relation to language […] Such relations are then physical as well as mental; paralinguistic aspects of language – such as intonation, gesture and expression – are equally important in the operation of language as a symbolic power.” Language is therefore both a source of power and a field of its own, in which power relationships unfold. In my view, however, I cannot see how Bourdieu’s view of language is possible without recognition of the emergent, antecedent and relatively enduring properties and powers of language as a cultural resource, i.e., as distinct from practice. Although rejecting Bourdieu’s views at times, Kramsch (2015) nevertheless draws connections between her work and Bourdieu’s writings. She

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discusses how interaction with his work led her to focus on language practice and speakers rather than speech per se, and how Bourdieu’s call for a reflexive sociology (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) has provided her with strategies to combine scientific objectivity and practical knowhow. As a surprisingly productive sociologist and ethnographer himself, Bourdieu also provides AL scholars with valuable strategies for ethnographically grounded language-based research. Grenfell (2011) similarly explains the extent of the influence of Bourdieu’s work on contemporary AL research, and summarizes Bourdieu’s view of language as constituted of form and content thus: Both form and content may exist in a way which favours certain ways of thinking and expressing that thinking. Moreover, they both may act as a mechanism for cultural transmission, which itself advantages and disadvantages those who encounter it depending on their background and the affinities (or not) this sets up when they enter a scholastic field. (p. 39)

In my view, Bourdieu’s importance to AL and sociolinguistics has less to do with his view of language, and more with his fascinating insight into culture, particularly his convincing critique of the common assumption among cultural anthropologists and many sociolinguists that culture is shared by all within a specific cultural community. What is indeed rarely shown in discussions on culture in AL and sociolinguistics is that culture, cultural acts and cultural products are not distributed equally: they are differentiated as a result of a range of pre-existing and enduring structural and cultural influences and dispositions. His work therefore provides an important theoretical basis upon which to improve existing intercultural communicative competence research and further advance a critical AL research programme.

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Habermas and the Lifeworld/System Distinction Compared to the works of Bourdieu, Foucault and Bernstein, Habermas’s sociological and philosophical works on hermeneutics reveals an even stronger interest in language, as his theory of communicative action (Habermas, 1984, 1987) attests. An important aspect of this theory is the idea that all speech acts are characterized by a telos, or purpose, which centres on the broader goal of mutual understanding. Habermas demonstrates in his work how human agents deploy communicative competence to achieve this broad communicative goal. According to Layder (2006: 217): “‘communicative action’ refers to the co-ordination of the activities of two or more people on the basis of a shared understanding such that each person tries to convince the other(s) with the effect that the resulting action is motivated through reason.” Given these emphases in his work, Habermas has often been associated with a range of theories and paradigms such as hermeneutics, pragmatism and postmodernism, although the latter label may not be fully accurate given his adherence to, and extension of, Weber’s work on modernity and human rationality. Indeed, a major part of Habermas’s theory of communicative action is the idea that human agents cooperate together via mutual deliberation, a capacity defined by the author as part of human rationality which, according to him, can be denoted in language and the very structure of human communication. Accordingly, successful argumentation necessitates the mitigation of coercive forces, a shared interest in understanding, and people’s desire to develop increasingly sophisticated and effective arguments. In this way, Habermas not only emphasizes human rationality, but more specifically intersubjective rationality as a fundamental element in communication, making his theoretical work the result of a rather productive combination of modernist and postmodernist principles. Arguably, this particular feature qualifies Habermas’s work as a major contribution to the structure– agency debate, thus deserving further consideration. Habermas also offers a strong and comprehensive critical approach to hermeneutics. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 50) explain,

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language, argues Habermas, is not just a means of communication which mediates our experience of the world, but is also a medium of domination and social power. A social science cannot therefore be reduced to interpretation, as is implied by hermeneutics. The second limit to the hermeneutic approach, argues Habermas, is that it is inattentive to the dependence of language on wider social processes.

This stance reveals the need to distinguish Habermas’s work from other interpretivist strands of social research, notably how his critical angle is rooted in depth ontology—i.e., the notion that society and its component parts, namely structure, culture and agency, are distinct and emergent entities, thus being stratified ontological phenomena—i.e., existing within, and drawing from resources situated at, multiple levels of society. Specifically, he distinguishes between the lifeworld (closely related to agency, but specifically referring to mutual, face-to-face interactions and the collaborative development of shared norms and values) and the system (closely related to structure, but specifically referring to exchanges of materials resources, power, etc.). In doing so, Habermas distinguishes himself from the theorists discussed in previous sections of this chapter with his non-conflationary approach to communication and social ontology, by emphasizing the need to conceptualize both lifeworld and system as different things. He also agrees with the realists on the point that conflationary approaches essentially obscure the causal relationship between different social strata and phenomena. From this laminated viewpoint, Habermas purports that, in late modernity, the system demonstrates a marked tendency to “colonize” the lifeworld, so that the emphasis on mutual understanding within the lifeworld is gradually eroded by the encroachment of capitalist value systems. By emphasizing the importance of both the lifeworld and the system to the production of social life, by giving importance to the analysis of both systems and situated interaction, and by not reducing his critical agenda to a mere study of discourse, Habermas offers a view aligned in many ways with the realist ontology explained in the next chapter. Layder (2006: 220) makes a similar observation regarding Habermas’s work thus:

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The idea of an objective world as distinguishable from a social world which is, in turn, distinct from a subjective world is something which is denied in many, if not most, action theories. Habermas is not claiming that these worlds are separate and unrelated to each other. On the contrary, he sees them as interfused, but at the same time it is important to distinguish them as constituent features of a seemingly unitary whole.

Habermas’s hermeneutic approach specifies that the objective features of reality are mediated by humans in symbolic fashion, which creates a separation between humans and the external world necessary for the emergence of human reflexivity (Sealey & Carter, 2004). From this basis, Habermas also stresses that our ability to sense the world is not inherently individual but rather importantly a shared experience largely unfolding through our use of language. He also points out that people do not experience reality symbolically “from scratch”; instead, this reality comes to them already structured. In other words, people experience the social world as an antecedent and enduring reality, as something which has already been pre-analyzed and interpreted symbolically, or again as already meaningfully structured. In this argument we can denote a clear rejection by Habermas of empiricism. Layder (2006) also denotes traces of complexity thinking in Habermas’s work, notably in how the philosopher presents society as undergoing an evolutionary trajectory towards increasing social complexity. As the author explains, in the context of increasing rationalization of the world, that is, the development of expert areas of knowledge concerned with the newly formed sectors of society (new occupational groups, the rise of scientific knowledge, development of new skills and expertise), the lifeworld becomes ‘overloaded’ so to speak. The complexity of validity claims in the context of growing specialisation in society (political, economic, occupational) makes it more and more difficult to reach shared understanding. There is pressure for sub-systems such as government and markets to become detached from the lifeworld and to operate on the basis of codified law. (Layder, 2006: 223)

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Through ongoing social shifts and developments, people on the ground are seen as experiencing increasing strain and confusion, as a result of being related to increasingly complex social processes, thus losing their sense of control in the process. As the system increasingly encroaches upon the lifeworld, human rationality loses grounds. Yet, Habermas’s intellectual roots in the Frankfurt School and his acknowledgement of the Enlightenment project—which informs his critical work to a large extent—lead him to argue that this process of alienation can be countered by ongoing debates and protests. Layder (2006: 225) points out that, in Habermas’s view, it is always possible for social resistance to be marshalled against the colonising tendencies of the system. In this way the critical potential of new social movements such as feminism, green politics, and anti-nuclear lobbies can be maintained without discarding altogether the project of modernity. This, of course, puts Habermas at some odds with both ‘anti-’ and postmodernists.

Indeed, Habermas has come under criticism from many different directions. Modernists accuse him of offering a slightly divergent yet essentially similar ontology to that of the interactionists, while postmodernists decry his marked penchant towards rationality and reproach his attempts at reviving modernist principles. Realists are encouraged by his attempts to balance modernism and postmodernism, but critique his concept of the “ideal speech situation” as idealism, and his emphasis on shared understanding and communicative consensus as denying other important, perhaps more conflictual processes in the formulation and exchange of meaning. Layder (2006: 233) also underscores these missing elements in Habermas’s theory: While the thesis of colonisation is intriguing and suggestive of testable propositions, it does need more specification in an empirical sense. It needs to be able to specify which areas of the lifeworld are more susceptible to colonisation and which are more resistant. These questions cannot simply be settled on a priori theoretical grounds, they must be connected to empirical research.

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Despite these problems, Habermas’s theory of communicative action has profound consequences for AL and sociolinguistics, not only because language and communication occupy central stage in his work, but also because it is grounded in depth ontology. In my opinion, what is also worth noting about Habermas is that, in the evolution of twentieth century social theory (and if we make abstraction of realism for a moment), his work manages to offer a much needed respite from postmodernist/poststructuralist relativism.

Summary This chapter is obviously incomplete. Many other social theorists have much to offer to the study of language, notably Basil Bernstein and his theory of language codes, which is arguably similar to that of Bourdieu. Moreover, while AL scholars may find much of interest in the evolution of social theory over decades, “it is difficult to discover in the founding figures of the sociological tradition more than the raw material for treating language sociologically” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 36). Direct and unmediated use of social theory in AL research is therefore not only difficult but also not recommended. In the above summary, I have tried to draw the links between different theoretical paradigms and AL/sociolinguistic concerns, although those connections were not always evident. One reason, of course, is AL scholars’ general ambivalence towards theory (as discussed previously). In addition, clarifying the links between social theory and AL research is rather a complex task requiring extensive referencing to actual research in our field. Consequently, further analysis and discussion of these links are certainly warranted in the development of a renewed and more sociologically informed AL scholarship. There are, however, important lessons we can draw from the above summary. Firstly, while most postmodernist and social constructivist thinkers reject the need for a structure–agency debate altogether, sociology, AL and the social sciences at large have mostly (at least in some form or another) been invested in discovering how structure and agency—as distinct and emergent strata of the social realm—interact

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to produce the linguistic, language-related and social phenomena we observe and study. As Layder (2006: 143–144) rightfully argues, to suggest that there is a widespread view among sociologists that stresses an individual-society split […] is misleading. All the major figures (and most of the minor ones) in the history of sociological thought have understood individuals and society to be intertwined and inextricably fused. Indeed, this is perhaps the founding assumption of sociological thought itself. However, these figures have produced very different ideas about the degree to which the enmeshment of people in social processes allows for levels of individual creativity and independence, particularly in instances of social transformation.

Hamlin (2002: 29, emphasis mine) goes further by stating that “although the [structure-agency] debate is sometimes believed to rest on a dualism whose terms are stated as being totally incommensurable and heterogeneous, this view only makes sense in conflationary frameworks that have been set up in terms of a radical holism or radical individualism.” It is therefore important for AL scholars to remember that social theory is not about reifying or cancelling the structure–agency debate. Rather, social theory has undergone increasing sophistication over decades precisely because intellectual exchanges among scholars (as the above summary has hopefully revealed) have prompted them to formulate diverging accounts of precisely how agency and structure are related in the ongoing production of social life. Our job as AL scholars and social scientists is thus to make conceptually and empirically grounded decisions regarding which account(s) of this relationship is/are most adequate (Layder, 2006) to what we study. This is indeed a rather different approach to social theory to that which has commonly been taken by AL scholars to date. As Sayer (2000: 79) argues, charges of ‘totalizing discourses’ or logocentrism sound rather impressive, if not intimidating, and it is especially important to go into the arguments behind them rather than merely parroting these terms. Otherwise academic debates may become debased to the point where, instead of engaging with the substantive accounts of others, one simply disqualifies

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them by accusing them of assuming some privileged vantage point or foundationalism.

Also important for AL scholars to remember: while the different paradigms discussed in this chapter provide various accounts of both agency and structure, these accounts usually result in ontological conflations (a notion developed and further critiqued in the next chapter). Arguably, much of the structure–agency debate has been characterized by various attempts at dealing with ontological conflations in some form or another. As the next chapter on realism explains, the tendency towards conflationary thinking in social theory and research must be dealt with head-on, for it considerably constrains our ability to account for complexity, emergence and causality in the social realm.

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4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis

The core argument has been made so far that AL is necessarily involved in the structure–agency debate from a variety of angles, whether it is with regard to (a) understanding the relationship between language learners, teachers, institutions and society, and between learners and the language being learned, (b) determining which variables to study and explaining what their properties and powers are, (c) revealing how language learners, teachers and language users—as reflexive and causally efficacious human agents—understand their lived experiences and construct subject positions, (d) clarifying causal relationships between social entities and phenomena in order to improve complex and wide-ranging processes such as language education, language policy and language maintenance, for example, and (e) engaging in transdisciplinary scientific efforts in collaboration with scientists from other scientific fields. As a branch of the social sciences, AL is also necessarily involved in the study of social stability or morphostasis (e.g., the establishment and recognition of language policies; language as a relatively rule-based system; the language testing industry and its general adherence to neoliberal principles) and change or morphogenesis (e.g., language learning, curricular change, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_4

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language shift, the emergence of language varieties) in language-related phenomena within and across multiple domains of social life. To facilitate these complex tasks, social theory has been shown to provide much valuable conceptual insight, which can then be used to formulate middle-range theories and strengthen methodological approaches relevant to specific AL phenomena. From Parsonian functionalism to Habermas’s lifeworld/system theory, paradigms summarized in the previous chapter have been shown to conceptualize structure and agency as important to the production of social life (except perhaps the more radical postmodernist strands such as poststructuralism and certain versions of social constructionism), and differ principally in their accounts of their relationship. While most paradigms put greater emphasis on either structure or agency, others (e.g., interactionism, structuration theory and, to some extent, complexity theory) emphasize their interrelationship in the hope of overcoming the dualism said to divide them. Some even go as far as to claim that the structure–agency discussion is meaningless, a burdensome heritage of positivism. Given the existence (and somewhat surprising popularity) of this more radical tendency among contemporary AL scholars, I have also argued that dismissal of the structure–agency debate is a considerable problem, for as Layder (2006: 98) argues, “doing away with the macro–micro distinction by claiming that it is false does not prove it to be so. It merely avoids making the effort to work out the relations between the two domains.” Again, there are important ontological reasons why the same terms, theories and analytical strategies cannot be applied equally and indiscriminately to the study of individuals, groups, institutions, societies and social mechanisms. The main reason is that these different social phenomena possess distinct and emergent properties and powers, and recognition of this fact is fundamental to how AL scholars conceptualize and study causal interactions in their data, and formulate strategies for improving language education and language-related practices. When specific ontologies are adopted by researchers, specific epistemologies follow (Longshore Smith, 2006), which then leads to specific theoretical and methodological choices and ultimately to specific conclusions about the data under investigation. These issues are not merely theoretical: they affect AL practices on the ground in profound ways. Precisely

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because it is applied and concerned largely with practical realities such as language learning and teaching, the point has also been made that AL needs theory, including social theory, to understand how phenomena are causally related and how practice can be improved. In this chapter, I present realism as (a) “a robust philosophical and applied perspective, which has been embraced and debated in philosophy of science, sociology, health, history, information sciences, and management and organization” (Cochran-Smith et al., 2014: 108), (b) an emergentist social ontology particularly mindful of the need to account for structure, culture and agency in the study of social realities, and (c) “an explanatory model in which the interplay between pre-existent structures, having causal powers and properties, and people, possessing distinctive causal powers and properties of their own, results in contingent yet explicable outcomes” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 12). Realism is characterized by commitment to objective knowledge, thus as helping to overcome some of the problems posed by anti-realist perspectives including interpretivism and postmodernism. Realism, in short, reaffirms the centrality of ontology in our work (Williams & Dyer, 2017). Sealey and Carter (2004: 14–15) explain realism’s commitment to objective knowledge thus: Following Popper, we would distinguish between subjective knowledge – what any particular individual knows – and objective knowledge – knowledge expressed in theories, propositions, conjectures. The important feature of objective knowledge is that it is ’totally independent of anybody’s claim to know; it is also independent of anybody’s belief, or disposition to assent, or to assert or to act. Knowledge in the objective sense is knowledge without a knower; it is knowledge without a knowing subject ’ (Popper, 1972: 109). The second sense in which we understand objective knowledge is that, precisely because it is ’knowledge without a knower’, it is capable of refinement and methodological development.”

The authors also explain that such commitment does not constitute a form of objectivism, an ideological perspective rooted in the belief that there is only one truth to be revealed and that there is only one way to apprehend it. Instead, following Bhaskar (1998), the realist position asks What are the characteristics and powers of the world which lead us to

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formulate those particular claims about it and not other claims? Dealing with this fundamental scientific question becomes possible with the adoption of a stratified ontology afforded by realism. In doing so, and by accepting both the existence of an objective reality beyond human perception and understanding and the postmodernist principle that our understandings of reality are cultural or inherently ideational (thus as socially constructed), realism also offers a way to combine positivist and postmodernist perspectives, similarly to a Habermasian ontology, yet also resolving a broader range of conceptual tensions than that which Habermasian ontology manages to achieve. Given these important benefits, realism can thus be considered as adding further sophistication to social theory because, as Haig and Evers (2016) underscore, it provides solutions to the problems posed by most other paradigms available, which show conflationary tendencies. Specifically, realism’s stratified ontology—also called “layered” or “laminated”— (a) explains why determinism is insufficient to explain the complexity of social realities, (b) brings attention to processes unfolding within and between structure, culture and agency as distinct and emergent strata of the social realm, and (c) provides solid conceptual grounds upon which to explore causality in the social realm. Bouchard and Glasgow (2019: 25–26, emphasis mine) explain that, in common parlance, the term stratified is used to refer to a structuring of a particular object or reality into layers. Juxtaposed with the adjective social or the noun society , stratified can potentially be (and has often been) understood as referring to social castes, classes or levels, each one with different status and access to particular resources and forms of privilege. In contrast, [the realist] use of the term stratified considers society not as a single and unified object but as an entity composed of multiple layers or strata, with the three core social strata being structure, culture and agency.

Cochran-Smith et al. (2014: 109) explain that a stratified reality has layers, some immediately perceivable and some that are hidden. People’s observable behavior is underpinned by other layers such as tacit belief systems, patterns of social interaction and organizational structures,

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and deep and contingent causal mechanisms, which are not immediately perceptible but which do lead to patterns that we can see.

In Bouchard (2017), for example, I look at the Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) context from a realist perspective and argue that realism’s stratified perspective allows researchers to highlight the distinct and emergent properties of the various constituents of the Japanese EFL system: texts (EFL policies, government-approved EFL textbooks, teacher-produced materials, newspaper articles, external EFL proficiency tests, etc.), beliefs (interpretations of government policies, exams, textbooks and classroom discourse by classroom actors, etc.), and processes (EFL classroom practices, localized uses of EFL textbooks, etc.). These various constituents include objects (textbooks, language policy documents and tests), intangible elements (beliefs, ideologies, values, etc.), human agents and/or actors (teachers, students, school administrators and policy makers), and institutions (schools, governmental organisms concerned with education, institutions involved in generating and administering tests, etc.). All of these social components can be organized within specific layers of the social realm and provide insight into the Japanese EFL system as a whole. Because of their interrelatedness, however, constituents can simultaneously belong to two or more strata at a time. (p. 77)

Also central to the critique of contemporary AL scholarship in this volume is the core argument that realism offers a meta-theory of causality. Aside from its insightful and much-needed account of human reflexivity as important causal force in society (Archer, 1996, 2004, 2012), one of realism’s most important contributions to the social sciences is a more explicit emphasis on underlying generative mechanisms. Examples of the latter include the conservative powers of social inertia, vested interests as well as the combination of competition and collaboration in explaining social stability, the material and symbolic interests associated with innovation as well as the complex network of contingencies, complementarities and divergences within the cultural system to explain social change. These underlying causal mechanisms are seen from a realist perspective as important forces generating causal

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links and phenomena within the social realm. The realist approach to explaining causal relationships is hereby presented as cognizant of and responsive to the stratified nature of society and its constituting parts. Realism is also presented in this chapter less as a theory than a broader ontological perspective which “favours the language of causality to describe the world, even though it accepts that any analysis of causality is partial at best” (Gerrits & Verweij, 2013: 171). To reinforce this argument, insight from prominent realist thinkers is hereby summarized and used to build the argument that realism provides solid conceptual grounds upon which social researchers, including applied linguists, can “generate provisional explanation of how events follow from previous events, what drives processes, and the mechanisms by which human behaviour transpires” (ibid.). Different realist approaches are, of course, available—e.g., ontological realism, metaphysical realism, semantic realism, epistemological realism, axiological realism, institutional realism, naturalistic realism, global and local realism (see Haig & Evers, 2016, for discussion). In this chapter, I only focus on two strands of realism that have influenced my own work. The first one is critical realism which shapes much of the argumentation regarding underlying causal mechanisms in this chapter. Social realism, on the other hand, provides in my view a much stronger and useful account of human agency, notably by emphasizing human reflexivity, or the ongoing sense-making internal conversation we hold within our own minds, as endowing agency with considerable causal power in the ongoing production of social life. As stated by Archer (2003) and underlined by Elder-Vass (2010), reflexivity is a causal power possessed by human agents. By reflexively deliberating on a number of issues in our lives, with regards to structural and cultural constraints and enablements, we, both as individuals and as part of collectivities, can (although not always) reach decisions that can then affect our behaviours. From that point on, our behaviours can then affect the course of social life, and over time, have causal effects on structure and culture. Although reflexivity has been discussed since the very beginnings of philosophy (see Lawson, 1985), social realism gives reflexivity central importance in the formulation of causal explanations. As an applied linguist and educator, I cannot help but conclude that this particular emphasis on people as

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powerful particulars (Harré & Madden, 1975) in social realism is crucial to AL research, a large proportion of which tends to focus on localized, smaller groups of thinking and learning classroom agents.

Distinguishing and Appreciating the Relationship Between Things Realism begins with acknowledgment that reality exists independently of our understanding of it (an objectivist principle), while accepting that much of social reality is a human creation or construction achieved largely through discursive means (a subjectivist, constructivist principle). Realists recognize that, as researchers and people, we do not have direct access to objective and unmediated truth; although diverging from postmodernist thinkers, they also maintain that a commitment to objective knowledge must also characterize scientific inquiry. Longshore Smith (2006: 192) presents the critical realist stance towards objective knowledge thus: The interpretivist rejection of the causal power of the natural and social worlds belies their inclusion of this world in their research. If we reject any regulation of our knowledge by empirical data afforded us by the objective world, we have given up on the practice of science. This is neither an argument for the infallible nature of knowledge nor that we should not maintain a healthy epistemic skepticism. Instead it is an argument for an alternative conception of science that resolves this disjuncture through a new set of ontological premises.

Realism, in this sense, proposes a third option, beyond objectivism and subjectivism, which maintains its commitment to explaining causality in the social realm while recognizing the central importance of human meaning-making processes, of humans’ fallible interpretative capacities, and the undeniable influence of context and culture. This principle is captured by Huckle’s (2004: 37) definition of realism as acknowledging “that the mind only knows the world by means of perception, thought and language, but clings to the ontological assumption that

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there is a real objective knowable material world.” Unlike the common postmodernist critique that objectivism, or positivism, can only offer a deterministic, machine-like view of the social world, the realist acknowledgment that there is a realm out there beyond our understanding of it is not a form of capitulation to determinism, for “the nature of real objects at a given time does not predetermine what will happen. Instead the structures of objects enable what can happen through the workings of their mechanisms within geo-historical contexts” (Longshore Smith, 2006: 202). The fact that there is a realm beyond our understanding which influences our actions and experiences in important ways does not mean that we are inescapable victims of machine-like forces, as in radical structuralism, nor does it mean that we should be concerned exclusively with our experiences and our individual understandings of these experiences, as in radical forms of interactionism. Rather, a realist social science is, at its core, the pursuit of knowledge regarding how people make constrained choices in structured contexts. Realist thinkers often ground their work on another fundamental distinction between the transitive and the intransitive dimensions of social reality and scientific knowledge. Bhaskar (2008: 6, emphases mine) explains both dimensions thus: A transitive dimension [is one] in which the object is the material cause or antecedently established knowledge which is used to generate the new knowledge; and an intransitive dimension [is one] in which the object is the real structure or mechanism that exists and acts quite independently of men and the conditions which allow men access to it.

If we concentrate on the question of knowledge, for example, the transitive dimension of knowledge includes all our evolving ideas about the world, or the ideas we express and share with others on a day-today basis, while the intransitive dimension of knowledge includes all the antecedent and relatively enduring ideas about the world (e.g., religions, scientific ideas and concepts). The intransitive dimension of ideas also includes our formulations of the underlying causal mechanisms which exist regardless of whether or not they are perceived and understood by us. A fitting metaphor for the intransitive dimension would be a library

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containing books resting on bookshelves, regardless of whether or not they are actually read by people. From this distinction emerges the additional realist principle that our variegated discourses and understandings of social reality are not exclusively about the transitive realm (e.g., human knowledge as an ongoing “narrative”): they are inescapably in relation to the intransitive dimension as well as the material realm. It is fair, for example, to claim that a tree has no inherent or given meaning since it is humans, as meaning-makers and interpreters, who label it and invest it with particular meanings. However, the formulation and interpretation of the tree as meaningful object would be impossible without the tree existing outside the realm of subjective meaning. Stated differently, our capacity for meaning, which is indeed part of our distinct and emergent powers as human agents, in large part requires an objective reality. It is from this perspective that we can appreciate scientists’ necessary commitment to objective knowledge. Discourses also gain emergent properties of their own over time, moving from the transitive to the intransitive. We can see this process unfold as ideas, concepts, beliefs, ideologies, identities, intentions and meanings come to occupy a more stable place within the Cultural System (see below), or become naturalized within particular contexts, thus acting as powerful influences onto human being’s sense-making activities. The library metaphor above serves to explain this particular process of emergence. Ideas can therefore be understood not merely as social constructions with transitive (which can be interpreted to mean ephemeral ) qualities: they can also be considered as real as rocks or the weather, precisely because of their emergent properties and real causal powers to influence both agency and structure. If ideas can gain emergent properties and powers over time, for example, by influencing people’s lives and social/natural phenomena in consequential ways, we must therefore understand them as real and as possessing intransitive properties beyond situated interaction. To untangle these conceptual complexities and avoid conflationary conclusions, knowledge and truth must also be conceptually distinguished, to highlight the social roots of knowledge on the one hand and the truth as independent of belief on the other. This strategy makes realism a relativist perspective regarding knowledge while rejecting

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relativism with regards to truth (Elder-Vass, 2012). Again, this important nuance is grounded in recognition of the differences between the transitive and intransitive dimensions. However, this apparent dualism between knowledge and truth should not be alarming to social scientists, for as Elder-Vass (2012: 249) rightfully points out, if we have access to a social or symbolic world, then we have access to at least some part of the world that exists beyond us, and so it cannot be true that we are incapable of access to reality “out there”. If, on the other hand, we are incapable of access to any reality out there, then we are incapable of acquiring the conceptual scheme that is said to structure reality as we know it.

Within realism, there is no doubt that our ability to access and understand the social world is deeply influenced by culture, or our powers as human beings to generate and consume meaning; there is also no denying that much of this involves social constructions. At the same time, these principles should not lead us to the limiting (because relativist) conclusions that (a) society is merely a tightly knit realm of human-generated meanings, or that (b) everything we sense about the world “out there” is entirely the product of our meanings and concepts. As social researchers, explaining the intransitive dimension still remains our primary target. If everything about society was included in the transitive dimension, made up entirely of concepts and ideas, we would indeed inhabit a rather deterministic social world. This is an unacceptable conclusion, for the social realm and the people who populate it constitute an open system in large part because it possesses both intransitive and transitive dimensions in relation with each other, which also means that deterministic accounts of it are necessarily mistaken. In terms of causal explanation, the realist orientation towards objective knowledge is therefore far from deterministic, yet also committed to the view that phenomena do cause other phenomena to happen in society. It would be incredibly pessimistic and limiting, for example, to think that nothing which takes place within school walls ever leads to learning, or that language learning has never been improved or influenced by AL research. As explained below, realist thinkers question both

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extreme positivist views of causality which present causes-effect relationships in hydraulic ways, and the rather defeatist, anti-realist denial of causality altogether, common in constructivism and other postmodernist strands. In parallel with CDST to a very large extent, realism looks at causal mechanisms as complex, multiple, situated, and produced by a combination of multiple interacting mechanisms. The issue of causality is explored further below and in subsequent chapters on CDST. Core to realism, obviously, is the issue of how we define reality. For some especially in the interpretivist camp, since reality can never be apprehended through our senses, reality is therefore whatever people see, experience and understand. For example, real language is understood from this perspective not as a set of rules and items included in dictionaries, grammar books or state-mandated language policy documents, but rather as whatever people on the ground use to communicate. Understandably, this vision of language sees any language policy or planning effort, including attempts to explain the structures of languages in normative ways, as intrusive and counterproductive. This popular empiricist viewpoint notably promulgated by Shohamy (2006), Pennycook (2013) and other poststructuralist AL researchers has led to the increasing prominence in AL scholarship of the notion of languaging (Swain, 2006), or the complex use of different linguistic and semiotic resources in everyday communication. Ironically, these authors are often reluctant to distinguish between language and communication on ontological grounds. In contrast, while realists accept that languaging is empirical and actual (see below), and that it is quite different from antecedent language rules, norms and policies, they also consider the intransitive dimension of language as also important to a study of languaging practices and to AL research in a broader sense. While situated language acts are certainly part of reality as we experience it, realists also note that the empiricist view restricts us to what our senses allow us to perceive, and therefore cannot account for the full range of ontological properties and powers of language. In addition, realists recognize that, in everyday communication, people do more than use a variety of linguistic and semiotic resources: they also talk about objective realities and are also cognizant (at least to some extent) of norms, rules and processes as relevant to their

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communicative actions. Realism sees these norms, rules and processes as important regulating forces existing beyond the immediate communicative act which, in large part, have emerged and gained salience over long periods of time. There are also numerous social, political, economic, ideological, natural and biological elements that play important causal roles in situated interaction, and not all of these can be perceived or understood by situated communicators. “Real language, from a realist perspective, must therefore be something more than what is contained within the empirical realm, or embedded in situated communicative acts. Although postmodernists would reject this example, we only have to think of Chomsky’s “concern with the hidden operational code which makes instances of language behaviour possible” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 68) to get a sense that language is more than an empirical reality. To rephrase this argument about language differently and more succinctly, people do not entirely reinvent language and communication “in the moment”: other layers or strata of knowledge and resources beyond their reach are also involved in this process. In short, to account for real language, one must deal with both its transitive and intransitive dimensions. To clarify the notion of the “real introduced above, the realist philosopher Bhaskar (1998, 2008) identifies three different layers of reality: the empirical , the actual and the real . The empirical usually includes “facts” which exist within our sensorial reach, or what we perceive through the senses and through the application of data gathering techniques. Interview, survey and statistical analyses are very much concerned with this layer of reality. The actual, however, includes all the phenomena which exist as opposed to others which could have existed but did not. These include events that take place everywhere in the world, whether or not we are aware of them or able to perceive them empirically. Finally, the real constitutes the intransitive layer of reality, the realm where we can locate underlying generative mechanisms. It includes the more abstract, conceptual elements of society that, despite their intangible or intransitive nature, have very real causal effects on people in context. For example, while it is impossible for us to feel, delimit or measure a social class (income alone being an insufficient indicator of social class positions), social class divisions are nevertheless real in that they have

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real effects on people’s lives. To understand social class division as an underlying causal mechanism, we therefore need more than empirical knowledge. Sealey and Carter (2004: 70) also distinguish between what causes things to happen in the world, which we often cannot observe (the real), and the instances of experience of which we are immediately aware (the empirical). The intervening domain, the actual, is that part of reality events – which actually happen, as distinct from all those things which might have happened but did not. The reasons why the real does not inevitably coincide with the actual are attributable to the fact that the world is an ’open system’.

In other words, to explain why we cannot describe society (as an open system) in the same way we describe a car—i.e., as a machine with fixed parts and pre-set patterns of energy transfer—requires important conceptual distinctions to be made between these different layers of reality: the car is empirical, whereas much of society is not. The notion of society as open system will be revisited in subsequent chapters as we explore CDST. Table 4.1 shows how underlying causal mechanisms, social events and human experiences are differently distributed among the empirical, the actual and the real. Elder-Vass (2010: 44) notes that, in dividing reality thus, “Bhaskar clearly intends the domain of the empirical to be a subset of the domain of the actual, which in turn is a subset of the domain of the real.” Bhaskar’s distinction is valuable to the development of human understanding and experience of reality, for while the empirical can be accessed though the senses and through our measuring instruments, processes located at the level of the real can mainly be felt through their effects on empirically accessible and measurable phenomena. Some in the postmodernist camp claim on this basis that, if things can only be understood Table 4.1 Bhaskar’s ontological domains (Bhaskar, 2008: 46) Mechanisms Events Experiences

The Real √ √ √

The Actual

The Empirical

√ √

√

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through their effects on other things, they cannot essentially be considered “real. The problem with this view is that the real is reduced to the empirical. Not only does understanding the differences between the empirical, the actual and the real help us avoid this form of empiricism, it also helps us understand three important points about reality and our variegated understandings of it. Firstly, people’s experiences, events and mechanisms can unfold through different timeframes, thus be “out of synch” with each other, which can lead to contradictions and the potential for change. Secondly, there is thus no one-to-one relationship between reality and people’s experience and understanding of it. Thirdly, recognition of the latter point means that commitment to objective knowledge requires a stratified perspective. By conceptually separating the empirical from the actual and the real, realism also allows for the development of richer and more sophisticated theories and statements about the social realm. Collier (2011: 4, emphasis original) presents Bhaskar’s brand of critical realism as postulating “greater depth to reality than some other theories: it postulates real causal mechanisms beneath events.” This highlights the need for social scientists to engage actively in evidence-based theoretical deliberations to capture and understand the intransitive layer. What realism indeed makes clear is the need for social scientists to “discover these mechanisms, as opposed, on the one hand, to simply registering the obvious [i.e., what we perceive], or on the other, inventing them” (Collier, 2011: 5, emphasis mine). In other words, while we cannot access much of the intransitive layer, empirical knowledge nevertheless offers important points of entry as well as evidence against which theories and concepts can be judged and improved. In Chapter 2, the same argument was made to explain that, while statistical analysis cannot generate theory, it can be used to test theories. This is precisely where realism departs from interpretivist or subjectivist paradigms. Huckle (2004: 37), however, explains that although realism is not antagonistic to constructivism, it is not simply another version of it, for realism “accepts a weak social constructivism […] by recognising that social reality is pre-interpreted and that language, discourse and ideology shape its production and reproduction. At the same time it rejects a strong social constructivism that denies the material reality of nature.” This nuanced balance becomes necessary

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when attempting to relate phenomena at the empirical level to processes and mechanisms at the level of the real, by considering the contingent factors located at the level of the actual. Citing Layder (1993), Sealey and Carter (2004: 194) explain that the realist approach to AL research stresses the links between theory and the empirical world, seeking to steer between an approach in which the world tells us, as it were, what theories to have, so that ’the whole thrust and meaning of theory is irresistibly driven by the empirical world as it appears to our senses’ (Layder, 1993: 61) and an alternative approach which suggests that the connection between the empirical world and theory formation is arbitrary or contingent; that is that theories can be of little help with developing knowledge of the empirical world. Our belief that the world extends beyond our empirical knowledge of it does not imply or entail a reduction of the empirical simply to a portal through which access to ’deeper reality’ is enabled. The empirical, in other words, is no less an element of reality for being directly present in ways that other elements of the social world are not. Our central point here is that forms of measurement and classification are critical to research which seeks to explicate the connections between the empirical, the actual and the real dimensions of social relations. The aim, then, is an elaboration of the kind of ’...theory which is guided rather than limited by empirical evidence’ (ibid.: 63).

Bhaskar’s distinction between these three layers of reality helps us further distinguish realism from both objectivism and idealism, especially in how realism emphasizes the central role of theory in an exploration of the real. As Clegg (2006: 316) explains, critical realism rejects crude realism and its unified subject, and “entails the view that the world has depth and that the real cannot be reduced simply to experience, including of course the simple experience of the subject.” It is thus appropriate to conclude that charges of reductionism or positivism aimed at realism simply miss their mark. Very much aligned with complexity theory on this point, realism embraces the full complexity of the social realm by, in part, making clear ontological distinctions between phenomena under investigation.

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Rooted in its commitment to objective knowledge and its intention to reveal insight into the real, a realist social science builds on the principles outlined above to conceptualizes structure, culture and agency as different social strata, with distinct and emergent properties of their own. Elder-Vass (2010: 50) explains the consequences of a stratified view of social phenomena to an understanding of causality and social processes in a broader sense thus: Any given higher-level entity, then, can be seen as a pyramid of successively lower-level parts and the causal impact of the higher-level entity as a whole includes the causal impacts of those parts. At each level, the entities formed from the lower-level parts have causal powers in their own right by virtue of how those parts are organised. The total causal impact of a higher-level entity conceived of in these laminated terms, then, includes the impact of all its lower-level parts as well as the causal powers that are emergent at its highest level.

Counter determinism, the task of revealing the properties and powers of structure, culture and agency is therefore crucial in realist social research, because it is the basis upon which scientists can then explore how wholes are organized through sets of relations between their emergent parts. Elder-Vass (2010) also explains how a stratified view of the world leads researchers to appreciate multiple determination, or the idea (also found in CDST) that social realities are the outcomes of a combination of multiple causal forces interacting in complex ways. Counter relationism, the task of distinguishing between things should also not be considered as a form of capitulation to outdated modes of thinking, for it remains one of the central purposes of scientific endeavours in general. As Layder (2006: 106) argues, It is perfectly in order to say that society is a product of human activity while at the same time suggesting that people and society are very different. […] To say that people and society (social structures) are different things is merely to point to different aspects of social reality. This is similar to making distinctions in the natural world – such as those between air, earth, fire and water.

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Equally important, by acknowledging both the constructed nature of social phenomena and their emergent and at times material and intransitive features, realism (critical, social or otherwise) “does put rest to the myth that there is no alternative to poststructuralism except a reversion to a crude version of the unified rational subject, which poststructuralism has so ably deconstructed” (Clegg, 2006: 316). What Bhaskar’s (2008) intransitive/transitive distinction and empirical/actual/real layering also offer is an explanation for why differences are consequential to the task of explanation, and also why both natural and social scientists will never be able to reduce reality to their accounts of it. Realism, in this sense, constitutes a powerful anti-empiricist critique of both successionism and interpretivism, the two broad perspectives that have guided much of AL scholarship to date. Earlier in this book and in the above section, I have argued with regard to relationism that conceptualizing social phenomena as closely interrelated with other phenomena, although of undeniable scientific necessity, should not distract us from depicting them also as distinct from each other. Realism, in this sense, is equally interested in differences and interrelationships. However, by highlighting the important point that relationships unfold between ontologically different phenomena, realism avoids the common tendency among relationists to present relationships as entirely constitutive of these phenomena—e.g., the premise that language cannot be understood apart from its real-world uses, or that “policy is practice and practice is policy” (Shohamy, 2006: 165), for example. It is worth noting here that interactionists (and to some extent CDST adherents as well, as will be discussed in Chapter 6) strongly advocate a relational sociology. The constructivists, however, are more radical in their depictions of relationships as “transactions” that can be unpacked through analytical narratives. This is a considerable problem, for as Donati and Archer (2015: 18, emphases original) explain, ‘Being in relation’ is an ontological expression that has three analytical meanings: (i) it says that, between two (or more) entities there is a certain distance which, at the same time, distinguishes and connects them; (ii) it says that any such relation exists, that is, it is real in itself, irreducible to its progenitors, and possesses its own properties and causal powers; and

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(iii) it says that such a reality has its own modus essendi (the modality of the beings who are inside the relation which refers to the internal structure of the social relation and its dynamics) and is responsible for its emergent properties, that is, relational goods and evils. These three meanings are analytical, because – from an empirical viewpoint – every relation contains all these aspects, which are closely interlinked.

Realism thus suggests that relationships are possible when they unfold between ontologically distinct and emergent phenomena, and that consequently studying these relationships necessitates a study of their differences. In addition, since their causal effects can vary depending on the nature of that relationship, the relationship itself must also be considered real and distinct from the two phenomena it connects. Recognition of these principles thus allows us to avoid the relationist trap—i.e., to reduce social phenomena to their relationships with other phenomena, which can lead to upward, downward or central conflations (Archer, 1995). At the same time, relationships matter a great deal to the constitution, maintenance and transformation of society and the phenomena within it, for it is within social relationships—notably the structure–agency relationship—that the powers of causal mechanisms can be deployed (Donati & Archer, 2015). Complimenting this relational perspective is the related principle that the absence of relationship can also bear causal significance to social events. In this sense, explaining society only in terms of existing networks of relationships between existing social phenomena is reductive because it overlooks the importance of dissociative relations, which are indeed relationships but not in the sense contained within a relationist perspective. As is perhaps becoming clearer to readers at this point, realism requires scholars to both clarify and maintain important analytical distinctions between things, between the different layers or strata of social reality, and between different dimensions of knowledge, before launching into the study of social phenomena and their relationships. This perspective goes against recent postmodern argumentations rejecting differences as ‘dichotomies”. But as Cilliers (2001: 141) rightfully points out, “we often

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fall into the trap of thinking of a boundary as something which separates one thing from another. We should rather think of a boundary as something that constitutes that which is bounded. This shift will help us see the boundary as something enabling rather than confining.” Realism, particularly its social strand, is clearly on the side of a relational sociology, but not one where relationships subsume everything to the point where distinctions become untenable. Rather, social stability and change are both understood as emerging from relationships in the social world. Yet, just as the related phenomena are also understood as different, given their emergent properties, so is their relationship. Donati and Archer (2015: 29) explain that the relation has properties and powers that generically surpass ‘social interactions’ […] Among various properties and powers of relations to be accentuated are at least two that are connected to one another. First, the social relation is intrinsically reflexive, in the sense that it ‘is always bent back’ on to the subjects that are in the relation. […] Second, and in parallel, this means that the social relation can never work purely mechanically because it has a ternary, not binary, structure.

To further understand why the study of relationships between social phenomena also implies a study of their differences, we need to unpack the notion of emergence, fundamental to both realism and CDST although not necessarily in identical ways.

Emergence As the title of this book suggests, understanding the notion of emergence is pivotal to efforts towards a renewed AL research. This view is directly aligned with Gerrits and Verweij’s (2013: 169) argument that “emergence serves as an ontological vehicle for thinking about the nature of causation.” According to Sayer (2000: 12–13, emphasis mine), emergence involves

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situations in which the conjunction of two or more features or aspects [of an object, system, or phenomenon] gives rise to new phenomena, which have properties which are irreducible to those of their constituents, even though the latter are necessary for their existence. The standard physical example of this is the emergent properties of water which are quite different from those of its constituents, hydrogen and oxygen. In the same way, social phenomena are emergent from biological phenomena, which are in turn emergent from the chemical and physical strata.

When we consider emergence as it relates to learning, for example, we can say that mental properties cannot be fully explained as outcomes of the interaction between the physical/chemical/biological elements in the brain. Rather, people’s mental capacities emerge from these elements, gaining distinct properties and powers which cannot be reduced to or fully explained by these constituting elements. Moreover, emergent mental properties can in turn impact the physical/chemical/biological elements in the brain, creating a feedback loop (to use CDST terminology). At the social level, while individual beings possess emergent properties which can influence the groups to which they belong to, these groups and communities can also be said to possess emergent properties of important causal consequences to their members (e.g., the emergence of rules, patterns, roles, power structures, etc.). When we talk about emergence as a crucial element in our analyses, we are not merely concerned with explaining how things evolve over time, or how they are different from other things: we are also trying to explain how phenomena are causally linked. For emergent properties to exist, a specific structure of relations between the constituting parts of an object, system or phenomenon must be in place. This criterion can be referred to as intrastructuration, whereby “the properties of an entity are altered as a consequence of its having become part of a particular type of whole” (Elder-Vass, 2010: 27). Sealey and Carter (2004) list three core features of emergent social phenomena: (1) they are generated from their constituent parts but cannot be reduced to them; (2) the relations between their constituent parts are necessary rather than contingent; and (3) their emergent properties can have a causal influence on the context for subsequent social interaction. With

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regards to the structure–agency interaction, the authors argue that “emergence is what makes the identification of structures possible, for the irreducibility, endurance and autonomous influence of emergent properties entails that they pre-date any particular set of incumbents” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 13). Their argument further clarifies why the concept of emergence is pivotal to causal explanation, and why determinism or other conflationary understandings of the structure–agency relationship are inadequate to account for complexity and causality. Because of this necessary relationship between emergence and causality, it would be contradictory to discuss emergence as a property of social phenomena on the one hand, while dismissing the concept of causality as “deterministic” on the other, as interactionists (and some CDST adherents) do. The importance of emergence to causal accounts is discussed further in the next section. Here are three examples that further explain emergence in the social realm. While the emotional life of human beings depends on the activation of certain regions in the limbic system—a process itself dependent on the existence of a flesh-and-blood human body—emotions cannot be reduced to or fully explained by these flows of energy, since emotions are both physical realities and part of the ideational realm of human existence. Likewise, language might be partly structured by grammatical rules and other linguistic items which have gained relatively enduring properties over long periods of time, although the individual components of language cannot—either separately or together in the aggregative sense—account for the full ontological scope of language and its centrality in human communication. The third example is the high school graduate who enters a university and must consequently develop knowledge of and adopt different roles, responsibilities and strategies for learning. This example also shows that the university itself, and that individual students who populate its classrooms, are emergent entities. As Elder-Vass (2010: 28) clarifies, “sometimes, when a person acts, they do so both as an individual and as a part of a structure. In such cases, the structure acts through the person and the person implements the structure’s causal power.” In other words, we cannot reduce the university simply to the sum total of its members precisely because, as an emergent entity, it exists (or emerges) out of a specific set of relations between

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its parts (e.g., students, faculty members, administrative staff, etc.), who would normally be unable to fulfil their functions in the university if the university itself did not act through its individual and collective members. In short, to understand how things affect, influence or cause other things to happen, we need to consider the emergent properties and powers of phenomena under scrutiny. There are, of course, different understandings of the notion of emergence, and these differences can indeed influence how causality is understood. Elder-Vass (2010) distinguishes between temporal emergence—the development of a new state or phenomenon over time, often due to changes in context/conditions—and synchronic emergence—the relationship between the whole and its parts at any given moment. As the author suggests, it is crucial to distinguish between these two types of emergence: The temporal sense of emergence refers to the first appearance of a thing, or its development over a period of time. Anything that exists (unless it has always existed) must have emerged at some time in this temporal sense; but this does not necessarily mean that it possesses emergent properties. [Instead] synchronic emergence […] is a relationship between the properties of a whole and its parts at a particular moment in time. (Elder-Vass, 2010: 5, emphasis mine)

Equipped with this understanding, the realist emphasis on synchronic emergence recognizes that “collective phenomena are collaboratively created by individuals yet are not reducible to individual action” (Sawyer, 2001: 552). In other words, collective realities are not epiphenomena of individual realities, and so must be conceptualized as different realities from individual ones on the basis of their emergent properties. In contrast, methodological individualists tend to view emergence as a property of individuals and their relationships. Sawyer (2001) explains that “methodological individualism’s focus on micro-to-macro processes is explicitly considered to be a study of how social properties emerge from individual action”, and argues that these are two contradictory contemporary understandings of emergence which lead to very different analytical observations and conclusions. This distinction between synchronic

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and temporal emergence, according to Elder-Vass (2010), matters a great deal to causal explanations, because looking at causal mechanisms—elements which again are part of the real—requires consideration for synchronic emergence. The author justifies this position with the following arguments: It is not the case that new emergent properties are created from nothing the first time that they appear and are then somehow available for further instantiation. […] Furthermore, in most cases there is no significant sense in which subsequent instances of an entity ‘inherit’ an emergent property from the first one. (p. 46)

In short, accounting for how elements with causal powers are—i.e., their constituting properties and powers—and how they become over time are two different types of causal explanations based on two different understandings of emergence. The notion of emergence not only contradicts all deterministic viewpoints, and has fundamental implications for research, for as Elder-Vass (2010: 19) explains, emergence is inherently compositional: “any given entity, then, can be seen as internally stratified into many different levels or layers, each level representing sets of parts that are combined into the entities at the next level up.” Collier (2011) also relates the realist view of emergence with the idea that society and its constituent parts are stratified entities. Elder-Vass highlights five core questions of relevance to the study of emergence: Any claim that an entity possesses an emergent property must be supported by the answers to five questions: (a) what are its parts?; (b) what are the relations between those parts that are characteristic of this particular type of entity?; (c) what set of morphogenetic causes has produced the entity in its current form?; (d) what set of morphostatic causes stabilises the entity and ensures its continued survival?; and (e) through what mechanisms do its parts and relations produce the specific properties of the entity?” (Elder-Vass, 2010: 38–39)

Together, these questions serve to further elucidate both emergence and the causal links between social phenomena. As Elder-Vass (2010: 40)

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argues, “the theory of emergence matters because it provides the essential foundation for understanding how causal forces operate in the world.” This places emergence—a necessary condition for causality—at the heart of a realist social ontology.

Emergence and Causality As a non-conflationary social ontology, realism holds that, because of their emergent properties, social phenomena (e.g., people, beliefs, mechanisms) can cause—or at least create the conditions for—other phenomena to emerge, or changes in other phenomena to occur. Reversing this claim, if social phenomena did not possess any emergent properties or powers whatsoever, they would essentially be determined entities, rendering explanation irrelevant. The notion of causality is often understood by contemporary social scientists, particularly interactionists, constructionists and certainly poststructuralists, as somewhat deterministic. Some CDST adherents have also demonstrated moderate support for this view. For example, LarsenFreeman and Cameron (2008) define causality as a heritage of the Enlightenment and the product of a “logic of determinism,” a statement which comes from a particular understanding of causality—namely the deductive-nomological model of causality—which explains cause–effect relationships in linear terms, thus as relatively predictable. According to this model, if researchers can demonstrate that one outcome always results from the interaction between two phenomena, they can then postulate the existence of a causal “law”. As the discussion on statistical analysis in Chapter Two has demonstrated, constant conjunctions are not necessarily evidence of causality. Yet, while Larsen-Freeman and Cameron are justified in their critique of the deductive-nomological model, causality is not fully explained by this model alone. When social scientists reject the deductive-nomological model, they often adopt relativistic views of causality, leading many to argue that, unlike the natural sciences, the social sciences have little to do with causality altogether. Grounding this perspective is the argument that, unlike natural phenomena which can be predicted with more

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certainty (e.g., unless it is very pure and very still, or unless we add pressure or additives to it, water will freeze once reaching zero degree Celcius), social realities are very difficult to predict because humans are also somewhat unpredictable. Although realist thinkers also consider the unpredictable nature of human beings as an important element to consider in the study of social realities, acceptance of this point does not lead them to reject causality altogether, nor the possibility for patterns to emerge in society. As Collier (2011: 7) counters, “since social causes will co-determine the course of events with natural causes, social sciences must be causal in the same sense as natural sciences are.” Stated differently, and recognizing at least one of the points made by posthumanists, the natural and the social worlds are not entirely different or mutually exclusive. For example, classroom language learning, while a fundamentally social endeavour, nevertheless depends on and is deeply influenced by objective realities and natural events. The Covid-19 outbreak in 2020 demonstrates this relationship rather clearly, as millions of students around the globe were directly affected by school shutdowns, and education around the world gradually moved from face-to-face to online interaction, thus fundamentally affecting educational realities all over the world. Of course, whether one is a realist, a postmodernist, a posthumanist or a CDST adherent, common sense and everyday experience of social realities should reveal that causality in society is not identical to causality in the natural world. Nevertheless, instead of rejecting causality altogether, social scientists sometimes need different terms, concepts and models to account for it than those used in the natural sciences. Despite these important differences and challenges, realism remains committed to explaining causality in the social realm. This element in realist social ontology emerged largely through the work of Bhaskar (1998, 2008), who holds that because causality is real, it can also be researched. Bhaskar’s distinction between the empirical, the actual and the real provides grounds for this type of inquiry, for “external events, processes or behaviours [at the level of the actual], the effects of underlying mechanisms [at the level of the real], can be observed [at the level of the empirical] as they unfold” (Gerrits & Verweij, 2013: 172, emphases mine). In their common rejection of determinism, realist social scientists thus advocate provisional causal explanations which consider

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how a phenomenon follows from previous phenomena, and the mechanisms which motivate causal processes as well as human behaviour and action. Elder-Vass (2010: 178) unpacks this notion of provisional causal explanation in realism thus: A good explanation will seek to focus selectively on the most relevant causal factors and there are at least two important criteria of relevance: first, the aspect of the event that we are seeking to explain, and secondly, which powers make the most significant contribution to this aspect of the event. In practice, we do not seek to explain all aspects of an event, even as simple an event as selling something in a shop. Instead, there are specific things we want to know.

And while realist accounts of causality remain partial at best, they nevertheless remain committed to objective knowledge. Layder (1993: 16) offers a similar argument, pointing out that a central feature of realism is its attempt to preserve a ‘scientific’ attitude towards social analysis at the same time as recognizing the importance of actors’ meanings and in some way incorporating them in research. As such, a key aspect of the realist project is a concern with causality and the identification of causal mechanisms in social phenomena in a manner quite unlike the traditional positivist search for causal generalizations.

Complexity theorists including Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008) hold somewhat parallel views, and while they justifiably reject the deductive-nomological model, they also do not reject the importance of causal relationships to explanations of social phenomena. In sharp contrast, postmodernists generally disagree with such approach, instead holding on to a reductive view of causality as deterministic and illfitted to the study of social realities. Exploring a Foucauldian approach to educational research, for example, Olssen (2004) reveals a tendency among poststructuralist thinkers to associate causality with the philosophies of Hegel and Marx, and in the same argumentation, posit any concern with causality as a philosophical “trap”, or a digression from

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the more important task of identifying logical or epistemological relations within discourse practices. These sorts of conceptual problems are common in ontologically flattened social ontologies. Critiquing the common postmodernist rejection of causality as linear, deterministic and essentialist, Sayer (2000) argues that if the concept of causality is rejected, or if one cause is not established as more important than another cause, our hair colour would have to be deemed just as vital for our survival as the functioning of our hearts. If all causes are equal, it is not clear how we could explain anything, or how one could ever hope to achieve anything (cause something to happen) by acting, for if no cause is more important than any other, then doing nothing is as effective as doing something. To say that A was caused by B, not C, is not to claim some kind of ultimate truth; like any other such claim it is open to revision, but that doesn’t mean that we can remain agnostic about causal priority. Our survival depends on identifying it – not ‘ultimately’, but well enough to be able to meet our needs. (p. 73)

We can therefore summarize the general realist view of causality as based on recognition that “causal relations are relations of natural or metaphysical necessity, rather than of contingent sequence” (Groff, 2008: 2). This view attempts to explain the “non-law-like”, or unpredictable quality of causality in the social realm, not as evidence that causality is irrelevant to scientific sociological explanation, nor as a particular kind of freedom possessed by a complex social system, but rather as the outcome of society being an open system on the one hand, and social phenomena possessing emergent properties on the other. Stated differently, in attempting to explain causality, the realist approach considers factors both internal and external to the social phenomena in question, and as indicated earlier, this is where the notion of emergence gains primal importance in the formulation of explanatory statements. Perhaps more specific to the realist view of causality is the idea that causal mechanisms act as powerful entities in the social realm, although again not in a linear or deterministic fashion but rather through multiple causation. Also found in CDST, this view is captured by Longshore Smith (2006: 203) thus: “The flux of events is always co-determined by a myriad of interacting mechanisms. This co-determination renders

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accusations of determinism irrelevant.” Included in these multiple causal influences are human agents as powerful particulars, with the power to make things happen in society. Kaidesoja (2013) provides a parallel argument whereby humans’ capacity for reasoning constitutes a causal mechanism: “reason can be interpreted as generative mechanisms that produce behavior in a way analogous to the ways in which the generative mechanisms studied in the natural sciences produce observable effects” (pp. 125–126). This further highlights the need to draw ontological distinctions between structure and agency in order to explain how reflexive engagement by human agents unfolds (Perez-Milans, 2017). Donati and Archer (2015: 17) explain the realist view of causality as “an explanatory framework for the transformation of social and cultural structures as a process that is continuously mediated by human agency, with agents themselves becoming transformed in the course of social transformation.” Social structures, on the other hand, are not necessarily powerful particulars; instead, they are conceptualized as the material causes of social actions (Lewis, 2000), and as such, as providing the conditions, resources and often the motivations for social change and/or stability. To put it differently through an example, schools and educational programs do not cause learning to take place, although learners manage to learn in large part because of the resources and constraining/enabling influences afforded by schools and educational programs. Just as there are multiple causes to social phenomena, we must also recognize that patterns and regularities do emerge in society, as the example of democratic peace (Goertz, 2012) discussed in Chapter 2 has suggested. However, these important elements of analytical interest for researchers are not understood from a realist perspective as regular, expectable outcomes of hydraulic causal forces. As Elder-Vass (2010: 47) states: “even when they are actualised by being instantiated in actual things, however, mechanisms and powers […] tend to produce certain effects, but this tendency may be blocked by countervailing powers, and so there is no guarantee or necessity that these tendencies will be realised in any given case.” Therefore, a particularly important point of interest for social scientists is the interaction of causal powers which lead to the emergence of specific social phenomena in specific contexts

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and at specific times. This view clearly goes against a Humean view of causality as mere constant conjunction; instead, it is based on the principle that causal powers are not mere concepts but rather the real sources of real effects in the real world. As Kaidesoja (2013: 106) points out, “the natural necessity that connects causes to their effects in causal relations is […] a real feature of the world, not a feature that the mind or human understanding has somehow imposed or projected onto reality, as Kantians might argue.” In addition, the realist view of causality “also precludes relativism about knowledge – for if the world is not all possible ways, then all competing claims about it cannot be equally sound.” (Groff, 2008: 4). Again, explaining causality in society requires an account of the emergent properties of social phenomena. Explaining causality begins with a conceptual distinction between structure and agency not as “two sides of the same coin”, but rather as different kinds of emergent entities, as shown by the differences in their properties and powers, despite the fact that they are crucial for each other’s formation, continuation and development. Thus, an educational system can be “centralized”, whilst a person cannot, and humans are “emotional”, which cannot be the case for structures. (Archer, 2011: 62)

With this emphasis on the distinctive features of structure and agency, we then need to distinguish causal claims from compositional claims (the latter being characteristic of a Giddensian view of causality). Elder-Vass (2010: 141) summarizes this point thus: “to say that structure “enters into the constitution” of knowledge is to move smoothly from the plausible causal claim that structure (in the sense of our external normative environment) causes our normative beliefs and dispositions to the utterly untenable compositional claim that structure is therefore a part of us.” The section on underlying causal mechanisms which follows highlights a similar distinction between causal and constitutive explanations of causality. The corollary principle is that structure and agency unfold diachronically, or within different time frames. Archer’s (1995) morphogenetic approach—a core element of social realism—stipulates that “structure

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necessarily predates the actions which transform it; and that structural elaboration necessarily post-dates those actions” (p. 90). The following succession of causal events outlines the morphogenetic cycle: Structural Conditioning → Social Interaction → Structural Elaboration Depicted in temporal terms, structure and agency must then be understood not as simultaneously related to each other, but rather as operating in asynchronous fashion. Archer (2011: 67) adds that, within the morphogenetic cycle, what we see is double morphogenesis: Not only is structure transformed but so is agency […] As it re-shapes structural relations […] agency is ineluctably re-shaping itself: in terms of domination and subordination, of organization, combination and articulation; in terms of its vested interests and these in relation to those of other agents; in terms of the new roles and positions that some occupy and others do not; and in terms of the novel situations in which all agents now find themselves, constraining to the projects of some and enabling to the projects of others, yet of significance to the motivation of all.

The notion of double morphogenesis (and in my view the parallel notion of feedback loop in CDST for that matter) underscores the realist view of causality within a stratified social realm which allows researchers to consider different units and timescales involved in the ongoing production of social reality (Layder, 1993). This stratified view of society and its component parts is based on the idea that causal explanations require insight into emergence, and from a different angle, insight into underlying causal mechanisms, a notion which has surfaced a few times in this book and which I now turn to.

Underlying Causal Mechanisms As discussed previously, AL as an applied field of inquiry necessitates theoretical engagement because (a) society and its constituting elements are emergent, stratified and complex, and interact with other emergent, stratified and complex phenomena, (b) guiding social practice and

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solving social problems require models of causality, and (c) empirical knowledge does not provide all the information required for the development of such models. By considering both the opaqueness of society and social transformation as core social research principles, AL scholars must therefore consider not only human agency as powerful particular but also underlying mechanisms as causally meaningful to the realities they study, mechanisms which it must be stressed are located at the level of the real. The opaqueness and indeterminacy of social phenomena has led some within constructivist and postmodernist circles to claim that, unlike the natural sciences, the social sciences are not about uncovering lawlike orderliness but rather about understanding the constantly changing complexity found at the local level. From this angle, if generalizability is ever possible in the social sciences, it would only involve the replicability of research methodologies. Although not entirely misguided, this view is somewhat defeatist, for as already discussed in Chapter 2 society reveals patterns and some degree of orderliness, and scientists must consequently account for these both theoretically and methodologically. Abrams (2012: 195) disagrees even more strongly with postmodernist relativism by pointing out that, despite the seeming indeterministic nature of society and social phenomena, “many social systems have a causal structure which makes it difficult for any but a narrow range of frequencies to be produced over a wide range of initial conditions.” Later on, the author comments on statistical regularity thus: “when frequencies are stable, however, there would seem to be something systematic about the underlying social system that produces that stability. Since such systematic facts would generate stable frequencies, it’s reasonable to view them as playing a role in constituting objective probabilities inhering in the social system” (p. 218). It is in large part from this understanding that realists, particularly critical realists, look at underlying generative mechanisms as causally efficacious social phenomena. Further grounding this stratified view are Sealey and Carter (2004: 184), who argue that, given the rather abstract nature of social structures, “research entails discovering the world as opposed to revealing it. That is to say, the very abstractness of social structural relations makes their theoretical apprehension both more critical and at the same time more

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fallible. Appeals to empirical evidence in these domains must always be indirect.” To consider phenomena beyond the empirical, at the level of the actual and the real, researchers must consequently be equipped with causal models. As Sørensen (1998: 239–240) explains with regards to the theoretical quality of mechanism-based explanation, developing theoretical ideas about social processes is to specify some concept of what brings about a certain outcome – a change in political regimes, a new job, an increase in corporate performance, a gain in status, or an increase in score on an academic achievement test. The development of the conceptualization of change amounts to proposing a mechanism for a social process.

Also clear from this statement is that underlying causal mechanisms are not exclusively society-wide but can also be rather local. For example, extending Kaidesoja’s (2013) point that humans’ capacity for reasoning can be a causal mechanism, the learning process can be considered a causal mechanism. Although direct evidence of learning cannot be gathered empirically—given that test results, for example, are only possible traces of learning at particular points in time and not evidence of learning itself—learning can be understood conceptually, and can certainly affect other processes such as mental growth and the emancipation of learners. As will be discussed further below, human reflexivity can also be considered a causal mechanism of a local nature. To sum up, the following three assumptions help clarify the realist view of underlying causal mechanisms developed in this chapter: (a) causality involves a range of processes that lead to a particular outcome, (b) if there is causality, causal mechanisms must therefore be involved, and (c) detecting and understanding causal mechanisms—as intransitive phenomena—requires a combination of empirical and conceptual knowledge. From this basis, scientists concerned with causal explanations then formulate hypotheses regarding the possible cause(s) which might bring about the outcome in question. An early reference to causal mechanisms, more closely aligned with structuralism yet which fits rather well within a critical realist ontology, is provided by Merton (1968), who defines social mechanisms as processes

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with specific consequences on specific structural elements, and that the goal for researchers is to describe and explain the conditions under which these mechanisms operate (or do not). Elster (1998: 45, emphasis original) explains that social mechanisms are “frequently occurring and easily recognizable causal patterns that are triggered under generally unknown conditions or with indeterminate consequences. They allow us to explain but not to predict.” In other words, referring to causal mechanisms is valuable to explanations of both local and broader social phenomena because of the particular causal patterns they elucidate and because we can identify them across various situations. A more general viewpoint is provided by Sørensen (1998: 240), who defines a mechanism as “an account of how change in some variable is brought about – a conceptualization of what ‘goes into’ a process.” Mechanism-based explanations are thus crucial to the social sciences, and help us move beyond postmodernism’s rather hopeless relativism because they provide a view of reality that is more general than the phenomena they lead to (Elster, 1998). They are, to put it differently, fallible because they are constructed discursively, yet they are also necessarily about realities located at the level of the real, and thus products of our commitment to objective knowledge, thus of central importance our scientific understandings of causal relationships in the social world. For educators, education theorists, applied linguists, and language practitioners in general, accepting the notion of causal mechanism is thus of central importance to the type of work we do. Although the above discussion might resonate with some social scientists, for others aligned with a postmodernist point of view, the very mention of causal mechanisms can conjure the much-loathed image of a social world determined by mechanistic forces, producing regular and expectable social regularities without the hope of change and elaboration, reducing human beings to structural/cultural “play dough”. Admittedly, realists are equally weary of this hydraulic image. As Easton (2010: 122) puts it, the term mechanism has problematic connotations since it implies clear structure and invariance in operation, something that critical realists would reject. A better portmanteau term would be deep generative

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processes and structures. […] they are ways in which structured entities by means of their powers and liabilities act and cause particular events. […] They do not need to be linear additive as required by statistical models or logico-rational as in box and arrow diagrams. Instead they can be linguistic in nature and metaphorical.

Realists not only reject this hydraulic view often associated with the notion of mechanism, they also hold that it goes against the very notion of causal “law” itself. As Elster (1998: 48) clarifies, “the antonym of a mechanism is a scientific law. A law asserts that given certain initial conditions, an event of a given type (the cause) will always produce an event of some other type (the effect).” In other words, while scientific laws are deterministic, mechanisms are probabilistic, pointing in the direction of tendencies and patterns. Porpora (2011) explains that causal mechanisms have nothing to do with a linear, mechanistic view of social processes; instead, they are very much aligned with a complexity view offered by CDST, as well as an interpretative, hermeneutic understanding of the social sciences: It is first of all an immediate mistake to assume the word mechanism necessarily connotes something we would normally consider mechanistic; something, that is, necessarily sub-human. […] When [realism] speaks of causal mechanisms, then, it speaks of what makes things work. Generally, that involves a reference to some kind of causal structure. In biology, for example, we might speak of the structure of the DNA molecule, a very special “double helix”. In physics, we might speak of the structure of an atom. One major consequence of this conception of causality is the realization that much of even natural science is qualitative.” (pp. 160– 161, emphasis mine)

Instead of social causes and effect relationships being hydraulic or mechanical, realists prefer stochastic as a more appropriate label. In Collier’s (2011: 8–9, emphases original) words, social causes are “features of things which produce certain outcomes given certain inputs. […] So rather than saying that there is a law by which whenever A happens, B happens, we say that there is a mechanism by which a particular structure or institution generates a particular tendency.” Here, tendency

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must also be distinguished from regularity. Realism does not approach causality only as involving relations among social events (specifically patterned relations), but rather approaches it as a set of complex relationships between causal mechanisms and the causal potentials of social phenomena. As Kaidesoja (2013: 107) explains, the powers of a certain powerful particular does not cease to exist outside the conditions where they are exercised as long as the nature of the particular does not change. Therefore, causal powers should be conceived of as causal potencies of things, which determine what the thing will (or can) do in the appropriate conditions.

As mentioned earlier, while causal relationships can be patterned, they can also be local. Put differently, things happen in society because of the existence of causal mechanisms which provide resources, relations and conditioning forces on the one hand, and the capacity of people within local contexts to make things happen on the other. Without agency, mechanisms cannot effectuate causality on their own, thus cancelling the critique that mechanism-based causal explanations are deterministic. As Bhaskar (2008: 9) argues, if science is to be possible the world must consist of enduring and transfactually active mechanisms; society must consist of an ensemble of powers irreducible to but present only in the intentional actions of men; and men must be causal agents capable of acting self-consciously on the world. They do so in an endeavour to express to themselves in thought the diverse and deeper structures that account in their complex manifold determinations for all the phenomena of our world.

This interest in causal mechanism is therefore not a denial of agency, nor is it a denial of the centrality of empirical “facts” to the development of sociological insight; rather, it is acknowledgement that people talk, choose and act in constrained fashion, within structured contexts, and that patterns in society are therefore possible and consequently need to be accounted for in causal terms. As we saw in Chapter 2, studying causality requires more than measurement of empirical regularity, which is what the covering law

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of causality offers. Hedström and Swedberg (1998: 11) provide a clear example to illustrate this point: A statistical association between “class” and income, or “class” and health, tells us that individuals from certain “classes” have lower incomes or worse health than others, but it says nothing about why this is the case. To answer such questions, it is necessary to introduce and explicate the generative mechanisms that might have produced the observed differences in average income or health between the occupational groups that the researchers have assigned to different “classes.”

Statistical relationships represented in graphs, for example, sometimes create patterns such as S shapes and so forth. In and of themselves, these cannot be called social mechanisms or visual representations of mechanisms. However, these patterns and relationships can be generated by underlying causal mechanisms, although to reach this level of interpretation—again, mechanism-based causal explanations are interpretations of underlying phenomena (Schelling, 1998)—the use of theory is necessary. Schelling lists three advantages of viewing statistical patterns in our data from the angle of social mechanisms: (1) the possibility to explain not only patterns but also exceptions to those patterns not as mere “noise” but as potentially related to these and other mechanisms; (2) once mechanisms are identified and explained, the possibility to use them as a template to explain other empirical phenomena; and (3) the possibility for intervention if, for example, problematic phenomena (e.g., systemic racism, sexism, etc.) can be related to specific mechanisms. In short, explaining patterns as products of causal links requires a causal theory which attempts to account for the relationship between agency, underlying generative mechanisms and observable patterns, as well as the irregularities which inevitably surface in sociological data. After all, phenomena that rarely happen in society (e.g., 95% of the population of a country agreeing on a single issue) also encompass causal processes. Consequently, what matters to causal explanation is for causality to be of relational necessity (Groff, 2008). This notion is at the heart of the realist rejection of causality as mere statistical regularity, for

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if causality in the social realm was otherwise, the latter would be deterministically driven, and social sciences would essentially be a matter of description, not explanation. Porpora (2011: 164–165) points out that, for realism, an event-regularity, even in the rigorous form of a regression equation, cannot ever serve as an explanation. It is at most one, fallible piece of evidence for an explanation. […] when critical realists use statistical techniques […] the statistics are employed to indicate the operation of a mechanism in a particular socio-historical situation. […] Statistics, as mentioned, should function as a form of evidence for an explanation rather than as the explanation itself.

The author then purports that causal explanations in the social sciences, as with the natural sciences, are thus inherently qualitative and that researchers belonging to all scientific strands must indeed be confident in seeking to develop even bolder explanations of causal mechanisms. Generally speaking, when discussing causality (either from a mechanism-based approach or otherwise), it is important to distinguish between different types of causal relationships. Firstly, we should distinguish between causal and constitutive explanations of causality: A causal explanation tells us how the antecedent events and their organization (timing and location) bring about the event to be explained. In contrast, a constitutive explanation describes how the properties of the components and their organization give rise to the system’s properties. […] In the case of causation […] differences are in antecedent events; in the case of constitution […] differences are in the properties of parts (or in their organization). (Ylikoski, 2012: 34, emphases original)

For example, explaining what learner motivation is and how it affects language learning are different kinds of scientific quests because they focus on different explananda. With mechanism-based causal explanations, we can also make two different types of claims about causality: regarding the existence of a causal relationship and regarding the degree to which causality has taken place. As Kincaid (2012: 49) puts it, “it is

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one thing to know that C causes E, another to know how changes in the various values of C result in different values of E.” Waldner (2012) identifies four types of causal relationships, and for each, I suggest examples (or lack thereof ) related to language learning: 1. regularity causation, whereby two events are said to be causally linked because one of them repeatedly follows the other (e.g., whenever we see a motivated language learner, we also denote greater engagement on his/her part in the learning task); 2. counterfactual causation, whereby if one event would not unfold, the other would not happen (e.g., if language teachers do not clarify how specific cultural norms influences language use, students might not notice the connections between culture and language); 3. intervention causation, whereby two events are said to be causally connected if the appropriate intervention(s) is/are made on one variable, leading to a causal effect on the other variable, and possibly a feedback effect onto the first variable (e.g., a teacher giving an insightful and fun lesson, and students feeling motivated and engaged as a result, which in turn leads the teacher to love his/her job); and finally 4. mechanistic causation, whereby a causal mechanism is triggered by one event, which then leads to the generation of another event (as pointed out earlier, this hydraulic model of causality does not necessarily apply to social phenomena including language-related phenomena). We can also distinguish between necessary causes and sufficient causes, although as already pointed out, mechanism-based causal explanations place more emphasis on necessary causes. Kincaid (2012: 59) sheds light on this important distinction: One route to causal complexity arises from necessary causes. When causes for an outcome are essential – the outcome does not happen without them – we can call them necessary causes. Contrast necessary causes with sufficient causes, where the latter have a causal effect on their own, but other factors can bring about the effect as well. Necessary causes,

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on the other hand, do not on their own produce the outcome in question. Necessary causes are an obvious type of mechanism, in that they are components of a complex cause that brings about an outcome. […] Necessary causes need not produce consistent associations. Since they work only in combination with other factors to produce an outcome, their correlation with the outcome can be tenuous.

In short, while necessary causes (as inherently relational phenomena) do not cause things to happen on their own, they are necessary for that, without them, the causal relationship leading to the emergence of the phenomenon under scrutiny cannot be fully explained. Within the context of language learning, for example, learner motivation can be understood as necessary for language learning to happen, and cannot be replaced by another factor or learner characteristics to account for the same outcome(s). At the same time, the complexity of social phenomena implies that cause–effects relationships are almost never produced by a singular variable causing a change in another variable. As such, motivation cannot account for successful language learning on its own: it can only be part of a more complex causal landscape. Kincaid (2012) explains similarly the indirect effects of education on growth: It might very well be that education is a necessary cause of development. Well-educated individuals living in a society that does not have the institutions and markets to put their skills to good use will find those skills wasted; they will contribute little or nothing to growth. […] As a necessary cause, education’s effect will be dependent on the presence of other causal factors. To the extent that those factors are missing, correlational methods will show low to nonexistent effects and miss its real importance. (p. 60)

Economists usually account for this in terms of complementarities, whereby the influence of one factor depends on the value and powers of another with which it shares a relationship. Arguably, this view of complex causality is found in both realism and CDST. Inspired by developments in biology, and sharply critical of individualism in the social sciences, Ylikoski (2012) identifies four general characteristics of underlying causal mechanisms:

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First, a mechanism is always a mechanism for something; it is identified by the kind of effect or phenomenon it produces. Second, a mechanism is an irreducibly causal notion. It refers to the entities of a causal process that produces the effect of interest. Third, a mechanism has a structure. When a mechanism-based explanation opens the black box, it makes visible how the participating entities and their properties, activities, and relations produce the effect of interest. […] Finally, there is a hierarchy of mechanisms. While a mechanism at one level presupposes or takes for granted the existence of certain entities with characteristic properties and activities, it is expected that there are lower-level mechanisms that will explain them. (pp. 22–23, emphases original)

Some elements from this definition are arguably questionable. In particular, the idea of a hierarchy of causal mechanisms needs to be developed further so as to avoid reductive or conflationary causal accounts. Also, the notion of a black box needing to be triggered by an external force, conjuring the related idea of closed systems, may not be entirely appropriate to analyses of social phenomena such as language education and gender relations, for example. Nevertheless, Ylikoski’s description of causal mechanisms is illuminating, particularly with regards to his rejection of the ideas that (a) understanding mechanisms is the same thing as understanding entire causal events, and (b) understanding causal mechanisms leads to overarching theories of explanatory relevance to all similarly caused social phenomena. As the author adds, “while there is an assumption that everything is mechanistically explainable and a presumption that ultimately all mechanistic accounts are mutually compatible, there is no overarching effort to combine them into one grand theory that would cover all the phenomena that the scientific field studies” (p. 24). In terms of types of causal mechanisms, possibilities abound. Williams (2018: 28) explains that mechanisms “might be hugely complex or very simple. The components of the mechanism must have particular dispositions (sometimes called liabilities or causal powers) that make the outcomes possible.” Elster (1998) provides specific examples of mechanisms, one of which is cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957), which “is stipulated to arise when a person holds two or more “cognitions” that are inconsistent with one another. Here, cognitions include not

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only ordinary factual beliefs but also consciously held values as well as mental representations of the choices or behaviors of the subject” (p. 52). According to Elster, dissonance can potentially lead to five outcomes for an individual: (1) modifying the world to make the desired state become reality (e.g., activism); (2) accepting that the world does not match one’s view of it (e.g., fatalism); (3) becoming convinced (i.e., strengthening a belief ) that the desired state is in fact reality (e.g., ideologism); (4) changing the belief so that the desired state is no longer desired (i.e., “moving on”); and (5) antagonizing the belief so as to wish it may not come true (e.g., the “sour grapes” feeling). While each of these possibilities might be characterized by interactionists as inherently agentive, a fuller picture requires that they also be explained with regards to cognitive dissonance acting as mechanism with causal potential when in relation to agency. Elster also talks about the endowment effect and the contrast effect as other possible underlying generative mechanisms thus: A memory of a good experience is a good memory, the memory of a bad one a bad memory. Hence a good past tends to improve the present, a bad past to make it worse. On the other hand, there is a contrast effect: A good experience in the past tends to devalue less good experiences in the present, and a bad event in the past will similarly throw the present into favorable relief. (Elster, 1998: 56)

Ideological processes and various mechanisms of belief formation can similarly be considered possible examples of causal mechanisms. Hedström and Swedberg (1998) provide two examples of commonly identified causal mechanisms in sociology. The first is the self-fulfilling prophecy, which postulates that defining a reality falsely (e.g., Trump’s reiterations of the impeachment proceedings as a “Democratic hoax”, despite ample damning evidences) can evoke specific kinds of behaviours (e.g., public doubt in the House of Representatives, in politicians and in “Washington”, partly leading the Republican majority in the Senate to vote for his acquittal), which in turn can lead to the false conception becoming a reality (e.g., Trump’s impeachment proceedings were indeed a “Democratic hoax” aimed at undermining his presidency). The second

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is the threshold theory of collective behaviour (Granovetter, 1978)—a preference-formation mechanism—which they summarize thus: An individual’s decision whether or not to participate in collective behavior often depends in part on how many other actors already have decided to participate […] actors differ in terms of the number of other actors who already must participate before they decide to do the same [i.e., individual "thresholds"] […] even slight differences in thresholds can produce vastly different collective outcomes. (Hedström & Swedberg, 1998: 19)

The authors also discuss action-formation mechanisms as showing “how a specific combination of individual desires, beliefs, and action opportunities generate a specific action” (Hedström & Swedberg, 1998: 23); and transformational mechanisms as processes whereby “a number of individuals interact with one another, and the specific mechanism (which differs depending on the nature of the interaction) shows how these individual actions are transformed into some kind of collective outcome, be it intended or unintended” (ibid.). While the list of causal mechanisms goes on, they share this important characteristic: although they are interpretations of causal relationships, causal mechanisms are nevertheless real in that they can have real effects on real people in real contexts, and must therefore be accounted for. To summarize and highlight the most salient points made so far regarding causal mechanisms, mechanism-based causal explanations do not constitute a denial of agency’s crucial powers to affect things in the world. Rather, they are aimed at revealing how people make constrained choices in structured contexts. Furthermore, detecting and understanding causal mechanisms require concepts, themselves dependent on theoretical deliberation. Hedström and Swedberg (1998: 13) point out that “mechanisms, in the natural as well as in the social sciences, usually are unobserved analytical constructs […] the social sciences routinely postulate the existence of unobserved explanatory mechanisms. Assumptions of intentions, discounting, and preferences have proven to be extremely useful analytical devices even though they never have been observed.” Even if our concepts and interpretations of

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social phenomena are deeply cultural, thus “imperfect embodiments” of real objects and processes, we need them to explain, not merely describe, social phenomena in their full ontological depth. Critiquing empiricists’ tendency to dismiss the importance of theory and causal explanations and instead focus on either statistical regularities or individual narratives as sufficient bases for explanation, Porpora (2008: 200) makes the same point although more forcefully thus: “in the case of causality, conceptual considerations – and, thus, theory – matter even more decisively than empirical considerations. This is a revelation that an empiricist sociology must repress, which is perhaps another reason why the methods texts so rush past causality itself to the indicators of causality.” What we are looking for as AL scholars and social scientists are not merely traces of causal links (the task of description) but rather why those particular causal links exist and not others (the task of explanation). In practical terms, revealing causal mechanisms involves “moving beyond describing what can be measured in the social world to explain the deeper causal powers that shape that which can be observed. Causality is accepted as configurational, contingent and generative of real social processes” (Emmel et al., 2018: 5). While mechanisms have real effects on observable and measurable phenomena, they cannot be described in the same way we describe objects and processes accessed empirically. Consequently, and as Layder (2006: 52, emphasis mine) explains, “it is important to include a rationalist element [in social theory and social analysis] in order to be able to describe things which are not easily experienced or observed. However, we must avoid the extreme version of rationalism, which insulates concepts and theories from the external world of empirical evidence.” Our explanations of causality must therefore be conceptual: they must be developed through the use of empirically-testable theories and concepts, making science in general dependent on empirical evidence while also a profoundly qualitative and interpretive human practice. Again, empirical and conceptual knowledge must be combined to produce a fuller view of causality and of causal mechanisms. Similar to structure and culture, underlying causal mechanisms can also be understood as intransitive social realities with antecedent properties. Elder-Vass (2010: 40) argues that

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causality operates to determine individual events, but the causal factors that determine these events are generic in the sense that whenever they are present, they will have an influence that is in some way consistent. Without such consistent regularities, it would be quite impossible for us to disentangle the causal influences that affect our world, and quite pointless for us to speculate about general causal laws or mechanisms.

Realism also stipulates that causality can unfold not only because of the existence of mechanisms but also because of their absence. Collier (2011) identifies negative facts, or the absence of objects or processes, as also having real causal consequences. For example, the failure of some governments in early 2020 to initially acknowledge the reality of the Covid-19 virus outbreak—which could have led to the development and implementation of rapid, targeted, and effective preventive strategies for limiting its spread—has had devastating effects on millions of people around the world. What began as a denial of objective reality— the virus and its spread —subsequently penetrated the subjective realm of human understanding and experience—is Covid-19 real and should we worry about it? —which then led to the emergence of related objective and material consequences—morbid death tolls and massive job losses. Similarly, although to a radically lesser extent, a teacher’s unwillingness to discuss a particular issue in class can lead to a loss of confidence among students in that teacher. In short, things can happen in the social world not only because of the presence of particular causal mechanisms but also because of their absence. As pointed out above, mechanisms, as intransitive aspects of social reality with antecedent properties, also have a generic and somewhat consistent quality. Indeed, mechanisms such as our periodic denial of objective realities and our marked tendency to prioritize self-interest have always been consequential social “facts”, impacting individual, social and natural life in very important ways. Mechanisms are therefore not merely transient and ephemeral discursive realities, but rather “facts” of social life, with real effects on real people in real contexts. This leads to the closely related realist notion discussed earlier in the book that the ideational features of social reality (e.g., beliefs, ideologies, norms, etc., generally categorized as part of the Cultural System) are also real

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because they have real causal effects (Collier, 2011). This view obviously contrasts with the postmodernist—or perhaps perspectivist —characterization of beliefs, ideologies and values as discursively negotiated, fluid and ephemeral entities. For realists, while the material and ideational elements of society are ontologically different, they can both have causal powers, and must therefore equally be considered real. Interest in underlying causal mechanisms is obviously not limited to realism, as most paradigms developed within the social and natural sciences have been either explicitly or implicitly devoted to the discovery of mechanisms. To this, Hedström and Swedberg (1998) add that a focus on mechanisms is inherently interdisciplinary, and raises the potential for the development of middle-range theories (Merton, 1968), which begin with the observation of empirical data, followed by the development of broader abstract conceptualizations or general statements, which in turn are verified by the data. With their emphasis on ontological questions, however, critical realists would stress that theory can do a lot more than that. As argued earlier in this book, the development of theories and statements about social mechanisms is a central task for social scientists, for “the search for mechanisms means that we are not satisfied with merely establishing systematic covariation between variables or events” (Hedström & Swedberg, 1998: 7). It also means that, in our attempts to reveal the full ontological depth of the social phenomena under scrutiny, we are equally dissatisfied with localized and personalized interpretations of these phenomena. In this section, I have provided a general overview of the concept of underlying causal mechanism and of mechanism-based causal explanations, crucial elements in realist accounts of social stability and change. In the remaining pages of this chapter, I extend the above discussion by revisiting the structure–agency debate from a realist viewpoint.

Structure and Culture As already discussed, much of social theory has been invested in elucidating specifically how structure and agency are causally related in the production of social life. We have also seen that despite various

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approaches to the structure–agency debate and resulting emphases, most social scientists and social theorists have considered both agency and structure as important elements. The point was also developed that, when either structure or agency is overemphasized, or when they are both seen as “two sides of the same coin”, ontologically flattened sociological perspectives ensue, complicating the study of causal relationships and the scientific task of explanation. Given that a core objective in the social sciences is explaining how people make structured choices in structured contexts, adopting a stratified viewpoint that considers the distinct and emergent properties of structure and agency while uncovering their complex interrelationship becomes necessary. Realism presents the structure–agency relationship as dialectical. Sealey and Carter (2004: 16) explain that as particular individuals we confront a world that is not directly produced or constructed by us, but is rather the complex, emergent outcome of the interactions between structural contexts (structure) and ourselves (agency). For the realist, therefore, there may be a divergence between how things are and how people take them to be. This follows logically from the temporal priority given to structures.

Social structures include broad phenomena such as social classes, the socioeconomic order, education systems and social institutions. They are understood from a realist angle as the enduring constraining and enabling influence of the social order (Sealey & Carter, 2004), enduring because structures possess the emergent property of anteriority—i.e., they have existed before us, and despite occasional changes, they will continue to exist after we die. Structures’ constraining and enabling potentials—another of their emergent properties—facilitate agentive movements (e.g., evolution from educational to professional life) albeit within certain limits (e.g., not everyone can get any job, become rich, or live anywhere they wish). I reiterate the notion of emergence here to emphasize that the task of distinguishing agency from structure—and thereby avoiding conflationary perspectives—involves looking specifically at emergence. From this perspective, Manicas (2006: 73) distinguishes structure from agency

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thus: “organizations have properties that cannot be ascribed to their members. Bureaucracies, for example, are difficult to dislodge, operate impersonally and are often painfully slow in getting to a conclusion.” Similarly, and as cited earlier in this chapter, Archer (2011) points out that while educational systems can be centralized, people cannot, and while people can be emotional, structures cannot. This explains to a large extent why society is not the aggregate of all individual subjectivities within it, and by extension why (a) studying structure cannot be achieved by looking exclusively at the empirical evidence of agentive processes on the ground (either statistically or through interpretative narratives), and (b) the study of agency requires different conceptual and methodological strategies than those used to study structure. Accepting the realist principles that social structures (a) are emergent outcomes of social relations, (b) include a broad collection of material and ideational phenomena such as organizations, normative institutions, social classes, economic systems or gender roles, and (c) also occupy the intransitive dimension, leads to the conclusion that the empirical study of structure is very much a matter of revealing its effects on human agency, not structure itself. Conceptual work is therefore required to understand the links between effects and their causes, links which are opaque and abstract by their very nature. Studying structure this way, however, also implies that structure has already been subjected to the effects of humans’ interpretative and reflexive engagement, so we never quite have direct and unmediated access to structure. Further complicating this study is that structure refers to a very broad range of social phenomena with often radically different ontological properties. As Elder-Vass (2010: 77) puts it, Someone who is theorising normative institutions may quite reasonably come up with a different way of understanding social structure from someone who is theorising the capitalist system. Both may develop radically different theories of structure and both may be right, even though their theories appear incompatible, simply because they are theorising different kinds of structure.

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In short, the study of specific social structures requires the application of structure-specific theories. Lopez and Scott (2000: 3–4) identify three types of structure: institutional, relational and embodied : Institutional structure [includes] those cultural or normative patterns that define the expectations that agents hold about each other’s behaviour and that organize their enduring relations with each other. On the other hand, there is the idea of what we call relational structure. Here, social structure is seen as comprising the social relations themselves, understood as patterns of causal interconnection and interdependence among agents and their actions, as well as the positions that they occupy. […] Embodied structures are found in the habits and skills that are inscribed in human bodies and minds and that allow them to produce, reproduce, and transform institutional structures and relational structures.

Although the distinctions provided by Lopez and Scott are insightful, they seem to overemphasize the ideational aspects of social structures, a strategy that limits researchers’ ability to maintain important ontological distinctions between culture and structure. On this point, Archer (2011: 70) defines culture as “referring to all intelligibilia, that is to any item which has the dispositional ability to be understood by someone – whether or not anyone does so at any given time.” In Bouchard (2017: 79), I point out that “like structure, culture also possesses the properties of anteriority as well as affording and constraining influences. It can, to some extent, also be studied in terms of underlying causes.” Given that they share some emergent properties, it is possible to see ontological parallels between culture and structure. However, Bouchard and Glasgow (2019: 27) note that “while agents might rely on cultural knowledge to interpret structural forces […] the latter are not inherently ideational.” This understanding is drawn from Carter (2000), who distinguishes between structure as primarily dependent on objective, material resources on the one hand, and culture as dependent ideational resources on the other. Equating culture with structure is thus problematic because it helps propagate the myth of cultural integration, or the view of culture as an integrated system (Archer, 1996). Aligned with cultural determinism,

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the myth of cultural integration can be denoted in the popular conceptualization of culture as a body of shared meanings which, according to Archer (2011), essentially merges the community of cultural agents with the meanings themselves. Rejecting this view of culture, the author adds that the act of sharing constitutes only one among many specific aims sought by a cultural group, and as such cannot be considered a defining feature of culture. When culture is lumped within structure, or simply identified as another structural reality, the problem of cultural determinism surfaces, a problem identified by Porpora (1987: 64) in the following terms: “To be told, for example, that some behavior is culturally intelligible, as a move in a game of chess, does not explain why the player performed that culturally intelligible behavior rather than another one.” Elder-Vass (2012) criticizes cultural determinism, specifically the compartmentalization of cultures into distinct and essentialized sets of cultural practices, by pointing out that “many of [the component practices of a particular culture] are actually shared with other cultures to some extent. And even when some practices really are unique to the culture concerned, there is something arbitrary about choosing those practices rather than others to define a cultural group” (p. 171, emphasis mine). These realist observations about structure and culture help further contrast realism from symbolic interactionism, for example, which offers, in my view, an inconsistent definition of culture. Interactionists tend to view cultures as fluid, ever-changing, and emerging through humans’ largely symbiotic interaction with the world. In and of itself, this view is not problematic. However, interactionism’s relativistic position paradoxically depends on a deterministic understanding of cultural identities, as revealed in Crotty’s (1998: 76) description of culture as “not to be called into question; it is not to be criticised, east of all by someone of another culture.” For Crotty’s view of culture as “not to be criticised” to hold ground, a deterministic understanding of the agency-culture relationship is necessary, locking people within the subservient role of reproducer of rigid cultural norms and practices, and cancelling the distinct and emergent properties of both agency and culture’. To avoid the determinist trap when thinking about culture, while facilitating the use of conceptual tools adequate for an account of cultural change, realists first define

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culture as the outcome of a complex interaction between humans and their social and natural environments, with the two strata possessing different kinds of powers to make things happen in the world. This approach makes room for a necessary conceptualization of people as different from their cultural identities and cultural communities, and culture as also existing beyond situated interaction. In line with the realist emphasis on the importance of drawing ontological distinctions between phenomena, Archer (1996) conceptualizes culture as a stratified reality composed of two separate yet closely linked layers: the Cultural System (CS) and the Socio-Cultural Domain (SC). Simply stated, the CS includes processes and phenomena including cultural knowledge, social norms, beliefs, traditions, language (as resource for everyday communication), myths and cultural heritages. It also includes cultural objects and artefacts. As part of their emergent features is the property of anteriority, which means that CS phenomena already likely existed when we were born, and will likely continue to exist in some form or another after we die. Archer (2011: 70) refers to the more conceptual aspects of the CS as similar to the contents of “libraries”: We use these concepts every day when we say that the ideas of X are consistent with those of Y, or that theory or belief A contradicts theory or belief B. In so doing, we grant that a cultural system has an objective existence and particular relations among its components (doctrines, theories, beliefs and individual propositions). These relationships of contradiction and complementarity are independent of anyone’s claim to know, to believe, to assert or to assent to them, because this is knowledge independent of a knowing subject – such as any unread book.

To further exemplify the CS, Archer (2011) explains that looking up a word, a concept, a person or a place in an encyclopaedia, a dictionary or online means that the relevant cultural knowledge is not “in our mind” at that particular moment. When we look up a word, we are therefore not a knowing subject: we are a subject actively seeking out the targeted cultural knowledge, which is part of the CS. As such, CS elements also occupy a life beyond situated and culturally imbued interaction.

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They do not, however, occupy a “virtual” life devoid of causal potential, endlessly waiting for agentive input; instead, they are real because, when interacting with agentive forces, they present real constraints and enablements. The SC, on the other hand, includes our everyday cultural choices and actions, or how we adopt, reproduce, resist, or challenge elements from the CS. This is largely the cultural life we experience and that we are most directly aware of. Processes within the SC are characterized by fluidity and unpredictability, not anteriority, although they are in large part the outcomes of past and contemporary cultural deliberations and actions. Archer (2011: 72–73) identifies the emergent properties of SC phenomena thus: The SC possesses causal powers of its own kind in relation to the CS: it can resolve apparent contradictions and respond adaptively to real ones, or it can explore and exploit the complementarities it confronts, thus modifying the cultural system in the process. Moreover, it can set its own cultural agenda, often in relation to its structurally based interests, by creatively adding new items to the systemic register.

Willmott (2002) summarizes the CS–SC distinction similarly by defining elements within the CS as cultural resources existing somewhat independently of human knowledge or awareness, and phenomena within the SC as having to do with people, or culturally active agents, ultimately generating and experiencing cultural life on the ground. The CS acts as the cultural library which provides us with ideas and resources to choose from while we live our lives within the SC. Archer (2011: 72) explains that at any moment, the cultural system (CS) is the product of historical sociocultural (SC) interaction, maintained in the present, but having emergent properties and powers which pertain to that level. Like structure, some of its most important causal powers are those of constraints and enablements. […] However, again like structure, constraints require something to constrain and enablements something to enable. Those “somethings” are the ideational projects of people – the beliefs they seek to uphold, the theories they wish to vindicate, the propositions they want to deem true.

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In other words, the exercise of CS causal powers is dependent upon their activation from the SC level.

In this way, the interaction between the CS and the SC not only generates the cultural realities we observe in the real world: it also accounts for cultural stability and change over time. To describe this process, Archer (2011: 73) extends the morphogenetic cycle involving structure and agency summarized above to account for the relationship between the CS and the SC, or between people and culture: Cultural Conditioning → Socio-Cultural Interaction → Cultural Elaboration For cultural conditioning to take place, the CS must necessarily predate our cultural actions (the SC) which, as they post-date the CS, can subsequently transform it, creating a feedback loop. As the author summarizes, the act of having ideas essentially activates the CS’s emergent causal powers which, as with structure, come in the form of constraints and enablements. Yet, the reasons why some CS elements are drawn from by agents and others not resides in SC’s emergent causal potentials. The links between the CS and the SC are also considered important because, by being relational entities, the CS and SC must therefore be distinct and emergent “layers” of culture related in a-synchronous fashion. According to Archer (1996), the CS predates the SC, which transforms it. Partly because this relationship is a-synchronous, elements from the CS do not determine people’s views or actions: they only provide certain conditions and possibilities within which people can then choose to act in certain ways and not others. In turn, because people have goals to achieve, they must make choices, which are in turn conditioned by elements from the CS. Over time, our choices can potentially change the CS by introducing new elements, which can in turn subsequently influence contemporary and future generations. This constitutes the core of realism’s anti-determinist viewpoint. Accordingly, the links between the CS and the SC are complex and often lead to unexpected outcomes because the CS and the SC unfold or move through time at

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different paces. For example, elements within the CS—being antecedent realities—have developed over long periods of time, often over generations and even centuries. While a language, for example, can change, it can only do so over very long stretches of time. In contrast, our decisions and actions within the SC are daily, rapid, performed at the moment and sometimes unpredictable. Because of their distinct properties, the CS and SC can also be understood as having different causal powers. The links between the CS and the SC are also understood from a realist perspective as causal , since causality is necessarily implied in discussions of phenomena such as cultural stability and cultural change. The a-synchronous relationship between the CS and the SC as distinct and emergent layers of culture is, again, necessary here, since it creates the context within which friction or occasional gaps and contradictions between the CS and the SC can emerge. These points of friction— inherent to the relationships themselves—are of considerable importance to explanations of phenomena such as cultural morphostasis and morphogenesis. The realist view of culture presented here also presents agency as a distinct social stratum with considerable causal potential, since our everyday cultural decisions and actions (the SC) are understood as constituting the principal force behind cultural stability or elaboration. Again, we take something from the CS (or the “library”) when its information is pertinent to us in specific situations. In turn, our choices and actions also transform the CS (although this might take a lot of time). If, for example, some information from the CS becomes pertinent to a larger portion of a cultural community over time, its salience as a cultural reality is magnified. On the other hand, less relevant information is gradually pushed deeper in the background, while new ideas tend to be introduced. In this way, the realist view of culture helps us in two important ways: (1) by explaining why some traditions, beliefs and rituals fade through history while others remain; and (2) by providing us with a basis upon which we can understand cultural stability and change, and develop strategies for safeguarding cultural traditions and heritages, to name one possible practical application. The realist view of culture summarized thus far stands in rather sharp contrast with interactionist views of culture, notably that of Street (1993), who reduces culture to action (or to a “verb”). By reducing

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culture to cultural acts, Street, unfortunately, conflates CS within SC, thus denying their emergent properties and powers. Instead, realism provides a robust ontology because it is stratified and anti-deterministic. It is also robust because, while agency occupies an important place, its context remains structured and cultured in important ways, which means that agentive choices and movements are also structured and cultured. While their ontological differences make it possible for them to be causally related to each other, structure, culture and agency remain fundamentally relational phenomena, and must therefore be understood in large part in terms of their interactions with other phenomena.

Agency In addition to its consideration for underlying causal mechanisms as powerful particulars, realism is presented in this volume as also providing a robust, stratified view of human agency as causally efficacious, equipped with distinct and emergent properties including generic powers to communicate and act (Elder-Vass, 2010), and operating within a contingent social realm—i.e., intricately linked with, yet irreducible to, cultural and structural forces. Other important distinct and emergent properties of agency include reflexivity, intentionality and creativity, properties that cannot be associated with structure or culture. The realist view of human agency offers a viable alternative to homo economicus (or Modernity’s Being, an agent with a core essence, constantly striving towards achieving free will based on rational calculations) and homo sociologicus (or the Social Being of constructivism and much of postmodernism, a replicator of social norms and rules who inhabits a fluid world of constantly negotiated social constructions, trapped within a discursive realm). Archer (2011) describes the first alternative as dependent on instrumental rationality, thereby remaining an essentially anthropocentric perspective, whereby only people have causal potential, not society. She describes the second alternative as providing a weakened view of agency overly dependent on discourse. She summarizes the conceptual problems at the heart of both alternatives thus:

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The central deficiency of these two models [Modernity’s man and Society’s Being] is their basic denial that the nature of reality as a whole makes any difference to the people we become […] Modernity’s Man is pre-formed, and his formation, that is, the emergence of his properties and powers, is not dependent on his experiences of the world. [With] Society’s Being […] the whole of the world comes to people sieved through one part of it, “society’s conversation”. […] What is lost, in both versions, is the crucial notion of experience of reality.” (p. 81, emphasis mine)

In other words, missing in these two problematic views of agency is consideration for structure, culture and agency, three core strata equipped with distinct and emergent properties of their own, although involved in complex and ongoing interactions unfolding at the levels of the empirical, the actual and the real. Instead of Modernity’s Being and Society’s Being, what is needed in sociological inquiry is a view of human agency as both “regulator” and “regulated” which encompasses the trialectical relationship between structure, culture and agency in conceptually and methodologically productive ways. Stated differently, we need a view of people which considers their distinct and emergent properties and powers as people, yet which situates them within a culturally and structurally contingent social world. As we saw in the previous chapter, structuration theory seems to provide interesting possibilities in this regard, although it does so by fusing both structure and agency together, leaving the crucial issue of causality somewhat unaddressed. Archer’s notion of double morphogenesis (summarized above) is also useful here. As the author explains, “structure is the conditioning medium and elaborated outcome of interaction: agency is shaped by and reshapes structure whilst reshaping itself in the process.” (Archer, 2011: 86). In this model, the causal relationship between structure and agency can potentially be operationalized theoretically and methodologically because these two strata are not fused together at the ontological level. The ways in which the world unfolds over time is not entirely dependent on our discursive input into it, nor our understandings of it, and the way the world is has a necessary regulatory effect on our actions and discourses. At the same time, we are not automatons, entirely determined by social forces: our existence is consequential to the ongoing

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production of social life. Such claims about agency and structure are possible within a realist ontology largely because they are grounded in the realizations that (1) we are inherently relational beings, (2) structure and culture are emergent outcomes of these relationships, and (3) structure, culture and agency—as relational phenomena—must therefore be ontologically different things. Social realism offers perhaps the most robust conceptualization of human agency, notably through the work on human reflexivity by Margaret Archer. Because we reflexively deliberate on a number of issues affecting our lives, and that these deliberations necessarily involve consideration for structural and cultural constraints and enablements, we can reach decisions which can then affect our behaviours, decisions which can then affect the course of social life, a process which over time can help solidify or reshape structure and culture. Archer’s view of human reflexivity begins with the notion that fundamentally, personal identity is a matter of what we care about in the world. Constituted as we are, and the world being the way it is, humans ineluctably interact with the three different orders of natural reality: nature itself, practice and the social order. Humans necessarily have to sustain relationships with the natural world, work relationships, and social relationships, if they are to survive and thrive. (Archer, 2011: 88)

In sum, precisely because we have projects we want to achieve, our interaction with the constraining and enabling influences of structure and culture (and the natural world, let’s not forget) become necessarily involved in what we do, influences which are channelled through the three orders of natural reality. At the same time, these three orders— nature, practice and the social order—are not necessarily neatly aligned with each other. As with the a-synchronous relationship between structure and agency and between the CS and the SC, contradictions, points of friction or “mismatches” between the three orders contribute to the complexity and unpredictability empirically observable in the social world. Faced with this complexity, humans try their best to achieve modus vivendi, or a “liveable degree of solidarity for the self in its

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commitments” (Archer, 2004: 10), or again as “some form of agreement between diverging forces, or an agreement between structure, culture, and agency to coexist through an accommodation of differences, made possible because of human agents’ ability to be reflexive” (Bouchard, 2017: 107). Not only do people adopt different approaches to reaching modus vivendi, depending on people themselves and the situation where the structure–agency relationship unfolds, people can prioritize one or two of the three orders of natural reality (e.g., people “living for their art”, people sacrificing their health and safety to protect others), although they can never neglect any one of these three orders (Archer, 2011). This means, of course, that human agents can never be reduced to biological entities or purely social beings: they are inescapably connected to the three orders of natural reality—nature, practice and the social order—for their survival. For social realists, human reflexivity—characterized by Archer (2011) as both cognitive and affective—is the main factor determining which balance, or modus vivendi, is ultimately achieved. Archer (2004) suggests four approaches to reflexivity: conversational reflexivity, autonomous reflexivity, meta-reflexivity, and fractured reflexivity, summarized by Bouchard and Glasgow (2019: 51–52) thus: Communicative reflexivity is adopted by individuals who doubt their own ability to reach modus vivendi by themselves. It is a type of reflexive engagement that aims towards contextual continuity or the reproduction and extension of existing social rules and structures. […] Autonomous reflexivity, on the other hand, involves an independent internal conversation in which work becomes a way for people to gain balance in their lives and reach modus vivendi. Personal rights and responsibilities are very important areas of concern in autonomous reflexivity. […] Metareflexivity is the ability to be reflexive about reflexivity, or the ability to realize that we have an internal conversation and that it is important to our well-being as social agents. Meta-reflexive people are critical of themselves and of society and think of the individual/society relationship often in idealistic terms. This explains why they are often uncomfortable when facing limits or rules. […] Finally, fractured reflexivity is a passive approach to the internal conversation. Fractured reflexive people do not have much control over their lives because their internal conversation

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has been somewhat interrupted and no longer helps them make reflexive choices effectively.

Although in Archer (2007) the author notes that none of these four types dominate in any society, in Archer (2012) and subsequent publications she presents meta-reflexivity as more dominant in late modernity. Despite their differences, however, these four approaches to the internal conversation reveal that humans (a) are ontologically different from the context and realities which surround them and are thus not reducible to them, yet also (b) rely on these to function successfully and achieve their goals. As such, when we talk about people deploying their agentive potentials, we are not talking about human beings acting in the world free of constraints, free to achieve their full potentials as they see it. As we saw previously, the “free will” view of agency is problematic because it only offers a socially decontextualized agency, a position which then leads to a problematic qualification of agency in terms of degrees of freedom to do as one wishes—i.e., the freer a person is, the more agency (s)he is said to possess. Elder-Vass (2012: 193) offers a realist critique of this view thus: “Having the agentic capacity to think, choose, and act is entirely distinct from having the authorised capacity to make decisions with significant social implications. We may be agents and yet prevented from exercising social power.” In many discussions of agency within the social sciences, however, when people are said to lack the ability to make their own decisions and act according to their own volition, they are often said to “lack agency”. Such claim reveals a modernist Western morality based on the conceptually problematic idea that people make decisions on their own, somehow outside structure or culture. As Erikson (2001: 177) points out, “it is a fallacy to conflate ‘agency’ with freedom (and hence with progressive, transformative practice). Rather, the point is that because local circumstances are contingent and that persons are not automata, local social action inherently involves agency, whatever the tendencies or consequences of those actions might be.” Although the social realist emphasis on reflexivity might be interpreted by some as another version of phenomenology, particularly the latter’s emphasis on how people make sense of their worlds, it is important to stress that by defining reflexivity as an emergent property of agency and

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by placing it in relation with structural/cultural constraints/enablements, social realism avoids the conflationary tendency to reduce society to a mere collection of subjective realities, or to overemphasize the importance of humans’ interpretative and rational potentials. Instead, social realism considers the complexity of human reflexivity, of human interpretations and discourses, in relation with structural and cultural forces as stratified phenomena themselves, all within a stratified social realm. Extending this view further, agency is conceptualized from a social realist viewpoint as more than what pertains to individual selves, because some of the properties of individual human agents—e.g., having projects, interacting with structural and cultural constraints and enablements, etc.—depend to a large extent on what goes on at the collective level. This implies that agency, or at least aspects of agency, also need to be extended to collective social units such as groups and communities. At the same time, it is conceptually problematic to reduce people to their social relations, as in relationism. Highlighting the importance of distinguishing individuals and groups ontologically, Bouchard and Glasgow (2019: 58–59, emphasis mine) point out that perhaps the main difference between individual and collective agency (besides the obvious fact that collective agency involves more than one human being) is that the latter needs to articulate its goals to meet them. The articulation of such goals requires both the organization of social life and the emergence of roles within [collectives].

In terms of causal explanations, these conceptual nuances matter a great deal. For one, individual agents who are part of groups can be said to cause things to happen in society largely as a result of the group acting through its members. In collectives, the causal potentials of individual agents must therefore also be explained in relation to their roles within those collectives. Elder-Vass (2012: 222) notes another important difference between individual and collective agency with regards to causality: Communities are not the kinds of thing that have the causal power to know. In order to know, one must have the capability of holding a belief,

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and communities do not have this capability. In order to attribute a causal power to a social collective, one must have an ontology that explains how collectives can have such power and a specific explanation, consistent with that ontology, of how a collective of the type concerned can have the power concerned.

Unlike groups, it is people who have a brain to think with. At the same time, when people think, their beliefs, ideologies and worldviews remain deeply social phenomena: “Knowledge thus depends on social groups for its validation but it is not held by them. We must bring social groups into the ontology of knowledge not by claiming primacy for them but by identifying their specific causal role” (Elder-Vass, 2012: 223). This stratified view of agency, in other words, leads to the realization that, while groups and collectives cannot hold beliefs, they can have causal potential because they can act through their members. While conceptualizing collective agency requires an initial understanding of individual agency, the same requirement exists with regard to the differences between agents and actors. Archer (2004) distinguishes four distinct and emergent layers of agency—the self , the person, the agent and the actor —a conceptual distinction that helps us understand agency as a phenomenon ranging from the inner self to the social being. On this basis, the author argues that “any attempt to conceptualise the Social Actor needs to be completed by reference to their properties as Agents, if we are finally to arrive at an adequate conception of social identity and how it is attained” (p. 283). Bouchard and Glasgow (2019: 54, emphasis mine) draw insight from this principle to suggest two important elements to consider when developing a view of collective agency: Firstly, understanding how agency operates in specific contexts and domains requires an initial conceptualization of individual agency and a secondary conceptualization of individual agents penetrating social contexts and reorganizing themselves into members of [collectives]. Secondly, our socially oriented needs as human agents can also be understood as triggers for the deployment of our reflexive powers in social contexts. Stated differently, while individual agency and collective agency possess distinct and emergent properties, they are also closely related to

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each other in the production, reproduction and transformation of social life.

In other words, the double morphogenesis also happens between individual and collective agency: the individual agent helps shape the collectivity, which also has potential causal effects upon individual members. With the above general realist principles regarding human agency, the next section looks at how a possible conceptual amalgamation between human reflexivity and the more patterned or routinized features of people’s discourses and actions could potentially contribute to a greater understanding of social stability and change.

Habitual and Transformative Actions: Can Habitus and Reflexivity Be Combined? As presented thus far, realism—particularly Archer’s morphogenetic model which allows for a conceptual detachment between structure, culture and agency and provides a strong version of agency— provides solutions to some of the conflationary tendencies in Bourdieu’s theory of practice and Giddens’ structuration theory (see discussions in Chapter 3). Elder-Vass (2010: 88) sees less of a victory for reflexivity and a loss for habitus than a possible combination between the two perspectives: Pierre Bourdieu and Margaret Archer have advanced what seem at first sight to be incompatible theories of human agency. While Archer stresses our reflexive deliberations and the consequent choices of identity and projects that individuals make, Bourdieu stresses the possibility of acting without such deliberations, and his concept of habitus gives a central role to social conditioning in determining our behaviour.

Despite these important differences, I will argue in this section that because both perspectives reveal valuable insight into different aspects of the agency–structure relationship, the possibility of conceptually

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combining them is worth further consideration. It is worth also noting at the onset of this section that parallels to the concept of habitus have also been considered by CDST adherents with consideration for the stratified nature of social reality, notably by Juarrero (1999: 255) who rightfully points out that contextual dependencies established through persistent interactions with that environment limit our need to constantly interpret the world. Under stable conditions, we simply order ourselves to "drive home" and let the world be its own model. No need to analyze and evaluate every stimulus; the stable context, as embodied in our external structure’s contextual constraints, will automatically reparse the environment for us. Higherlevel monitoring can continue in place while the constraints of the internalized environment fine-tune the details.

The works of Bourdieu and Archer, however, do not provide equally stratified viewpoints. Therefore, drawing conceptual parallels between reflexivity and habitus necessitates a certain conceptual back and forth between two contrasting models, and requires negotiating and resolving core conceptual discrepancies. Although Archer herself does not see such combination as possible, Elder-Vass (2010) asserts that a sociology of the human agent which combines both reflexivity and habitus is both possible and desirable. In the context of ideology critique, Bouchard (2020) argues similarly that, instead of the outdated Marxist notion of ideology as false-consciousness, critics should consider habitus, which explains the more routinized and habitual features of human discourses and actions, and a model of human reflexivity to account for the distinct and emergent properties of agency within the context of ideology research. Accordingly, while Archer’s account of reflexivity reveals agency as an important causal force, it is also crucial to recognize that people cannot act by drawing exclusively from their own resources and powers (a point which Archer also makes). To explain why people cannot fully extricate themselves from structural and cultural constraints simply by engaging in alternative discourses and actions, Bouchard argues that critical social scientists must also consider habitus as possible underlying generative mechanism. Archer recognizes and integrates this reality well

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in her work, although as will be explained later she remains a rather strong critic of habitus largely because it is grounded in a weak version of agency. Elder-Vass (2010: 111) begins this difficult task with the claim that reflexivity’s role in determining what actions will be taken by people “varies by individual, by social class and by historical context.” To this claim, I would add that reflexivity also varies depending on the Cultural System of relevance to particular agents and particular situations or cultural contexts, as well as the habitus related to a particular field of practice. As with structural forces and underlying generative mechanisms, habitus acts as a powerful “magnet” for agency and conditions much of what we say and do. As such, perhaps its explanatory potential is greater than what Archer is willing to recognize. Elder-Vass (2010: 112) follows with an argument which, in my view, captures the complex interaction between habitus and human reflexivity rather well: To say that our social background and experiences influence our dispositions is not to cede all causal power to the social level at the expense of the individual. Our dispositions may sometimes be heavily and unconsciously affected by social factors, but none of us is ever completely at the mercy of our habitus. Nor is our habitus the unmediated product of social structures, but rather the result of a lifetime of critical reflection upon our experiences, including our experiences of those structures. Reflexivity thus becomes a critical attitude towards the dispositions we have acquired from our past, as well as towards the contemporary social situation that we face.

In short, habitus is presented by Elder-Vass as one of the emergent products of reflexive engagement by individuals and collectives over time. In doing so, the author does not characterize reflexivity and habitus in Giddensian-like fashion (or as “two sides of the same coin”). In attempting to bridge habitus and reflexivity thus, Elder-Vass is mindful of Archer’s (2010: 128) point that structure, culture and agency cannot essentially be “mutually constitutive” “because reflexive deliberations depend upon a clear object-subject distinction.” Looking at solutions to this theoretical conflict, and maintaining his commitment to a stratified realist ontology, Elder-Vass (2010: 107) states that “some actions

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are reflexively determined and others are determined by the habitus […] both Archer’s and Bourdieu’s theories are right, but about different actions.” In this way, habitus and reflexivity could potentially be compatible theories within a stratified understanding of the structure–agency relationship. This potential conceptual compatibility could be seen as offering greater explanatory possibilities because empirical questions could then focus on what contextual conditions, human motivations and underlying mechanisms lead people to act in particular ways and not others, thus opening possibilities for accounts of a broader range of human behaviours. Elder-Vass goes even further to suggest that both reflexivity and habitus cause most agentive phenomena: When individuals act, that action is the direct and immediate product of non-conscious brain processes and that conscious intentionality is itself a naturally caused phenomenon that acts as an input into this process, but only as one of many such inputs. This means that human individuals do sometimes make choices that affect their actions but it does not mean that they have free will in the controversial philosophical sense of making uncaused choices. We are choosing beings, but choosing is itself a natural process and one that is governed causally like any other. If this is the case, the sense we have of free will arises from the fact that we are the being doing the choosing, not because that choosing is uncaused. (Elder-Vass, 2010: 198, emphasis original)

For Archer (2010), however, habitus and reflexivity are simply incompatible. She identifies four reasons why habitus fits uncomfortably within a realist ontology: (1) as a complex, dynamic and open system, social life and the people who live it always operate within, or in relation to, contingent realities; (2) humans, as stratified biological and social entities, possess creative reflexive powers which are not part of habitus; (3) the contingencies of the social world are multiple and lead to unpredictable outcomes, often pushing people to resort to their creative reflexive potential; and (4) a realist ontology is rooted in a conceptualization of agency, structure and culture as distinct and emergent strata of the social realm, with different powers and properties, thus leaving little room for habitus

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which, according to most realist thinkers, reduces agency more or less to an epiphenomenon, or product, of habitus as structuring structure. According to Archer, because the notion of habitus fails to consider reflexivity as a mediatory mechanism between structure, culture and agency, and therefore as an important causal mechanism in the production of social life (Kaidesoja, 2013), it therefore cannot be juxtaposed or combined with reflexivity. Although not rejecting habitus outright, Sealey and Carter (2004: 136) prioritize reflexivity over habitus thus: “the process of ‘socialization’ is not one of consensus among people who arrange themselves into simply identifiable groups. […] The presence of consensus at the level of observable behaviour does not permit a direct reading of people’s commitment to the culture at the level of beliefs.” The authors’ viewpoint thus ensures that important ontological distinctions between people and ideas, and between habitus and reflexivity, are maintained. Instead of habitus+ reflexivity, Archer (2010) suggests researchers to remain focused on providing balanced accounts of the distinct and emergent powers of agency, structure and culture. For her, habitus is a weak model because it relies too much on what she calls “group membership and action patterns” which fail to explain what people actually do. Reflexivity and habitus are thus seen by the author as incompatible in the sense that one explains causality while the other offers merely a cover term for routinized acts without actually explaining how it might cause things to happen: The compromise concept of a ‘reflexive habitus’ elides two concepts which Bourdieu consistently distinguished: the semi-unconscious dispositions constituting habitus, and reflexivity as self-awareness of them. Moreover, what work does calling this a ‘habitus’ do? Literally, it states that people now have a disposition to be reflexive about their circumstances and perhaps to be prepared for change rather than for stability. If so, ‘preparedness’ must be used transitively; one must be in a state of preparation for something determinate, otherwise this hybrid habitus cannot supply dispositional guidelines for action.” (Archer, 2010: 126)

In my view, Archer’s rejection of habitus, although persuasive in her account of human reflexivity, fails to consider the possibility that habitus

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can indeed and quite reasonably be viewed as an underlying causal mechanism in and of itself. Underlying generative mechanisms, as suggested earlier in this chapter, do not directly cause people’s actions, nor does explaining them as social phenomena distinct from agency requires a strong account of agency. The causal potential of underlying generative mechanisms is “triggered” when interacting with humans’ reflexive potentials and their very real capacity to act and bring about change in the world. In this sense, habitus “kicks in” when people have things to do, and deliberate on some level about what needs to happen for particular goals to be fulfilled. While habitus, by itself, cannot provide a complete causal account of human action, as a potentially powerful causal mechanism, and as providing important insight into the social and cultural forces interacting with agency, it is in my view somewhat mistaken to dismiss it merely as a problematic theoretical concept in the explanation of social processes. Habitus should instead be conceptually positioned in relation to agency, all the while keeping in mind their distinct and emergent properties and powers. Sayer (2010), another realist thinker who sees value in looking at reflexivity in combination with habitus, adopts a slightly different angle to argue that we hold one another responsible for so many of our actions, that is, capable of reflecting on what we should do. It is also indisputable that we do much ‘on automatic’; we have many embodied inclinations, aversions, and skills. We could hardly be skilled actors if we needed to reflect and deliberate on everything before acting. (p. 108)

This basis allows the author to envisage the possibility of a combination between habitus and reflexivity, although not without some important conceptual elaboration of habitus in particular. The impact of habitus on agency, to be more specific, should not be understood as taking place only at the subconscious level. As he puts it, “the processes by which we develop a habitus range from a kind of osmosis or unconscious adaptation through to a more conscious process of learning how to do things so that we can come to do them without thinking” (Sayer, 2010: 110). Stated simply, there are not only subconscious and conscious actions happening separately: both processes can happen in conjunction

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and influence each other in important ways. For example, I can willingly choose to join classes at a language school with the explicit goal of improving my communicative competence in a language, while not reflexively pondering on the validity of every one of my actions in the classroom. So that the mind can operate smoothly without having to consciously consider every action we make, many of our everyday actions must therefore unfold with regards to field-specific habitus. This means that habitus must also be accounted for as an underlying generative mechanism and as consequential to an explanation of human action, in the development of richer sociological insight. Again, because they are not “two sides of the same coin”, it is important to consider the complex interaction between reflexivity and habitus in temporal terms—i.e., explaining how people “acquire” habitus over time, and how habitus influences agentive movements from then on. This position clearly underscores the primacy of reflexivity over habitus in accounting for agentive movements, and makes a great deal of sense if we consider that, while children do have the unique potential to be socialized (as opposed to plants which do not), this potential is dependent on the presence and use of their reflexive powers. Stated differently, because one cannot be socialized—and thus “acquire” habitus—without reflexivity, the latter must therefore be more consequential to accounts of agentive processes than the former. We must always remind ourselves that people do not act in particular ways because culture or society dictates them to do so; instead, decisions and actions are arrived at through the use of humans’ sense-making ability—one of agency’s distinct and emergent powers—and it is through this process that cultural constraints and enablements can have their effects. Caetano (2015: 67), however, puts both at the same level by arguing that “structural conditioning is not always external; society also exists internally in subjects’ minds, consolidated in systems of dispositions that, like reflexivity, have the potential to guide action.” In my view, this is mistaken because, again, for habitus to have any influence on agentive movements, it must be processed by reflexivity-endowed human agents, and must therefore be considered as distinct from agency. Instead, the combination between reflexivity and habitus—with the former having primacy over the latter—is mindful of realist principles, while not succumbing to an interactionist viewpoint

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or promoting simply another version of homo sociologicus. It successfully integrates the idea that reflexivity is crucial in mediating “the effects of the social field and participation in social life on individuals” (Sayer, 2010: 112), while making it possible for habitus to act as causal mechanism in certain situations, for certain purposes, at specific times. The current discussion reveals some of the problems in Archer’s theory of reflexivity. Sayer (2010), for example, notes that people’s reflexive powers do not actually mediate all socializing influences: “We are not omniscient, omnipotent beings; some influences get beneath our radar, especially in early life, in our ‘formative years’, shaping our dispositions and responses without our even noticing them” (p. 113). Further on, the author identifies similar possibilities in later life thus: Embodied habits of thought and action can remain important even where we change our minds through deliberating on some issue. Thus if people come to see that something they have believed is wrong, through encountering a convincing argument and decide that they should henceforth act differently, this in itself is unlikely to be sufficient to change their ways of thinking and acting completely. For example, even if a white racist comes to renounce her racism on the basis of argument, she may still find herself unintentionally making racist assumptions in everyday life. (p. 117)

Caetano (2015) echoes Sayer’s criticism of Archer’s theory of reflexivity to some extent, arguing that Archer’s notion “minimizes crucial social factors and the dimensions necessary for a more complex and multi-dimensional study of the concept, such as social origins, family socialization, processes of internalization of exteriority, the role of other structure–agency mediation mechanisms and the persistence of social reproduction” (p. 60). While individuals’ reflexive deliberations are presented by Archer as the “glue” between structure, culture and agency, Caetano posits that the influences of generative structural and cultural forces are not fully considered. In arguing thus, Caetano seems to suggest that Archer’s model is aligned with interactionism to some degree, suggesting that this problem is due to Archer conceptualizing the links between agency, structure and culture principally at the level of theory.

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Although I do not fully agree with Caetano’s critique of Archer, this lack of conceptual flexibility between reflexivity and habitus also strikes me as somewhat odd in Archer’s work. If we consider that “reflexivity, exercised by internal dialogues, not only mediates the impact that structures have on agents, it also conditions individual responses to particular social situations” (Caetano, 2015: 62), Archer’s morphogenetic model can indeed be seen as prioritizing agentive discourses and actions in the production, reproduction and transformation of social life. This perception can be somewhat justified in reading Archer’s (2004: 18) own words regarding the importance of agency in her work: “I wish to reclaim human beings as the ultimate fons et origio of (emergent) social life or socio-cultural structures, rather than subjugating humanity, as if it were the epiphenomenon of social forces.” This epistemological bias in Archer’s work is noted by Caetano in her argument that Archer’s analysis “is focused on individuals’ capacity to evaluate their social circumstances, leaving no room for a problematization that is articulated with the hierarchical dimension of social life” (p. 64). Although not in full agreement with Caetano on this point, I do agree with the critique that her work needs to provide greater insight into people’s habitual actions. At the same time, Caetano’s claims that Archer fails to consider social origins, socialization and differentiated locations in her work on reflexivity, and her charge that Archer leaves “no room for a problematization that is articulated with the hierarchical dimension of social life” (Caetano, 2015: 64), are not entirely convincing. Even a surface reading of Archer’s work reveals that she is mindful of social forces when developing her theory of reflexivity. Although she seems to prioritize agency, Archer consistently makes the claim that the morphogenetic model provides a framework that explains the links between structure and agency, and never (in my view at least) highlights one at the expense of the other. The author makes this clear by persistently referring to the need in social research for analytical dualism, or analytical balance between the “parts” and the “people”. In addition, when one engages in a closer reading of Archer’s work, it becomes clear that Caetano overlooks important elements. For example, while Caetano is right in pointing out that, in Archer’s model, “the causal efficacy of structures is

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not directly felt upon subjectivity itself, but on the result of that subjectivity: individual projects, from which potential courses of action are defined” (p. 66), she is mistaken in claiming that “social structures are only present in internal conversations when individuals evaluate them in articulation with their main concerns” (ibid.). Indeed, when Archer (2004: 21) argues that “we cannot discover the nature of social structure by administering questionnaires”, for example, she is also arguing that the effects of structure upon agency (a) are not only real, but that (b) they cannot be measured simply by studying how human agents interpret them through analysis of their reflexive activities and engagements, as revealed through the analysis of survey data. Clearly, Archer’s views diverge from interpretivist principles. Despite these problems in her critique of Archer, Caetano nevertheless manages to present the morphogenetic model as a dialogue with Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, and this in my view deserves further attention. Put differently, Caetano’s critique can be interpreted as suggesting that the theories of Bourdieu and Archer are the products of diverging epistemological emphases, the former on socialization and the latter on reflexivity, but that they can be linked together at the ontological level. In this section, I have tried to argue that these links are possible as long as habitus and reflexivity are understood as distinct and emergent, with habitus as a potential causal mechanism, and with reflexivity as an emergent property of human agency as powerful particular. While habitus does not have any particular agentive capacity to guide action, agentive reflexivity can, in a very practical sense, rely on systems of dispositions that allow people to make decisions in context without ongoing conscious deliberations over options and strategies. As Caetano (2015: 67) puts it, the inner life of subjects is not only composed of conscious dynamics. Individuals are not in a constant state of alert. Combining Archer’s theory with the dispositionalist approach allows a conceptualization of individual interiority as consisting not only of conscious mechanisms, but also of social processes that take place without individuals being aware of them.

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In sum, the reflexivity+ habitus combination does have explanatory potential within a realist perspective. Similar to Elder-Vass (2010) although perhaps more aligned with Archer’s views, Sayer (2010: 121) combines reflexivity and habitus in the following way: “the semiconscious responses that arise from the dispositions of our habitus merge into the conscious monitorings of our internal conversations. Our relation to the world is not merely one of practical engagement, or indeed contemplation, but of concern.” At the same time, this combination cannot come without some degree of conceptual reformulation of habitus. This is because, in and of itself, habitus reveals little about agency. As Layder (1997: 53–54) points out, “habitus only provides a general, loose series of predispositions, and these are not determining of what people do in specific social contexts. This is in part due to the emergent quality of social action.” Nevertheless, its potential to have a marked influence on agency cannot be dismissed, as Archer seems to do at times. If we accept the definition of habitus as a set of “durable motivations in people’s minds, as “acting as a system of cognitive and motivating structures” (Bourdieu, 1990: 53), as constituted at the level of practice, and as practically oriented dispositions, we can also accept the possibility that habitus is also closely related to (yet of course distinct from) human beings’ sense-making capacities, and indeed close to the reality faced by people daily. Again, while people make decisions largely based on their sense-making capacity, habitus remains an important influence upon the development of this capacity within human beings. These are, of course, conceptual deliberations which can only be strengthened through empirical research; yet, they offer avenues for a renewed understanding of the structure–agency relationship, in light of the important contributions made by Bourdieu and Archer. To sum up, a social realist approach (and to a large extent a CDST approach as well) to the social sciences seeks to understand human beings not as hopelessly fluid entities constructed through discourse, but as having very real capacities to act in the real world and affect other things. As such, they must be conceptualized as “real,” which requires theoretical exploration and elucidation of their distinct and emergent properties, including their ability to cause other things to happen in society. Equally, structure and culture affect people in consequential ways, which is why

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their distinct and emergent properties must also be clarified. Hopefully, the work in Chapter 3 and in this chapter has done more than reassert agency’s role in the production of social realities, that it has provided readers with a clearer understanding of the importance of the structure–agency debate to social research, including AL research, and that contra Ashwin (2012), it has made the important point that talks about structure and agency are not mere epistemological exercises centering on different sets of social processes, but rather deliberations about ontologically different yet equally consequential phenomena and processes. I also hope that this chapter on realism has offered ways to resolve some of the tensions between the various ontologies summarized in the previous chapter while providing the grounds for a realist approach to AL scholarship, the subject of the next chapter.

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Elder-Vass, D. (2012). The reality of social construction. Cambridge University Press. Elster, J. (1998). A plea for mechanisms. In P. Hedström & R. Swedberg (Eds.), Social mechanisms: An analytical approach to social theory (pp. 45–73). Cambridge University Press. Emmel, N., Greenhalgh, J., Manzano, A., Monaghan, M., & Dalkin, S. (2018). Introduction: Doing realist evaluation, synthesis and research. In N. Emmel, J. Greenhalgh, A. Manzano, M. Monaghan, & S. Dalkin (Eds.), Doing realist research (pp. 1–13). Sage. Erikson, F. (2001). Co-membership and wiggle room: Some implications of the study of talk for the development of social theory. In N. Coupland, S. Sarangi, & C. N. Candlin (Eds.), Sociolinguistics and social theory (pp. 152– 181). Pearson Education. Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press. Gerrits, L., & Verweij, S. (2013). Critical realism as a meta-framework for understanding the relationships between complexity and qualitative comparative analysis. Journal of Critical Realism, 12(2), 166–182. Goertz, G. (2012). Descriptive-causal generalizations: “Empirical laws” in the social sciences? In H. Kincaid (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of social science (pp. 85–108). Oxford University Press. Granovetter, M. (1978). Threshold models of collective behavior. American Journal of Sociology, 83, 1420–1443. Groff, R. (Ed.). (2008). Revitalizing causality: Realism about causality in philosophy and social science. Routledge. Haig, B. D., & Evers, C. W. (2016). Realist inquiry into social science. Sage. Harré, R., & Madden, E. (1975). Causal powers. Basil Blackwell. Hedström, P., & Swedberg, R. (1998). Social mechanisms: An introductory essay. In P. Hedström & R. Swedberg (Eds.), Social mechanisms: An analytical approach to social theory (pp. 1–31). Cambridge University Press. Huckle, J. (2004). Critical realism: A philosophical framework for higher education for sustainability. In P. B. Corcoran & A. E. J. Wals (Eds.), Higher education and the challenge of sustainability (pp. 33–47). Springer. Kaidesoja, T. (2013). Naturalizing critical realist social ontology. Routledge. Kincaid, H. (2012). Mechanisms, causal modeling, and the limitations of traditional multiple regression. In H. Kincaid (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of social science (pp. 46–64). Oxford University Press. Juarrero, A. (1999). Dynamics in action: Intentional behavior as a complex system. MIT Press.

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Chapter 3 identified important conceptual developments in the structure–agency debate within social theory, and has shown that in most cases, both structure and agency have long been seen by social theorists and scientists as consequential to the production of social life. Most social theorists to date have largely rejected the notion that structure and agency work contra each other; instead, most have been invested in figuring out precisely how structure and agency are causally related, and it is from this basis that preference for one over the other have emerged; only in radical versions did one “win outright.” This general avoidance of dichotomous thinking in social theory is justified, for as López (2001: 88, emphasis mine) explains, “one of the fundamental problems with the opposition of agency to structure, is that it sets up a connotative resonance between agency and freedom, and structure and determinism [which] seems to allow for explanatory inadequacy to be reproduced.” Phrased differently, the reduction of agency to freedom and/or structure to determinism is possible only within flattened (i.e., non-stratified) social ontologies, whereby the distinct and emergent properties of agency and structure are not fully considered, leading to complications at the level of theory design, methodology and data analysis. In light of this, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_5

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one of the underlying arguments in this book is that understanding the complex evolution of the structure–agency debate—including coming to term with realism as a more robust social ontology—is consequential to AL research because it provides richer conceptual grounds upon which to (a) resolve debates regarding language as a socially emergent phenomenon, (b) come to term with the centrality of complexity, emergence and causality in AL research, and more broadly speaking (c) understand the role of language in the ongoing production of social life. This chapter builds upon the previous one to summarize a realist approach to AL research, drawn mainly from Sealey and Carter (2004), a volume which in my view is perhaps most effective in drawing from social theory to overcome enduring problems posed by both successionist and interpretivist approaches to AL research. As the authors phrase it four years prior to the publication of their book, sociolinguistics research can instead “draw on social theory for analysis of the relationship between speaker and system, the role of language in the creation, maintenance and change of social institutions, and the role of human agency in sociolinguistic phenomena” (Carter & Sealey, 2000: 3). The need for a renewed AL has been underlined for decades, at least since Hymes’ works and of course Firth’s call for a new kind of linguistics concerned with the realm of real-world language experience. Unfortunately, the term “realism” has also been misunderstood as another version of modernism, a confusion apparent in Silva and Leki’s (2004: 7) problematic dichotomization between “realist AL” and “composition AL”: “applied linguistics’ ontology has been primarily realist. That is, physical reality exists and is driven by unchanging natural laws. Composition studies’ ontology is predominantly relativist – realities exist only in the form of mental constructions that are socially based, local, and specific.” The confusion here comes from (a) Silva and Leki’s marked interpretivist argumentation, and (b) lack of acknowledgement by the authors of realism’s satisfied ontology and its resulting antagonism towards any form of determinism, including the notion of “unchanging natural laws.” Calls for re-conceptualizing AL scholarship along realist lines have also been construed as calls for (a) localized views of language-related processes—i.e., what people do with language in context, and (b) “practical” linguistics—e.g., something that language teachers can use in the

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classroom “next Monday.” Despite recognition by a growing number of AL scholars of the need to transcend successionist and interpretivist approaches in AL, unresolved conceptual and methodological issues persist, notably the notion of “authentic” or “real” language, which has most often been reduced to empirical evidence of language, thus reduced to language practice, and by extension, reduced further to spoken language. This type of empiricism is considerably limiting because it further exacerbates the counterproductive divisions between theoretical and pedagogical AL scholarships. Perhaps more importantly, it moves attention away from our collective understanding of the challenges currently facing AL scholarship, including the view of AL problems and issues as systems. As stated in the Introduction, my goal in this book is mainly to look at how complexity, emergence and causality have so far been conceptualized in AL, and I have chosen to approach this task by looking at CDSToriented AL research from the stratified social ontology provided by realism. My purpose in doing so is to encourage greater interest among AL scholars in the development of a CDST-informed realist AL. Since realism is less explicit with regards to social complexity and its implications for social research including AL, I leave this topic for subsequent chapters on CDST, and instead concentrate in this chapter on four main issues pertinent to AL research: emergence, causality, knowledge and language, as developed within realism. Despite the facts that (a) principles and concepts associated or in parallel with realist social ontology have so far been sporadically used by AL scholars, (b) realist AL successfully integrates a broad range of existing AL theories and theories about language within a robust social ontology and (c) realism seems to have attracted more attention within the field of linguistics, it is worth noting that realism simply has yet to occupy an important place within AL scholarship. Authors including Belz (2002), Block (2006, 2007, 2015), Bouchard (2017, 2018, 2020), Bouchard and Glasgow (2019), Corson (1997), Jones (2003), and Jordan-Baker (2013) have approached their analysis by adopting different elements from different strands of realism; however, few have explicitly outlined a realist approach to AL as comprehensively as Carter and Sealey (2000), Sealey (2010a, 2010b, 2012, 2018), and Sealey and Carter (2004). Although not exclusively a “realist”

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reference, the resource book by Sealey (2010b) can also be categorized within the realist strand of AL research. This resource book is specifically aimed at helping beginner AL scholars (particularly sociolinguists interested in exploring and using various approaches to discourse analysis), while situating AL scholarship within the social sciences, and managing to explain the complex and multiple links between concepts/theories and the practical aspects of AL research. It unpacks the ontological basis upon which to distinguish between different types of linguistic evidence, and reiterate from a variety of angles the need for triangulation in realist AL research. Given that the current volume is much less specific on issues related to realist AL methodology, I encourage readers to consult this valuable resource. Sealey and Carter’s (2004) book Applied Linguistics as Social Science opens with a discussion of the links between social theory and core AL concerns, and follows with a summary of a realist view of language. The authors explain how claims about language by AL scholars are grounded in specific theoretical and methodological traditions, and trace numerous conceptual problems in AL scholarship back to specific theoretical descriptions. They subsequently develop a realist take on intercultural communication and empirically grounded AL studies, closing their volume by suggesting methodological possibilities for as social realist approach to AL research. Applied Linguistics as Social Science is—as is the current volume—grounded in a critique of existing AL scholarship as being largely driven by successionist and interpretivist traditions. The authors argue that research in the most ‘well-populated’ region of applied linguistics – the teaching and learning of additional languages – has been dominated by an approach which draws on traditional concepts such as falsifiable hypotheses, the identification of dependent, independent and confounding variables, and the measurement and quantification of salient phenomena. We also noted developments in theoretical and methodological debates in applied linguistics which challenge this tradition, and advocate alternatives, including relativist perspectives, qualitative and ethnographic methods and social constructionist assumptions. These two broad alternatives are often presented in open opposition to each other […] but there is a third category of researchers who are not wholly convinced by either. We would locate ourselves amongst them. (p. 183)

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The authors qualify the successionist and interpretivist traditions as empiricist, thus as products of conflationary thinking, and convincingly present the requirements for and the benefits of a realist approach to AL. Specifically, realism is said to allow AL scholars to do their work “with reference to the properties and powers of language and of language users […] A central feature of this approach is to argue that the social world consists of different kinds of things: namely human beings and the products of their interactions, which are social relations and cultural creations” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 1). Prefacing the Sealey and Carter volume, Layder (2004) identifies realism’s notable advantage over other paradigms in social theory, notably its emphasis on the links between theory and empirical data, its acknowledgement of the discursive nature of scientific theories, and the fundamental orientation of theories towards objective knowledge. In short, realism can be said to offer a “third way” by combining insight from successionist and interpretivist approaches and by integrating them within a more robust social ontology. As with most realist social studies or books, realism is introduced by Sealey and Carter through a critique of conflationary thinking in general—e.g., rendering human agency as an epiphenomenon of cultural or structural processes (downward conflations), reducing social structures to discourse or human interaction (upward conflations), reducing complex systems to their interaction with other complex systems (central conflations), etc.—although it is particularly concerned with the problems posed by postmodernism, as is the current volume. At their core, all variations of realism (see previous chapter for a short list) are concerned with the contingent relationship between agency, structure and culture in the ongoing production of social life. Clearly, realism is not the only ontological perspective to be concerned with this relationship, although it does differ in terms of its account of causality, specifically how it positions emergence as a necessary condition for explaining the causal powers of agency, structure and culture, including an account of agency and underlying generative mechanisms as powerful particulars. To provide some context to the current discussion, an example of conflationary thinking in recent AL research can be noted in some of the core assumptions guiding extensive reading research (e.g., Renandya, & Jacobs, 2002). One such assumption is that extensive reading, in addition

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to fostering reading fluency, facilitates a richer linguistic environment by emphasizing learners’ ability to guide their own learning process largely through self-selection of learning materials, or reading materials within their “comfort zone.” Although a reasonable proposition at first glance, and while learner agency seems to be important in this account, much of extensive reading research remains grounded in the problematic assumption that the type of book chosen itself causes language development to take place, thus overlooking the crucial contribution of reflexivity and learners’ sense-making capacities. Although the point is not to discredit extensive reading as a valuable approach (indeed, extensive reading research has so far raised a number of important issues in language learning, notably regarding learner autonomy, motivation, comprehensible input, language competence and vocabulary learning), at the heart of one of its underlying assumptions—the superior value of specific reading materials over other materials—is that the reading material itself possesses causal power (i.e., that a specific type of reading materials has the potential to cause or trigger a particular learning process rather than another). In contrast, a realist (particularly social realist), non-conflationary approach to these issues would argue that, while the reading material selected is a cultural resource with specific constraining and enabling potentials, the reflexively endowed learner engaged in extensive reading tasks remains the principal focus of analytical concern since (s)he has causal efficacy, not the reading material in and of itself. After all, some language learners could certainly see more value in selecting full-length, non-edited novels over extensive readers to their overall language development. As an English language learner myself, for example, reading the full-length English translation of Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Neil Postman’s Technopoly at the age of eighteen were far more enriching and consequential experiences (although admittedly painful and nerve-racking at times) than any simplified reading materials deemed to fall within my comfort zone at that age. From this understanding of causal links, the question for researchers then centres on the relationship between the learner (as reflexive agent and powerful particular) and the reading material (as cultural resource with constraining and enabling potentials), in light of the language learner’s interests and goals. This relationship is understood

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within this perspective as necessarily unfolding over time and within a contingent social realm. Descriptions of the reading materials can be of use in the task of explaining how this process unfolds, although only in terms of explaining these materials as resources found within the CS, not the SC. To account for the latter, reflexivity would need to be explained. In much of extensive reading research, however, the focus remains largely on the correlation between learners’ existing vocabulary knowledge and the vocabulary range afforded by the materials, a focus which arguably conflates human agency within the CS and bypasses reflexivity as an important causal force in language development. The importance of realism’s anti-determinist, anti-conflationary viewpoint to AL scholarship becomes even more apparent, for example, when important analytical categories such as motivation, task or learner need to be conceptually developed prior to data collection and analysis. In Chapter 2, it was argued that motivation is generally understood in AL scholarship as an affective condition, or disposition, of individual learners towards learning, including their capacity to persist in their learning endeavours (Gardner, 1985). Sealey and Carter (2004: 205– 206) were also quoted as offering a definition of motivation rooted in consideration for structural enablements and constraints upon learners’ intentions (i.e., motivation as a relational phenomenon), and so it is worth repeating it here: While learners’ assessment of the probability of being able to make use of the L2 may also be involved in motivation, that probability is associated with more macro structural factors such as the global economy, and the likelihood that facility in this particular L2 will lead to secure employment. ’Motivation’, then, is conceptualized not as an individual characteristic, nor as a quantifiable variable possessed in different measures by different learners, but as emergent from relations between human intentionality and the social world.

As such, motivation is conceptualized from a realist perspective as both part of learners’ reflexive engagement with the constraining and enabling forces of structure and culture, and as a fundamentally relational phenomenon emerging from learners’ engagement with structural

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and cultural forces, throughout the language learning process. Variations in motivational states thus cannot be explained with reference to causal forces internal to the learner alone, but also and rather importantly with reference to the complex interaction between the learner and his/her structured situatedness. Since this chapter aims to reveal some of the important links between social realist ontology and AL research, I begin by highlighting core principles grounding social realist research left unaddressed in the previous chapter, and in the process hopefully clarifying some of the “nuts and bolts” of a realist approach to AL research.

Realism and Social Research Within the current intellectual zeitgeist—often characterized as part of the broader linguistic turn in philosophy, or as “anti-realist”—it is possible for the term “realism” to conjure associations with the natural rather than the social sciences. However, as Haig and Evers (2016) point out, contemporary realism—largely developed out of Bhaskar’s critical naturalism, a critique of both positivism and postmodernism—has generally been the purview of the social sciences. Although certainly not a unified vision, a realist research agenda in the social sciences involves “commitments to a stratified ontology, [an emphasis on causation], a distinctive rationale for experiments and qualitative research methods, and a transformational model of the nature of society” (Haig & Evers, 2016: 15, emphases mine). With this in mind, realist AL research advocates the emergence of methodological strategies out of theoretical deliberations in order to elucidate causal relationships—i.e., explaining social phenomena in both how they are constituted and how they affect other phenomena. In this sense, realist AL contradicts to a large extent Grounded Theory (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) in that it views the apprehension of empirical reality as a profoundly conceptual task. Put differently, we cannot understand reality without theories, concepts or even words, which are themselves theory-laden. More importantly, “it is only through [a-priori theoretical deliberation] that one can circumvent the limitations of [the empiricist

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view of knowledge] vis-à-vis the problem of the social interaction/social structure relation” (Layder, 1981: 37, emphases mine). Sealey and Carter (2004: 125) talk about theories as “descriptions” of reality thus: As propositions about reality, these descriptions can be assessed in terms of their truth or falsity, their consistency, their evidence and so forth. The importance of a realist ontology is critical here. It provides us with a firm view of the reality to which our theoretical descriptions refer; our descriptions are descriptions of something. […] one cannot theorize about anything, least of all language, without implicit commitment to a view of the world. How things seem to us, in other words, depends both on the world and on our descriptions of it.

In other words, our research endeavours would be impossible from a tabula rasa state of mind; instead, they depend to a large extent on our pre-existing understandings of how the world is and works. Again, however, theories and concepts are not mere discursive constructions: they are emergent products of our commitment to objective knowledge as scientists, and as such they must be subjected to the correspondence theory of truth—the notion that the truth or falsity of a statement about the world is judged on the basis of how it describes/explains that world. Furthermore, methodology must be able to clarify specifically what methods are available, their benefits and drawbacks, and of course which ones are ultimately chosen and for what reasons. Also of importance to this process, methodological strategies must be justified as both reliable with regards to their capacity to measure and reveal insight into AL phenomena, and coherent in relation to theories, conceptualizations and beliefs about those phenomena. Depending on the research project, and the components and resources involved in it, both inductive and hypothetico-deductive approaches are deemed valuable to realist social research: the former being best suited to evaluating the value of competing theories, and the former of potential value to revealing the links between hypotheses and empirical data. Being a realist about methodology does not involve rejecting one approach and prioritizing another outright. At the same time, more importance is placed on qualitative analysis, not as a rejection of quantitative research strategies, but rather as a necessary outcome of realism’s

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concern for the development of causal explanations. As Porpora (1987: 8) puts it, human agents struggle to achieve their socially structured interests in the context of social structured resources, powers, constraints, and opportunities. In the process they alter the social structural relationships that bind them. Such process can only be studied historically because of both the uniqueness of the structural conjunctures and the intrinsic non-lawfulness of human behavior. […] narrative accounts of such processes combine elements of both agency and structure in ways that resolve the theoretical opposition between them.

The idea that explanations of causality require historical, or timesensitive, perspectives was developed earlier in this book. Unlike statistical analysis, which merely provides traces of social facts, historical narratives have explanatory potential in that they allow researchers to explain how phenomena emerge over time out of the complex relationship between people and specific combinations of underlying causal mechanisms, or as an outcome of the agency–structure–culture interaction. Historical narratives also allow for a productive interaction between theory and the analysis of empirical data. Porpora (1987: 8) explains that “a historical narrative can be explanatory by describing the operation of various generating mechanisms in a specific context and by showing how the shape of events in that context conforms to some general theory.” Historical narratives also afford researchers the necessary tools with which to gauge society as radically open and stratified. This is a specific understanding of historical narratives, whereby a unique phenomenon under scrutiny is explained as the outcome of a specific series of events unfolding through time, each with distinct and emergent powers and properties of their own, as well as the effects of mechanisms (which might not necessarily be unique to the situation). Given that realism values historical narratives and analyses, it goes without saying that the pre-test/post-test approach—which occupies a prominent place in successionist AL research—is also seen from a realist angle as inadequate to the task of explaining causal relationships.

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Porpora (1987) also notes that historical narratives are well-suited to the analysis of agency in contingent social contexts: “because the explanatory form of narrative is discursive rather than syllogistic, it needs not portray the actions of individuals as deterministic outcomes of social structural arrangements. Instead a narrative can trace the unique agential responses of individuals to those arrangements” (pp.102–103). As we saw earlier with regards to humans’ reflexive engagement with structural and cultural constraints and enablements, a historical narrative is appropriate to the task of clarifying the complex and stratified process of mediation between structural and agentive forces, specifically reflexivity as a powerful particular and as a three-step process involving (a) structure/culture shaping contextual realities, (b) human beings deliberating upon structural and cultural constraints and enablements, because of their concerns and goals and (c) agentive commitment and contribution to social morphostasis and/or morphogenesis. With historical narratives, every step along this process of mediation can be clarified empirically and conceptually, from descriptive and explanatory angles. Elder-Vass (2010) eloquently summarizes the realist approach to social research in terms of a specific series of analytical steps, as a complex process of identifying a number of structural elements that we would expect to find in any object of scientific enquiry: entities, made up of parts (which are themselves entities), organised by particular relations between the parts and possessing emergent properties in virtue of these relations. In order to explain these entities, relations and properties, we need to identify the mechanisms by which the parts and relations produce the properties, the morphogenetic causes that bring this set of parts into this set of relations in the first place and the morphostatic causes that keep them so. And once we are equipped with these elements, we can go on to explain events, and sometimes event regularities or partial regularities, by showing how the emergent properties or causal powers of the entities concerned interact to codetermine these events. (p. 68, emphases original)

If we apply this approach to a study looking at extensive reading (to extend the above example), analytical categories might be organized in the following way (Table 5.1).

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Table 5.1 A realist approach to studying extensive reading

Entities and parts Structural/cultural elements

Agency

Morphogenetic mechanisms

Examples of elements in a study on extensive reading • Ministry of education policies on foreign language education • Literary works • Curricular structures, including language learning assessment • Formatting and accessibility of reading materials • Students • Teachers/library workers

•

• • • •

Distinct and emergent properties • Provide contents and direction for language pedagogy • Limit range of pedagogical possibilities

• Capacity to learn, make sense of stories, guess unknown words, remember information, reformulate, share ideas and opinions with others • Establish assessment criteria and evaluate students’ performances, suggest interesting books, share personal experiences, provide feedback and advice Importance placed on literary appreciation and literacy at a particular school or language department Enduring and powerful influence of teachers, library staff and seniors Students’ desire to learn a foreign language and improve reading fluency Actual language learning and reading fluency development Teachers’ desire to enrich the language learning experience (continued)

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Table 5.1 (continued)

Entities and parts Morphostatic mechanisms

Examples of elements in a study on extensive reading

Distinct and emergent properties

• Students’ apathy towards the language learning experience • Disengaged and/or ill-trained language teachers • Lack of resources at the school or language department

Of course, the above table merely provides a speculative arrangement and only a limited number of possible analytical categories. In turn, accounting for the relations between entities and the resulting events and regularities would involve a thorough study of empirical data (e.g., actual graded readers, students’ performances on online graded reader tests; engagement in reading circle activities, short summary essays, etc.), in light of the theory-informed organization of concepts and analytical categories in the above table. An obvious outcome of such an approach to the study of extensive reading is rejection of the assumption that the reading material itself has the capacity to cause particular learning processes to take place, or that a particular range of lexical units is responsible for causing development. Consequently, understanding the role of graded readers in the development of reading fluency necessarily involves accounts of reflexivity and other mechanisms involved. Also of capital importance here is the idea that any arrangement involves ongoing and nuanced analysis of the relationship between conceptual and empirical elements. To sum up, a realist approach to AL research aims to provide conceptually and empirically grounded explanatory insight. As such, it depends on sound and robust theories of how society works, or how its various components (including institutions, people, language, communication, pedagogy) operate in relation to underlying generative mechanisms in the production of both empirically observable and conceptually decipherable social phenomena. This general principle applies also to critical AL research, for as Layder (2006: 54) points out, “the capacities of human beings to ‘act back’, to resist and transform the social circumstances in which they find themselves, are important features

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of any theory which links macro and micro phenomena.” As with the complexity approach discussed in the following chapters, realism remains an inherently relational perspective towards the world. It is deeply relational, however, not by succumbing to relationism, but rather by studying the complex relationship between conceptually distinct and emergent phenomena within a contingent social realm. Realism is also concerned principally with situated, contingent, local processes and the generation of middle-range theories, or what works for whom in what circumstances (Emmel et al., 2018). Again, however, critical realism places a much greater emphasis on the potential for theory to reveal insight into the stratified nature of social phenomena including underlying causal mechanisms. Following Popper (1972), the potential for social change is not inherent to social objects or phenomena, but rather inherent to the situation. Stated differently, critical potentials are not exclusive to people: they are also emergent outcomes of the relationship between people and the contingent social world in which they operate. As such, a fundamental task in critical realist AL research involves clarifying how situated agents (language learners, teachers, language programme designers, policymakers, etc.) are differently resourced and differently constrained and enabled in their choices, as a result of various structural and cultural factors including their position along the socio-economic ladder (Pawson & Tilley, 1997). In the next section, I revisit the realist view of emergence—a notion which grounds realism’s anti-conflationary, anti-deterministic stance—in relation to AL research.

Emergence in Realist AL Realist AL can be described broadly as a type of study principally concerned with language and language-related phenomena, themselves seen as emergent outcomes of the antecedent, complex and enduring interaction between agency, culture and structure as “layers” of the social realm with distinct properties and powers of their own. Sealey and Carter (2004) identify three broad areas of interest for AL research: language,

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people’s discourses and practices, and structured social contexts within which language-related practices take place. Realism offers a unique approach to—and places a marked emphasis on—emergence as a relational process and as a prerequisite for causality. According to Elder-Vass (2010: 5), “the value of the concept of emergence lies in its potential to explain how an entity can have a causal impact on the world in its own right: a causal impact that is not just the sum of the impacts its parts would have if they were not organised into this kind of whole.” Stated differently and with regards to human agency as powerful particular, a realist viewpoint holds that a person can potentially condition context and subsequent social interaction because (s)he has emergent properties and powers—e.g., the ability to speak, remember, learn, reconfigure his/her thought process, act.— which are not reducible to his/her component parts (e.g., brain, mouth, eyes, neurological system, etc.) nor to his/her context (e.g., classroom, teacher instruction, textbook, school, etc.). In the previous chapter I offered a few examples of emergent processes including one which pertained to language learning, pointing out that mental properties emerge from chemical and biological processes in the brain, gaining distinct properties and powers over time which cannot be explained by these constituting elements (ideas, beliefs, emotions, etc.). I also mentioned that emergent mental properties can reciprocally impact the physical elements in the brain. In parallel, Carter and Sealey (2000: 8, emphases original) provide the example of a written text to explain emergence as it relates specifically to language and related phenomena: A linguistic artefact in the form of a written text is emergent from the engagement of authorial consciousness with language, but as a text it is irreducible to either of these elements and possesses properties and powers which are partially autonomous of them and capable of exerting influence in their own right (the startling career of The Satanic Verses and its dire consequences for its author provide a compelling example).

Acknowledging some of the parallels between realism and CDST, and describing language as (1) emergent in the human species, (2) emergent

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in individual human beings and (3) a cultural emergent property, Sealey and Carter (2004: 77) further state that the concepts of emergence and complexity are crucial to explaining social action, including social actors’ use of language […] explanations of socially situated language use entail a recognition of natural phenomena, such as the biological endowment of human beings with particular kinds of vocal, aural and visual apparatus and particular kinds of brains, and that speakers’ language use is partly a product of various kinds of interaction between nature and culture.

Below, I revisit this stratified, emergentist view of language within realism. Suffice to say at this point that emergence is a crucial conceptual reality to consider in the development of a stratified approach to AL research, notably because it helps researchers clarify important issues regarding “real” language, authenticity, and more importantly causality, an issue which I revisit in relation to AL research in the following section.

Causality in Realist AL The issue of causality is certainly not germane to realism or AL, nor is realism the only paradigm which addresses this issue explicitly, for essentially all social sciences are necessarily involved in the search for causality (Kincaid, 2012). As Sealey and Carter (2004: 86) point out with regards to the learning-teaching relationship within AL, “the problem of how learners can best be helped to make progress in the language they are learning entails an interest in how pedagogy and outcomes are related.” This relationship is, at its core, causal. This makes the rejection of the very idea of causality by many AL scholars within the postmodernist strand more or less an abdication of one of social scientists’ core responsibilities: to explain why things are this way and not another. Instead, the previous chapter has shown that models of causality applicable to the study of social phenomena are not only available in the literature (for a discussion of the various approaches to causality and causal modelling in the social sciences, see Russo (2009)), they are necessary to explain

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the kinds of causal interactions between structure and agency, and the influence of underlying causal mechanisms on the production of social life. Since AL scholars cannot sidestep this core responsibility, they therefore need an approach, or a combination of approaches, which allow them to “think about the social world as a complexly stratified open system where explanation takes the form of modelling causal mechanisms and testing models empirically” (López & Potter, 2001: 19). In order to develop and apply such an approach to AL problems, we first need to dispense with (a) the interpretivist rejection of causality as the product of modernist or dichotomous thinking, and (b) the deterministic/hydraulic model of causality which characterizes successionist views. Instead, we must look at how causality generally unfolds in specific AL contexts, as a result of the structure–agency interaction, influenced by underlying causal mechanisms, over time and for specific purposes. As with CDST, realism generally sees causality in complexity terms— i.e., as complex causality—which presents the very process of causality not as direct singular force of one object upon another, but rather in terms of tendencies and/or mechanisms (Maxwell, 2012). As Elder-Vass (2012: 16, emphasis original) explains, because what happens on any given occasion is never completely determined by a single causal power, causal powers do not produce exceptionless empirical regularities. Instead, they operate as tendencies. Any given causal power has a tendency to produce a certain sort of outcome but these tendencies may be frustrated when causal powers with conflicting tendencies interact with them.

Within realism, language learning (one of the core concerns in AL research) can be conceptualized as a process emerging out of a complex combination of variables, elements and underlying causal mechanisms situated at different levels—structural, cultural and/or agentive—interacting in complex ways in specific contexts and moments. This stratified, emergentist view of variables, elements and underlying causal mechanisms, along with models for complex and contingent causality, can also (and perhaps even more explicitly) be applied to the study of

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language policy and planning. Monaghan and Boaz (2018: 183) identify a core ontological assumption guiding realist AL research: “Realist advice eschews proclamations that declare programmes to work, precisely because programmes themselves have no causal powers. Instead they offer recipients a range of resources on which to act or not.” In similar vein, Cartwright (2012: 299) argues that showing that a programme or policy worked within a specific population “is a long way from establishing that it will work in a particular target, let alone that it works in general.” The main reason, as we saw previously, is that neither structure nor agency act in deterministic fashion, largely because of the reality of human reflexivity which acts as a sort of “buffer zone” between agency and structure. In my view, the statement by Monaghan and Boaz (2018) in the previous paragraph is also pertinent to the study of language teaching approaches, materials or even variables such as learner characteristics (e.g., first language, motivation, anxiety, beliefs about language learning): while potentially causally relevant, these factors commonly studied in AL research do not directly cause (or impede) learning. Likewise, a language teaching method, set of methods or methodological perspective (e.g., grammar translation, communicative language teaching) can be deemed as causally meaningful to a specific learning outcome, although they cannot independently explain why a language learner succeeds or fails at his/her task. As Westhorp (2018) points out, and as suggested in Table 5.1, teaching approaches provide a range of resources for learners to act in certain ways and not others. In other words, teaching “works” for some people—i.e., can trigger learning—in certain circumstances, at certain times, and for specific purposes. Stated differently, these phenomena can be causally efficacious when they are combined with other forces at particular points in time, in specific contexts, for specific purposes. In this sense, what is needed in AL is a perspective which allows researchers to account for complex and contingent causality. In this sense, the task of realist AL scholars is to explain the different conditions, mechanisms and causal links at play, a task which as we saw in previous chapters becomes possible largely with the use of theory informed by empirical evidence. From this conceptual basis, we can deduce that realist AL—as with CDST-informed AL for that matter—is principally focused on the

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“case,” specifically the complex succession of causal events potentially binding teaching to learning in contexts, for example, so as to hopefully produce conceptual insight of relevance to other cases. Knowledge of the local is necessary also in large part because it can potentially lead to knowledge and insight about both individual and larger groups of learners. AL scholars are, by the very nature of their work, deeply invested in both descriptive and explanatory tasks not because they want to help one or two people learn languages more effectively, but precisely because they want to understand how language-related phenomena such as language learning and teaching can be improved overall, for the empowerment of learners everywhere and the betterment of the human condition. Stated differently, AL research outcomes should, in principle, be generalizable in some form or another. If they are not, their use to language practitioners becomes considerably limited. At the same time, causal models are not necessarily applicable uniformly to all learning and teaching situations, which means that the types of causal claims made with regards to a specific case must be reformulated and adjusted to other cases, in light of new empirical evidence. Again, underlying causal mechanisms can be understood in broad conceptual terms, but they are also specific to the case, which means that their potential causal effects cannot be fully predicted. As Cartwright (2012) argues, while cases can indeed share causal structures, asserting these similarities requires strong evidence of a varied kind. Sealey and Carter (2004: 88–89) make a similar argument thus: “Research of this type will not discover ‘universal laws’, because the actualization of the properties and powers of the objects in the world is context-dependent, but it will aim to generalize beyond the individual case of the single ethnographic study, by drawing on particular conceptualizations of propensity and probability.” As such, the notion of generalizability within realist AL is very much a conceptual issue of relevance to the case. As established previously, a stratified realist view necessarily considers the relationship between structure, culture and human agency as consequential to causal explanation. Sealey and Carter (2004: 87) explain that a realist approach to causality is rooted in

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a belief that the world consists of phenomena – including human beings and social structures – which have distinctive properties and powers. These objects exist independently of our understandings of them […] It is the combination of the powers and properties of human beings and social structures which generates the experienced empirical world.

The realist approach therefore goes beyond both interpretivist and successionist views of causality by focusing on causal mechanisms to produce causal explanations. It is based on understanding that regularity in the data can be explained with reference to specific mechanisms. Elder-Vass (2012: 17, emphasis original) explains causal mechanisms as inherently relational conceptual entities which depend on the composition and structure of the entities concerned. To be more precise, they depend upon (i) the set of parts; (ii) the powers of those parts; and (iii) the set of relations between these parts that are characteristic (and definitive) of entities of this type. When they depend not just on the parts of the entity possessing them, but also on the relations between those parts that only obtain when they make up a whole of this type, these powers are emergent properties of the things possessing them.

In this way, Elder-Vass (2012) further distinguishes between realism and more radical constructionist approaches by assigning central importance to the causal powers of culture and concepts—specifically the causal mechanisms at play—when determining whether these actually matter to the study of specific social phenomena: Constructionist arguments generally assign key roles in the process of construction to one or more of: culture, language, discourse, and knowledge. For a realist, if these are significant then it is because they have a causal effect, and the attribution of causal significance to these normatively based phenomena demands an investigation into their ontological structures. To be more precise, we must identify the mechanisms by virtue of which they can be causally effective (p.8, emphasis original).

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Applying this view to research in sociolinguistics, for example, is Meyerhoff (2001) who lists four possible underlying mechanisms— as they relate to language users as social agents—for the emergence of language variation: “To date, the motivations for interlocutors that have been proposed in sociolinguistics might be summarised in four ways: Accrue social capital; Avoid or minimize risk; Maximize fit with others; Maintain individual distinctiveness.” The realist understanding of causality outlined thus far and in the previous chapter also includes consideration for variables as bearing relevance to causal accounts. Looking at the interaction between variables and second language learning, for example, Lightbown and Spada (2001: 42) list some variables of consequence: intelligence, aptitude, personality and motivational characteristics, learner preferences and age. However, because realism rejects the successionist model, these variables are not understood as independently affecting learning; although they possess distinct and emergent properties of their own, they remain profoundly contextualized social phenomena. To understand how variables interact in complex ways to influence the phenomena under scrutiny, we need causal models. Elder-Vass (2012: 18–19) also recommends combining retroduction—first identifying the causal powers followed by explaining the mechanisms behind them—and retrodiction—first identifying the event, then explaining the powers which led to this event and their interaction. Reinforced through conceptual linkages between theory, underlying mechanisms and empirical data, the author argues that a retroduction/retrodiction combination allows researchers to avoid conflationary thinking characteristic of both successionist and interpretivist accounts of causality.

Truth, Knowledge and Education in Realist AL Although multiple often diverging theories of education can be found in the literature, most agree with the principle that education should empower both individual and groups of learners to face a complex world. This process of empowerment necessarily involves presenting a

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clear, rational, consistent and objective view of social reality, its challenges, etc., a project which also necessarily involves the pursuit of truth as constructed (epistemology) on the one hand, and truth as oriented towards the discovery of objective reality (ontology) on the other. From this angle, realist AL thus considers the correspondence theory of truth as essential to both research and pedagogy. Researching AL phenomena also as educational realities means looking at how truth and the knowledge of it are related, and given the moral (because inherently critical ) nature of education, how curriculum organization are linked to broader social realities including ideologies, market pressures and the unequal distribution of power and resources within society. This section extends the previous discussion on the realist view of emergence and causality by looking at the issues of truth and knowledge from a realist angle. This discussion bears direct relevance to AL scholarship in general, although particularly the type of research invested in the teaching and learning of languages as well as in issues of identity, ideology and social equality in relation to language and its social uses. To begin with, while realism accepts the idea that reality and our understandings of it are related, they are never understood as the same thing or as epiphenomena of each other. This means that a realist perspective is grounded in recognition of (a) a reality outside people’s understanding of it, and (b) people’s understandings of that reality as inherently about that reality. These principles provide the grounds for the correspondence theory of truth, further demarcating realism from antirealist positions such as certain strands of positivism and anti-positivism, radical constructivism and postmodernism, which reduce social reality to discursive constructions (Mackenzie, 2011). The realist view of truth is summarized by Mackenzie (2011: 542, emphasis original) with the argument that To say of a statement that it is true is to endorse it. It is to do just what one does when one asserts the statement. In either case, if one subsequently becomes convinced that the statement is not true, one must withdraw one’s endorsement. Any evidence relevant to the content of the statement is relevant to the claim.

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Furthermore, a realist view of truth—and the knowledge of it—is grounded in a study of empirical evidence through conceptual engagement, or theorization, which is a social activity inherently oriented towards the description and explanation of objective reality. As Williams (2002, cited in Maton & Moore, 2010) puts it, “some knowledge claims can be considered more epistemologically powerful than others. That is not to say such knowledge is unchanging, eternal Truth, but rather there are rational grounds for comparing the relative merits of knowledge claims in terms of their explanatory power.” In other words, while we can never access truth directly or produce infallible truth claims, we can nevertheless produce intelligible, reasonable, more or less rational and non-arbitrary—and quite importantly, empirically justifiable—statements about things possessing specific characteristics and powers. In this way, realism rejects the conflationary approaches of both successionist and interpretivist perspectives, while also rejecting (a) the modernist assumption about an ultimate truth waiting to be found, as well as (b) the postmodernist notion of truth as either justified through consensus and/or its practical uses. According to Elder-Vass (2012), the more radical social constructionist approaches can be identified as problematic from a realist angle if we consider, for example, three of their core assumptions about language as (1) the central force in shaping our views of the world (rather than language both being about the world and shaping certain aspects of the world), (2) the core mechanism in the creation of human understandings of the world (rather than human perception of that world) and (3) determining the meanings we give to linguistic units (not necessarily by making references to the world but rather through particular forging of power relationships within that world). In short, our knowledges of social reality are, from a radical social constructionist angle, mere knowledge claims, themselves discursive products resulting from unequal power relationships. As Elder-Vass (2012: 78, emphasis original) warns, this sort of argument leads to strong epistemic relativism: We must become relativists about all knowledge claims, because if our very concepts are the product of power and can only be altered by the operation of competing powers, there can

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be no objective basis on which to judge that any one claim about the world is better founded than any other.

In contrast, the author stresses that “all social entities are ultimately composed of material parts (primarily people) […] if we are to understand their causal powers we must ultimately demonstrate their rootedness in the material” (Elder-Vass, 2012: 20, emphasis original). To sum up, the realist view of truth and knowledge is rooted in acceptance of the correspondence theory of truth on the one hand, and acknowledgement of the need to clarify how theories relate to other theories on the other. Realism, in this sense, sees the importance of grounding theories in empirical facts, while not succumbing to empiricism. With regards to interpretivist assumptions about the socially constructed nature of reality, and the related overemphasis on local realities, realism would suggest that there is no particularly convincing reason why local knowledge should be less (or more) fallible than knowledge about larger populations or about the more abstract, transitive aspects of social life. Also important to underline: when subjectivists argue that local knowledge is “more real” or “more useful” to educational practice because it comes from direct access to and analysis of empirical data, for example, they are not actually being subjectivists: rather, they are also providing a description of how the world “actually is.” Indeed, our ability to deem things as more useful and/or “more real” than others depends on consideration for the correspondence theory of truth, thus on our commitment to objective knowledge. At the same time, to say that a statement is about objective reality is not a denial of its social/cultural nature. Specific to the context of education, objective statements (as information to be learned, for example) undergo multiple complex ideological reformulations, or “pedagogization,” from policy to classroom practice. In discussing Bernstein’s (1990) notion of pedagogical device, Maton (2013) identifies an important feature of the realist understanding of the relationship between the fields of knowledge production and pedagogy, stating that the latter “is a principle for appropriating other discourses from the field of production and subordinating them to a different principle of organization and relation – they are pedagogized” (p. 48). Within educational contexts, pedagogized

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knowledge becomes to some extent an ideological site where the arbitrary and the non-arbitrary are reproduced and transformed through the accomplishment of educational projects. However, acknowledgement of ideology should not lead to a denial of objectivity. Indeed, educational discourse being pedagogized not only serves specific purposes, it interacts with objective reality in dialectical fashion, with theory guiding practice and practice testing theory (Huckle, 2004). This interaction is further facilitated through ongoing commitment to (a) objective knowledge and the correspondence theory of truth, and (b) a particular type of educational discourse emphasizing communication, shared agency and discovery of knowledge. Huckle (2004: 39) describes a critical realist approach to education as seeking to Overcome the epistemic fallacy that suggests that reality is simply what experience or experiment tells us it is. It claims that the world cannot be changed rationally unless it is interpreted adequately. Such interpretation requires teachers to engage dialectically with students to:

• probe experience; • liberate knowledge of deeper realities (structures, processes and events); • reveal those structures and processes that produce and reproduce powerful interests that prevent people from realising their potential; • expose knowledge or ideology that sustains such interests; and • reflect and act on alternative structures, processes and knowledge which allow a greater degree of self-determination and democracy. Together, these educational principles explain the core of realism’s approach to truth, knowledge and education, issues of crucial importance to AL research, especially its strand concerned with elucidating language learning and teaching, language learning programmes and broader educational programmes in schools, as well as phenomena linking language with identity, ideology and social equality. In the next section, I attempt to further link realism and AL by summarizing a realist

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view of language based on realist principles and the various commentaries about language made in the book thus far.

Language in Realist AL A realist approach to AL research is rooted in an emergentist, nonconflationary conceptualization of language, which begins by identifying language as an emergent product of the complex interaction between structure, culture and agency. In Bouchard (2018), I describe language as a stratified entity composed of (a) language as a relatively rule-governed cultural emergent resource, and (b) language as situated, contingent practice of meaning sharing. Language is seen from this perspective as emergent in that it is more than a particular set of rules and lexicogrammatical elements, which means that it cannot be reduced to these rules and components, nor can it be reduced to the situated interactions which have largely contributed to the emergence of these rules and conventions over time. The more fixed elements of language constitute “a cultural resource manifesting itself in the form of constraints and enablements, an abstract set of tools and rules used to represent objects and processes, part of complex and situated semiotic processes, and an important element in the emergence of discourse and practice” (Bouchard, 2018: 9). To be clear, the “more fixed elements of language” are not crystallized “natural” elements of language, for languages remain human creations which undergo constant changes over the years. At the same time, these elements are “more fixed” than other elements such as fashionable expressions suddenly emerging in teenager discourse at one time in one region of the world and disappearing shortly afterwards, or the kind of language we hear every day on the street, for example. This is because, as antecedent elements of the CS, they are recognized by language users as “more fixed” and therefore as possessing intransitive, more systemic features. If we consider the vast industry devoted to English proficiency testing, for example, we can recognize that test-takers are involved in activities which rely on a stratified view of language—i.e., recognition by test-takers at some level that language and related phenomena such as standardization and variability are distinct

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and emergent products of the structure–agency relationship, and that they need to be learned in order to pass the test. Mackenzie (1998: 61) also acknowledges this stratified layering of language as conceptually important when making the point that “the structure of verb tenses in English is a human construction but not alterable by individual effort.” In other words, while rules change over time, they change not because of one person’s desire that they do but rather as the outcome of the complex structure–culture–agency relationship over rather long periods of time. It is important to recognize the ontological properties of this particular stratum of language, since it helps us explain why speakers or writers (in any language) can judge the value and correctness of specific language forms, and do not reinvent language from scratch whenever they communicate; instead, they communicate ideas by drawing in large part from an antecedent and relatively enduring set of linguistic and semiotic resources which both constrains and enables their communicative endeavours. This particular aspect of the structure–culture–agency relationship endows both language and human communication with certain systemic properties. Indeed, in addition to grammar books and dictionaries which map out much of the content and extent of languages as CS resources, corpus analysis has been very helpful in revealing the systemic features of situated language use, or language within the SC. The expression “drawing from” here does not mean merely reproducing language as a CS resource: it means taking information and inspiration from a cultural (not a material) emergent property, not detachable from human beings but emergent from their biological attributes and their practical engagement with the world. Access to linguistic resources is conditioned by material relations but language, as emergent, has a degree of autonomy both from individual speakers and from material relations. (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 32)

The conceptual distinction between the relatively rule-governed aspects of language on the one hand and language as a social practice on the other also means that knowledge of lexicogrammatical units and rules does not determine how language learners will actually use the language

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in situ. This conceptual distinction is not simply the outcome of an ideological exercise by linguists unconcerned with empirical evidence, but rather “an important step in human beings’ ongoing quest to make sense of their world and their place in it” (Bouchard, 2018: 9). This view is aligned with that of Layder (1997: 30), who points out that a system view of language and a situated and fluid view of it are not dichotomous or mutually exclusive: Language is also a reservoir of ready-made meanings as well as a stock of materials (words, grammatical rules and syntactic rules) out of which an infinite supply of newly minted meanings and interpretations may emerge. The existence of such resources means that a high degree of flexibility and negotiation can take place in human interaction.

To further clarify the notion of language possessing autonomous properties, Popper’s (1972) distinction between three categories of reality, or “worlds,” is helpful in distinguishing between different aspects of language as a stratified social phenomenon, thus reinforcing the realist view of language. According to Popper, World 1 includes physical events and objects such as biological entities; World 2 includes the realm of individual mental processes (what the phenomenologists would be most concerned with); and finally World 3 is the realm of abstractions, and corresponds to contemporary human knowledge and cultures. According to realist principles, Worlds 1, 2 and 3 are causally related to each other, both affected by and affecting processes in other Worlds. What matters for a realist view of language is that World 3 is partially autonomous, detached from situated interaction. For example, the theories we have about language, its learning and its real-world uses are part of World 3 and can reinforce specific views held by teachers and learners regarding language and how it should be learned (realities located within World 2). Sealey and Carter (2004: 37) explain Popper’s three worlds concept and its relevance to the realist view of language thus: The signs and symbols that constitute language enable the development of a fund of common meanings, ideas and understandings, or what we refer to, following Popper (1972), as the ’World 3’ of the products of

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human consciousness. In this schema, ’World l’ is the physical world, ’World 2’ is the subjective experiences emerging from the engagement of human consciousness with World 1, and World 3 is the realm of the externalized products of the engagement of human consciousness with the world beyond itself. World 3 is pre-eminently symbolic.

This ontological perspective contradicts constructionist accounts which generally present language not as a resource found, for example, in dictionaries and grammar books, but instead as whatever people say or write in context. As argued earlier in this book, this overemphasis on the local offers an ontologically flattened view of language because it disregards its World 3 features, or as Sealey and Carter (2004: 119) put it, “its relations of coherence and logicality, its grammatical, syntactical and lexical patterns and relations.” The constructivist view, in this sense, complicates attempts to account for how language makes sense to people in the first place, and by extension how languages change over long periods of time, because constructivism’s inherent empiricism cancels its ability to explain specifically what is being understood or changed, or even why. Furthermore, the constructivist view of language cannot explain, for example, the study of extinct languages, and is somewhat antithetical to philological explorations of the structure and historical development of a language or languages, for example. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 23) point out with regards to the constructivist view of language, The corollary of their claim would seem to be that the structures of languages are the effect of members’ beliefs about languages, of contemporary action and perception. It then becomes difficult, on both counts, to explore the interplay of language with agency, with the efforts of people to modify or maintain some aspect of social reality.

From a realist ontology, there is no doubt that linguistic and cultural processes are principally fluid and most often instantiated through agentive performances or actions. In this sense, realism can also agree with a postmodernist perspective, given its concern for complexity, difference, relationship, and reflexivity in social research. At the same time, and in sharp contrast with other postmodernist perspectives, realism

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is characterized by ontological depth-ness, and maintains its commitment to objective knowledge. While The Douglas Fir Group (2016: 19) is somewhat justified in arguing that, in today’s intensely globalized world, “language use and learning are seen as emergent, dynamic, unpredictable, open ended, and intersubjectively negotiated,” it is crucial to add that there remains some degree of predictability and stability here, namely the fact that language learners and users are drawing from an antecedent and relatively enduring shared resource—i.e., language as a World 3 entity—and that even in today’s intensely globalized world situated intersubjective negotiations of meaning are both constrained and enabled by language—and languages—as CS resource, and of course by the ineherent need people have to understand each other. After all, the statement that situated language use is emergent must inevitably be based on awareness of language also as a World 3 entity, thus on awareness of language as a stratified social phenomenon equipped with properties and powers beyond situated interaction. A realist view of language also distinguishes language from discourse. Elder-Vass (2012: 11, emphases original) explains that language “provides us with the tools to express meaning and therefore shapes how we may do so, whereas discourse, at least as Foucault uses the term, relates to the regulation of the content of what we say.” A realist view of language also adopts the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole (see Chapter 3 for discussion). As Elder-Vass (2012: 88) puts it, we can relate the langue/ parole distinction to the realist account of causation. On the one hand, langue may be seen as a collection of causal mechanisms, or at least as the structures that underpin those mechanisms. Each sign, as a psychological phenomenon, is a mental property of the individual concerned, and its structure, in combination with the individual’s generalised language processing capacities, gives the individual the capacity, or we might say the power, to associate a specific concept with a specific signifier-set.

The langue/parole distinction, maintained in realism, has been criticized notably by poststructuralists to justify the view that signs are arbitrary, and the corollary view that other signs can also emerge as

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salient in the signifier-signified relationship. However, this argument is rather incomplete. Considering, for example, that I am bound by the conventions of academic discourse when writing this book, what poststructuralists often miss is explanation for the fact that individual communicators cannot choose freely which signifier to use. And this is also precisely where Saussure’s theory fails: it does not explain how langue becomes parole, or how agency as well as social, cultural, political and historical factors together act as powerful causal forces in the reality of language use. The existence of linguistic and communicative conventions, and how they relate to broader socio-economic realities, reveal the stratified nature of language on the one hand, and explains why language-as-resource, when used and interpreted in communicative events at the level of practice, becomes one of many factors of causal importance. As Elder-Vass (2012: 116, emphases original) explains, When we turn from langue to parole, the indeterminacy of the meaning of the sign is resolved as a normal product of the linguistic process. Langue provides us with a toolkit of flexible signs, whose very flexibility depends on their meaning being underdetermined. Parole makes use of these linguistic resources, combining them with contextual features to provide specific meaning.

The realist view of language, which in part builds upon the Saussurean langue-parole distinction, thus affords antecedent properties to language as both a social construction and as possessing emergent sui generis properties (Lass, 1980), subjected to morphogenetic processes, as do other social and cultural realities, with human agency and underlying generative mechanisms as causally efficacious forces. The emergentist view of language provided by realism is, in my view, necessary to progress in AL research, especially in sociolinguistics, because it raises important questions about “real” language. The notion of “real” language, often perceived in common-sensical terms yet rarely conceptually unpacked by AL scholars, inevitably brings attention to the stratified nature of language, and from a critical angle, provides fertile grounds to explore the sociological roots of linguistic preference. Of

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course, interest in the notion of “real” language is not germane to realism. Hymes (1974) and Firth and Wagner (1997) famously brought attention to this notion in their calls for a new kind of linguistics concerned with real-world language experiences. Sealey and Carter (2004: 65) identify three different claims about “real” language in AL scholarship: (1) as empirically accessible evidence of language, (2) as structured, thus as possessing antecedent properties existing beyond the communicative act, thus requiring a distinction between form and meaning and (3) as emergent product of situated interaction, yet not reducible to such interaction, the structure and properties of which can arguably be revealed through extensive corpus-based research. However, consensus regarding “real” language among AL scholars has, over time, concentrated attention on (a) localized manifestations of language-related processes—i.e., what people do with language in context, how they construct identities, etc., and most predominantly (b) “practical” linguistics—i.e., pedagogical strategies for teaching languages. Although yielding valuable insight into languages and language-related processes, the notion of the “real” in AL research has, in other words, largely been reduced to language as an empirical phenomenon—i.e., language practice—thus overlooking claims (2) and (3) above by Sealey and Carter. From that basis, a division between pedagogical and theoretical AL unfortunately emerged, gradually leading to a blurring of the necessary links between theory and practice in AL. For realist AL, “real” language refers to an underlying mechanism (or mechanisms) allowing language users to produce and perceive language in all its forms, or again the emergent properties of language as CS resource which allow situated interaction within the SC (Sealey & Carter, 2004). Language is “actual” in the sense of all the language-related phenomena which do happen (as opposed to those which could happen under different circumstances but do not—e.g., all the dialects and varieties of a language currently existing in the world). Finally, language is “empirical” in the form of observable language-related behaviours and phenomena. This laminated viewpoint allows for a view of language as an emergent outcome of the structure-culture-agency relationship, emergent because it cannot be fully explained through a study of situated communication, nor can it be explained fully through a study of its

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systemic features and internal structuring of symbols alone. Language is also emergent in the sense that, while it is partly about the material world, it retains properties that are distinct from it. As a CS resource with antecedent and relatively enduring properties, language also enables and constrains communication and people’s actions. In turn, language is also restrained by how the world is. Ultimately, however, empirical evidence of language shows the crucial role of human agency in determining precisely how language resources are deployed, as a result of the interaction between people and context. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 83) remind us, It is human beings – and not languages – which do things in the social world. In seeking to accomplish things in the world, social actors must use language. Whenever they do so, however, there is an engagement with the linguistic resources available or accessible to them. Through this engagement they experience these resources in enabling and constraining ways.

In this way, we can assume the existence of a feedback process between human agents, the language they use and the objective reality they interact with and are part of. Looking at language through a realist lens allows us to move beyond the ontologically flatted view of the “real” as either “empirical” (e.g., how A uses language x to express identities 1, 2 and 3) or as “useful” (e.g., AL research must lead to improvement in classroom practice), to ask more critically engaged and sociologically relevant questions about issues in AL research such as What is the role of language in language education? Should language teachers use the target language exclusively? How does language education fit within a broader educational curriculum, agenda, policy or philosophy? How can language teachers relate what goes on in their classrooms with political, cultural, economic and social realities affecting the lives of their students?

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Realist AL Research As mentioned at the onset of this chapter, much of realist social research is grounded in a critique of conflationary thinking. As such, in a realist AL research project the following tasks become necessary to reveal the stratified nature of the phenomena under investigation: (a) explaining both conceptually and through the study of empirical data the relational nature of phenomena, including language and its users, and (b) differentiating between contingent empirical phenomena and phenomena which are a necessary outcome of underlying generative relations and mechanisms. The distinction between contingent and necessary mechanisms and outcomes is important with regards to emergent properties, because in order to explain emergence we must demonstrate that the relations which bind the parts and produce emergent outcomes are necessary rather than contingent. This brings us back to Elder-Vass’s (2010) distinction between temporal and synchronic emergence discussed in the previous chapter. The necessary/contingent distinction is also important when elucidating causal links. For example, studying the impact of a language policy on particular (or situated) language practices, or the impact of a new curriculum on language learning, require a distinction between contingent outcomes which emerge in specific contexts at a specific period of time, involving certain people, under specific contingencies on the one hand (e.g., diverging effects of monolingualism within language maintenance policies around the world), and necessary outcomes which must exist in order for other things to happen (e.g., a teacher needing certification to implement a government-approved school-wide curriculum, based on localized language-in-education policies). In parallel with a CDST approach to AL research, Sealey and Carter (2004: 196–197) also emphasize the need to recognize this distinction: The world of social interaction is an emergent, complex, densely symbolic world, where relations themselves, not isolable variables, are constitutive of ‘what works’. Applied researchers may feel much better equipped to

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address the policy-makers’ concern with ’what works’, if the question can be reformulated as ’what works for whom in what circumstances?’

To answer the last question, the realist thinkers Pawson and Tilley (1997) recommend scholars to consider people as reflexively endowed yet differently resourced powerful particulars, who over time make constrained choices within a contingent social realm, in light of their goals and aspirations. From this basis, and in order to transcend successionist and interpretivist influences within AL, Sealey and Carter recommend AL scholars to, in part, invest more energy and time ensuring that all analytical categories and variables in a study are theoretically unpacked in adequate fashion—i.e., in terms of their distinct and emergent properties and powers—before concentrating on the technical aspects of data gathering instruments (which usually involves tasks such as developing questionnaires based on a specific sample size, and maintaining consistency and transparency during interviews). This advice follows long-established research traditions: theory should in principle lead to methodology and not the other way around—i.e., the selection of theories which justify already selected methods. Although realism (and CDST as well) does not prescribe specific sets of methods, methodological questions can, in part, be approached from a realist perspective by answering the following questions: 1. What type(s) of language/discourses are under focus—language practices in the classroom or in the community? textbooks? public discourse about language education? language policies? academic discourse about language education? 2. Which structural, cultural, institutional realities influence the type(s) of language/discourses under focus, and how does this influence unfold? 3. How do human agents in the study negotiate, mediate, resist, etc. these influences in the pursuit of their goals? 4. What are the effects of this interaction between agency, culture and structure? Is it leading to the reproduction or transformation of empirically observable language practices? What other emergent language practices can be observed?

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5. From the findings, what can be said about subsequent structure– culture–agency interactions? As is hopefully becoming more obvious to readers, answers to these questions necessitate a balance between conceptual and empirical work. They also require a multidisciplinary approach to studying how phenomena unfold within and across different strata of the social realm. The study of each level via the application of multiple research approaches should, in principle, reveal much of the complexity discussed by CDST adherents (as discussed in the following chapters). Unfortunately, yet quite understandably, theoretical, methodological, financial and logistical complications can significantly impede this sort of engagement. Even if a comprehensive critical realist study is difficult to conduct in practice, however, researchers can nevertheless: a. b. c. d.

identify the different layers or levels involved, reveal as much insight about each as possible, develop research methods applicable to each level and look at possible trans-level mechanisms involved.

Throughout this process, realist AL scholars should keep in mind (a) the core principle of emergence, and (b) the principle that what we study are complex systems composed of complex parts which interact in complex ways to produce, at higher levels of organization, the complex and irreducible phenomena under investigation. In other words, while realist AL research involves greater involvement in theory and methodology than successionist and interpretivist approaches, and can become overwhelming on many fronts, the work is possible, particularly in collaborative settings involving scientists from different fields and with different expertise. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 202) observe, “social realism is not a research method (nor yet a methodology), and studies may well draw eclectically on the extensive expertise developed by social and linguistic researchers during the previous century, including surveys, official statistics, questionnaires, interviews, observation, ethnography and even introspection.”

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Specific steps can be said to characterize the realist approach to AL research. Firstly, the researcher provides a comprehensive survey of existing empirically informed research to provide some general causal propositions. For example, Bouchard and Glasgow (2019) look at a series of empirical studies of language policy and planning processes around the world, and offer a preliminary understanding of the causal relationships binding elements of agency and language policy and planning processes as complex systems, as outlined in these empirical studies. In doing so, the authors also provide further clarity into epistemological priorities shaping research on agency in language policy and planning. The second step involves looking at emergent powers and properties of agency, structure and culture in order to locate some of the core attributes of causal links, thus potentially refining causal propositions. These more refined propositions, or middle-range theories, should eventually be tested against empirical data. Once these two initial steps are accomplished, the empirical research project begins and can include the collection/analysis of data, followed by the testing of causal propositions, and by the subsequent refinement of causal propositions. The likely outcome of such research is a rich and complex list of causal configurations, which become the basis for answer to the complex realist question “what works for whom in what circumstances and in what respects?” (Pawson, 2006: 74). From this angle, Bouchard and Glasgow (2019) outline a realist approach to studying agency in language policy and planning contexts which begins with an analysis of the context and domain of language use, and follows with an analysis of specific language policies to reveal their cultural and structural influences. Thirdly, researchers conceptualize the interface between agency and language policy and planning processes by notably identifying the types of reflexive approaches deployed by the agents involved. Fourthly, a movement back to structural and cultural influences helps researchers revisit how policy enables and/or constrains agency. This approach ends with an exploration of how agency arches back to influence—or fail to influence—the creation or revision of subsequent language policies. Throughout this process, the drafting and revision of causal propositions remains ongoing.

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I end this chapter with a short discussion on corpus analysis and critical discourse analysis (CDA), two important strands in contemporary AL scholarship which, although not exclusively “realist,” can nevertheless be identified as appropriate approaches to the study of “real” language, as understood within realism.

Corpus Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis and “Real” Language By looking at large bodies of data statistically and through concordance analysis, corpus analysis is effective in revealing overt patterns of use, as well as the relatively patterned structure of everyday communication. Sealey and Carter (2004) note that corpus evidence contradicts the traditional division between words and sentences, or lexis and syntax. Corpus findings also lend strong empirical evidence to support claims regarding the existence of widely shared norms and structured patterns of language use, claims which contradict the popular interpretivist/postmodernist view of language and communication as personal and idiosyncratic. Corpus analysis, however, unfortunately isolates texts from their contexts and fields of production. Rajagopalan (2004: 411) notes that “what corpus linguistics produces are snapshots of language in a constant process of evolution. Rather than purport to capture the putative ‘essence’ of, say, word meanings, its findings point to statistical tendencies of collocation, colligation, and so on, which are subject to constant change and are thus by definition unstable.” Sealey and Carter (2004) disagree, stating that while corpus analysis reveals empirical “traces” of underlying processes, it is vital that we analyze those traces to understand the relationship between language and its social context. As the authors observe, corpus analysis produces a body of attested language behaviour which “points both towards the unobservable but nevertheless real structures underlying that behaviour, and towards the equally real, but not exhaustive, empirical experience of language in use which we can observe everywhere around us. The most significant feature of a corpus […] is its demonstration of the intersubjective properties of

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language” (p. 75). Despite its limitations, corpus analysis thus offers a unique view into what realists would call “real” language. Unlike the focus on overt patterns of use in corpus analysis, CDA is interested in what links language and society together, and is particularly concerned with ideological tendencies (i.e., covert tendencies) within spoken and written text (Bouchard, 2017). It is mainly focused on elucidating underlying processes and mechanisms linking discourse practices (e.g., the production and consumption of policy texts) and particular manifestations of power structures and relationships in society. In Bouchard (2017), I describe CDA as “an approach to research specifically concerned with issues of reflexivity, triangulation, and validity in the study of complex social phenomena, as observable through text, discourse and social practices” (p. 125). For the most part, CDA researchers have prioritized printed materials, and only recently have they begun to consider interactional data and other multimodal discursive forms more explicitly. In many ways a realist scholar himself, Fairclough (1992, 2010) develops a CDA approach based on the distinction—and appreciation for the relationship—between organizational structures and agency. His text-oriented discourse analysis (TODA) provides a stratified view of text as composed of three layers: text, discourse practice and social practice. In turn, Wodak’s (1996) discourse-historical method places greater emphasis on the study of original documents and their interaction with agents in context, as revealed through ethnographic work. Countering CDA’s tendency to overemphasize printed text, Kress and van Leeuwen (1996) look at visual images and multimodal forms of semiosis as part of their analysis. Also informative, van Dijk (2001) socio-cognitive theory looks at ideological discourse from macro and micro viewpoints, although this strategy unfortunately blurs the important distinction made by Fairclough between text and discourse practice. Given its wide epistemological scope and perspectives, it is therefore impossible to identify CDA clearly and exclusively with any specific research methodology. As an overall body of work, however, it can be identified as an ontological perspective which successfully addresses discourse as a stratified social phenomenon.

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Existing CDA research, however, has been criticized as failing to combine sociological and linguistic theory. It has also been criticized for its marked emphasis on text-based linguistic processes, and for providing incomplete accounts of contextual influences on the production and consumption of discourse (Rogers et al., 2005). Since its principal focus is on identifying and dismantling ideology within text, CDA thus becomes essentially concerned with linguistic “effects” rather than “facts.” This shortcoming is noted by Widdowson (2001), who dismisses CDA as a mere projection of analysts’ own partiality. I do not agree with Widdowson on this point, considering that Fairclough, Wodak and Van Dijk have indeed provided numerous arguments, conceptual models and methodological approaches which effectively deal with the problem raised by Widdowson. More importantly, and as with corpus analysis, CDA offers a unique viewpoint into what realists understand as “real” language by, again, approaching language essentially from a stratified viewpoint, and by opening up new conceptual avenues for exploring the complex interplay between linguistic “facts,” discourse practices and social, cultural and political forces at play.

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6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis

So far in this volume I have concentrated on emergence and causality— two of the three core concepts under focus in this volume—in relation to the social sciences and AL research. In doing so, I have presented realism as a robust ontological perspective beneficial to a renewed AL scholarship. In this chapter and the next, I focus more explicitly on the notion of complexity and argue that CDST is also much needed in AL scholarship in order to move beyond positivism and its deductive-nomological model of causality on the one hand, and the at times counterproductive relativism of postmodernism and interpretivism on the other. The system view of CDST also adds further sophistication to realism’s view of system, and allows AL scholars to map out in more precise terms the distinct and emergent properties and powers of social phenomena as complex systems. In addition, CDST’s view of causality adds a great deal of sophistication to AL scholars’ understanding of non-linear processes, including self-organization as a higher level of order, and of how parts and wholes (of both natural and social phenomena) are causally related to each other. Furthermore, CDST—presented by Juarrero (1999) as a theory-constitutive metaphor which allows us to study the causal relationship between parts and wholes—offers even greater engagement with © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_6

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transdisciplinarity than that which can be found in realist literature. As the applied linguists De Bot et al., (2005: 116, emphasis mine) underline, “insights from neurolinguistics, social constructivism, cognitive linguistics, connectionism, social network theory, political science and many other fields have enriched [CDST’s] understanding of language in use. However, none of these approaches have been able to fully acknowledge the dynamic nature of language systems in the multilingual mind.” The authors go on to state that language, languages and language users can effectively be studied through the application of CDST-grounded AL research because they possess (to some extent) the core characteristics of complex and dynamic systems, including openness, non-linearity, emergence and autopoiesis (i.e., the ability of living systems to maintain and renew themselves by reorganizing their composition, as they interact with their environment). This view draws from Juarrero (1999: 195), who argues that dynamical processes homologous to those of self-organizing, far-fromequilibrium abiotic and biological systems are also at work in people and their mental states. In response to disequilibrium either within an agent’s own cognitive organization or between the agent’s cognitive state and other internal dynamics (psychological, emotional, desiderative, motor, and the like), a person’s current frame of mind can undergo a phase change and recalibrate to rectify the disequilibrium.

CDST also provides a convincing explanation for the non-linear progression of human thought and behaviour. As Juarrero (1999: 166) ponders, “if the brain is a complex adaptive system, no covering-law approach, including a behaviorist one, could ever account for human action. If the brain is fundamentally stochastic, as are many other complex adaptive systems, the novelty and unpredictability are in principle so as well.” CDST also allows us to explain why we can nevertheless observe patterns at both the individual and collective levels, and from this basis make informed guesses about future behaviours of complex systems, including social phenomena such as languages, people and societies. Ball (2004: 6, emphasis mine) expresses this idea when asserting that “it is possible to make some predictions about how [people] behave

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collectively. That is to say, we can make predictions about society even in the face of individual free will.” What provides the basis for attempts at prediction is an understanding of how complex adaptive natural and social systems unfold within context and over time. As argued previously, the concept of emergence is central to both CDST and realism. Together, they provide convincing and useful approaches to understanding social phenomena, including language(s), language learners, language learning, education, schools, policy processes, etc., as stratified, complex, emergent, open and dynamic systems, within a complex and contingent social realm. These conceptual parallels between realism and CDST afford researchers not only ontological depth but also valuable theoretical and methodological possibilities for studying complex causality, or multiple non-linear causal relationships within the social realm, and thereby avoiding many of the pitfalls of both successionism and interpretivism. CDST is, however, criticized in this chapter on three fronts: (1) its limited insight into human agency, and by extension (b) its limited engagement with critical theory and (c) the rather liberal use by CDST adherents of notions and insight from the natural sciences as metaphors to describe social processes.

CDST in a Nutshell, and Some of its Important Notions Given the growing popularity of CDST in AL and the social sciences at large, and considering the complex and transdisciplinary nature of research inspired by CDST principles, a single chapter on the subject is clearly insufficient. Readers of the current book are therefore encouraged to consult more comprehensive resources to get a richer and more solid understanding of complexity theory and its various uses (e.g., Buckley, 1998; Byrne & Callaghan, 2014; Cilliers, 1998; Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2009; Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020; Juarrero, 1999; Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008; Ortega & Han, 2017). The Encyclopedia of Complexity and Systems Science (Meyers, 2009) provides one the most extensive and detailed explanations of CDST notions pertinent to both the natural and the social sciences to date. In this chapter, I instead look at specific issues

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in CDST which bear relevance to the study of social phenomena, AL issues, and to the overall argumentation in this book. CDST has a rather short history. Its roots can be traced back to Chaos Theory in mathematics, which emerged in late ninteenth Century through the works of French mathematician and philosopher of science Jules Henri Poincaré, although most of its principles and concepts were developed during the postwar period. However, some of the principles in CDST can be traced further back in history. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020) show rather clearly how complexity perspectives have deep roots in the philosophical and sociological works of Adam Smith, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Émile Durkheim, Talcott Parsons, Jurgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens, for example, thus revealing a rather rich heritage in the humanities. From a historical standpoint, and given the evolution of complexity theory to this day, it is therefore mistaken to characterize complexity theory exclusively as a product of the natural sciences, and by extension as external to the social sciences. Although complexity theory has roots in the natural sciences, or more specifically in mathematics (Lowie, 2013), Byrne (2005) argues that the emergence and development of complexity theory within the social sciences should not be considered simply as a process of one field borrowing ideas from another field: “Rather it involves thinking about the social world and its intersections with the natural world as involving dynamic open systems with emergent properties that have the potential for qualitative transformation, and examining our traditional tools of social research with this perspective informing that examination” (p.98). According to Williams and Dyer (2017), Chaos Theory has led to new insight into both natural and social phenomena. Examples of empirically accessible complex and dynamic phenomena displaying chaotic behaviour include the double-rod pendulum, which demonstrates how changes in complex, non-linear systems are highly sensitive to initial conditions. The butterfly effect, another important principle of Chaos Theory, attempts to describe how small changes in a non-linear system can lead to large differences over time. At the same time, and despite arguments made earlier in this book regarding the distinct properties of natural and social phenomena (to be further elaborated later in this chapter), we should not be alarmed to

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find multiple ontological parallels between natural and social objects. For example, Lowie (2013: 1808) observes that “research in the field of neuroscience shows that the coordinated behavior of the brain is also largely determined by self-organization […] The same conclusion is drawn from other findings in cognitive research.” Over forty years ago, Lass (1980: 114–115) pondered this issue in a very similar fashion thus: If […] we find considerable apparent indeterminacy even in biological systems at fairly high levels of organization, we shouldn’t be surprised to find the same – or worse – in systems involving far more complex and less well-understood properties: e.g., mentation (conscious or unconscious), and its various offshoots such as symbolic behavior, socialization, etc. We might expect language – and especially its history – to be a paradigmatically non-nomic domain.

More recently, Williams and Dyer (2017) observed that, while they retain important ontological differences (e.g., different properties and powers), natural and social phenomena nevertheless occupy the same world, which strongly suggests that they must share some ontological properties. Moreover, because they are both subjected to influence from random variables, both natural and social phenomena can be considered as complex. Tracing the origins of CDST, Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020) see important conceptual exchanges between the natural and the social sciences, noting that in the natural sciences complexity perspectives have led to the emergence of multiple converging conceptual models and theories including Chaos Theory and non-linear dynamical system theory in mathematics, synergetics and complex adaptive systems in physics, dissipative structure theory in chemistry and autopoietic system theory in biology. They also explain that complexity perspectives have penetrated multiple areas of the social sciences including philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political sciences, health studies, economics, psychology and management studies. Similarly, Hilpert and Marchand (2018: 2) observe that components of complex systems can take “material, conceptual, or semiotic forms such as individual students, and teachers, and

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technological objects; motivation, behavioural, affective, epistemological and cognitive variables; or words, text, symbols, and discourses.” As Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020) explain, a core element in CDST—as with other versions of complexity theory—is complexity as referring essentially to the relationship between things (Buckley, 1998; Byrne, 1998; Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008; Morin, 2008), clearly a feature of both natural and social phenomena. From a realist perspective, perhaps CDST’s most valuable contribution to human knowledge is its novel view of system. Accordingly, a system does not group parts in an aggregative fashion: parts are related to each other in specific ways which allow for the maintenance of the system. Juarrero (1999: 110, emphases original) explains that “a system’s internal structure consists in the specific components and the relations among them. Its external structure or boundary conditions consist in the interactions between the components and the environment.” The external structure of a system can, over time, influence how its internal structure unfolds. Open and complex systems emerge as a result of the flexible relationships between their parts, relationships which are necessary to long-term system survival, since the strength of a system usually diminishes when structural bonding becomes too rigid in the face of external influences and change. Emergence constitutes a fundamental element of open, complex and adaptive systems which, in response to external influences, can bring about qualitative change to their components and their relationships, notably a higher level of system organization. Aligned with this view, researchers adopting CDST principles have so far been much less concerned with quantitative than qualitative change, or phase shifts, described by Byrne (2009: 1) as “radical changes in kind rather than marginal changes of degree.” Based on this rudimentary understanding of the complex system, the following eight principles serve to summarize the main principles of CDST as it applies to the social sciences: 1. Various social phenomena (people, systems, agency, causal mechanisms, etc.) can be conceptualized as complex and emergent open systems because they possess numerous features germane to such systems.

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2. Complex systems are the emergent products of their self-organizing capacities as well as emergent products of the interactions between their constituting elements, and between themselves and their environment. 3. Complex systems—as emergent entities—are irreducible to their component parts. This means that they cannot be explained by reversing time and seeing how they came together. 4. Various states of a complex system (e.g., the weather, a class of students, etc.) at any point in time depend on how elements within that system interact over time. 5. Change or stability of a complex system cannot be fully predicted because the variables with which it interacts are constantly changing over time, as does the system itself. 6. The evolution of complex systems over time is achieved largely through iterations of simple procedures (i.e., one process leading to the next), but with sometimes complex and more significant effects. 7. Changes involving the parts of a complex system affect all other parts of that system over time. 8. Complex systems vary in the sense that they are sensitive to specific inputs at times, and to other inputs at other times. Equipped with these eight general principles, we can now look at more detailed issues within CDST. To reiterate a crucial point, however, complex systems are not merely random, wild or complicated: their behaviours reveal underlying causal patterns including feedback loops, a notion which recalls the realist notion of double morphogenesis discussed in Chapter Four. As we saw, double morphogenesis occurs in the structure–agency relationship when agency transforms structure while also being transformed as a result of both external and internal forces. In this way, double morphogenesis can be said to necessarily involve a feedback loop or a combination of loops, and that these complex exchanges are of a causal nature. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 27) stress the importance of feedback loops in a CDST view of change, and in their explanation, we can denote echoes of the notion of morphogenic cycle: “complex systems

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do not remain passive to changing events but rather adapt to and anticipate an ever-changing environment, and in turn initiate change to that environment.” Feedback loops can be negative or positive: negative feedback loops are aimed at maintaining a system’s integrity so as to ensure its functioning. They are products of a system’s internal regulating powers emerging as a result of that system’s interaction with other systems. Positive feedback loops, on the other hand, principally involve a system repeating actions deemed effective because they have worked well previously. Positive feedback loops, also called self-augmenting feedback, involve energy transfer between system parts, constantly feeding off each other, amplifying their powers and properties, a process also called loop gain. When applied to a realist ontology, positive feedback loops can be associated more closely with system morphostasis and negative feedback loops with system morphogenesis. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 28) explain these processes with reference to human communication thus: “too much negative feedback will shut the interaction down and lead to an impasse between interlocutors, while too much positive feedback can result in conflict with one interlocutor dominating the interaction, or both interlocutors competing for space in the interactive event space.” The CDST view of system, emergence and causality finds numerous conceptual echoes within realist literature. Again, we must remind ourselves that CDST is a rather young perspective in the process of establishing increasingly more solid ontological and epistemological grounds within the social sciences. Throughout this process, it is likely that the parallels between CDST and realism will become more evident. Walby (2007: 456) states that CDST is not a unified theory; rather, it is “an emerging approach or framework. It is a set of theoretical and conceptual tools; not a single theory to be adopted holistically. The author observes that the implications of CDST to social theory and research tend to be understood differently. For example, while Byrne (1998) sees complexity theory very much in realist terms, Cilliers (1998) aligns CDST with postmodernism. In my view, however, Byrne’s assessment is more accurate than that of Cilliers, given the marked rejection of the very idea of a system within postmodernism, as well as CDST’s commitment to objective knowledge.

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As suggested in the Introduction, to understand CDST one must first distinguish between things being complicated and things being complex. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020) define complicated as a quantitative difference from simplicity, and the task of understanding complicatedness is breaking things into their parts and then putting them back together. In this way, complicated systems are the sum total of their constituent parts. In contrast, the authors define complex as referring to a qualitative difference, adding that understanding a complex object/phenomenon cannot be achieved by breaking it into its constituents. According to CochranSmith et al., (2014: 107), this is the case “since unexpected consequences arise as a result of the dynamic interactions of parts, which provides challenges to researchers trying to understand the system.” Juarrero (1999: 123) similarly explains that complexity is not an additive measure (as is the complicatedness of, for example, a sand dune) but a measure of organization and order. A system emerges when previously uncorrelated particles or processes suddenly become coordinated and interconnected. In subsequent steps of an evolutionary sequence, components and processes are correlated and interconnected differently — in an even more complexly differentiated hierarchy. What makes each step of a self-organized process new is that its components are systematically interrelated in qualitatively novel ways.

This distinction between complex and complicated parallels another important distinction in CDST between restricted and general complexity. In restricted complexity, it is the interaction between the parts which leads to the emergence of the complex system in question. In light of this distinction, causality can thus be understood as what happens as a result of those interactions (Byrne & Uprichard, 2012). In general complexity, however, complex systems possess properties that are distinct and emergent from the interaction between their parts (Byrne & Callaghan, 2014). For social scientists, general complexity is therefore a more appropriate concept. This brings us back to emergence as a pivotal notion which helps us distinguish between restricted and general complexity, and between

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complicated and complex systems. As Mason (2008a: 2, emphasis original) points out, “complexity theory’s notion of emergence implies that, given a significant degree of complexity in a particular environment, or critical mass, new properties and behaviours emerge that are not contained in the essence of the constituent elements, or able to be predicted from a knowledge of initial conditions.” This fundamental feature of complex systems necessarily implies that (a) complex systems can never be reduced to their constituent parts, and (b) their causal relationships with other entities and systems is non-linear, and are therefore impossible to capture fully through the formulation of laws. As with realism, CDST therefore rejects the notion of causal laws and instead prioritizes causal mechanisms (Maxwell, 2012). When applied to the study of social phenomena, CDST is grounded in a conceptualization of society as a complex system emerging from the interaction between its component parts (e.g., people, groups, institutions, etc.), which are also complex systems. Because of this focus, CDST embraces the notion of an objective reality and the principle that social phenomena can be explained in causal terms. It understands causality as situated, thus rejecting the pursuit of universally applicable knowledge (i.e., the pursuit of the nomothetic principle). Another parallel between CDST and realism is that the former is “against both the sterility of structuralism […] and the disengagement of relativist poststructuralism as the meta theory of postmodernity from any practical engagement at all of social science with processes of social transformation” (Byrne, 2005: 98). From this basis, CDST-grounded social research aims to account for the components and emergent properties of complex systems, for the assumption is that the production of complex arrangements over time—or complex assemblages between subsystems and between complex systems and other systems—happens because of the process of emergence (Byrne, 2009). Gerrits and Verweij (2013: 168) explains this crucial element in complexity theory thus: The world is composed of open systems that are nested within, and have nested within themselves, other open systems. This openness means that systems, although bounded, interact with other open systems in their

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environment. This interaction results in changes to the systems as environmental influences become part of the system’s structure. However, such environmental influences are not magically transferred to the system; the components that form the structure of the system interact and it is through this interaction that environmental influences become internalized. The process by which this happens is referred to as emergence: structure is formed through the interaction of components, and the resulting structures are not linearly traceable to their roots. Without interaction, there is no structure, only a sum of components. Thus, complex reality consists of open systems that are emergently structured.

At the same time, while emergence is central to realism and CDST, the notion is sometimes understood in different ways, notably as either relational or temporal . Most references to emergence in the literature are of the temporal kind, which notes the initial appearance or development of a new phenomenon, thus providing a rather weakened and incomplete view of the emergence of complex systems over time. We can see marked adherence to this perspective among CDST adherents, for example, when they discuss the importance of the “initial condition” of a complex system, and when they argue, for example, that emergence can only be the product of self-organization (e.g., Goldstein, 1999). Specifically, selforganization means drawing resources from context firstly, and secondly changing oneself (or itself ) so as to respond to these constraining and enabling resources and the constantly changing environment (Allen, 2009). As Lowie (2013: 1808) states, “in self-organization, the system as a whole is shaped by the interaction of lower-level subsystems.” However, as Elder-Vass (2010: 21) points out: “water molecules, for example, are not self-organised complex systems, as these terms are used amongst complexity theorists, and yet on a relational understanding of emergence they are entities with emergent properties.” Given the limitations of the temporal view of emergence, we must therefore consider relational emergence which considers, at a moment in time, how a complex system emerges out of the interaction between its components, and in the process gains properties and powers that the components do not possess, and which it would not necessarily possess if its components were organized differently (Elder-Vass, 2010). Arguably, the relational view of emergence takes us beyond the somewhat problematic notion

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of “initial condition” (discussed below) to provide a compositional view of complex systems, in relation to other complex systems. From this basis, what social scientists aligned with a CDST perspective need to explain is how relationships (both between system parts and between systems) act as mechanisms leading to the development of the emergent property under scrutiny. This recalls the important point made by Donati and Archer (2015: 18, emphasis original) cited in Chapter Four on realism that a “relation exists, that is, it is real in itself, irreducible to its progenitors, and possesses its own properties and causal powers.” However, complex systems are not understood within CDST as undergoing change only because of external causal forces, but rather because of the process of self-organization, concisely (although somewhat problematically) defined as a bottom-up causal mechanism by Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 32) thus: “self-organization is a process, across time, through which systems acquire their structure and their functions without interference. […] Self-organization, then, refers to the spontaneous pattern formation and change in systems.” Similarly, Guastello and Liebovitch (2009: 23) define self-organization as a process which “does not require the intervention of outside agents; rather it is often characterized as order for free. [Self-organizing] mechanisms vary in their emphasis on feedback loops between subsystems and bilateral interactions among agents (subsystems) within a system.” Determining at which stage of the process a complex system is, and looking at how the system evolves and acts, are therefore two scientific endeavours requiring the identification of an attractor state, which as will be explained below can be understood also as a causal mechanism. Arguably, attractor states can also be understood as providing both constraining and enabling resources and influences unto agency. Verspoor (2015: 40–41) explains that “the notion of an attractor is reminiscent of the classical developmental notion of a stage, suggesting that development is a process creating a sequence of attractors.” In a more specific sense, researchers can look for signature dynamics, which “produce a particular time signal or trajectory of change over time in the state space that is essential for understanding the causal complexities of system development or change” (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020: 34). There are two general types of attractor states: fixed-point and strange. Fixed-point

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attractor states are the simplest, and constitute single points of equilibrium where complex systems settle. Strange attractors, on the other hand, are chaotic and are often beyond the reach of complex systems. Using realist terminology explored in Chapter Four, we can thus identify modus vivendi as a fixed-point attractor state, or a point where human agents reach some kind of equilibrium in relation to cultural and structural constraints and enablements. In contrast, people’s dreams, hopes and ultimate goals can be identified as strange attractor states. Yet, while complex systems are said to self-organize, external influences must come into play, not as organizing forces but rather as triggers for self-organization to take place. As Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 36, emphasis original) explain, “self-organization can only proceed if there is a trigger such as a significant perturbation that nudges a system out of an existing attractor state.” In this sense, human reflexivity—when defined from this perspective—operates when triggered by cultural and structural constraints and enablements, forces which can be characterized as external sources of energy and influence. Hiver and Al-Hoorie also point out that complex systems are not chaotic per se, because selforganization unfolds in a rather systematic fashion, towards stability, despite possible variations. These more or less regular and stable processes are labelled control parameters, which in light of the discussion on realism in previous chapters, can also be understood as causal mechanisms. As such, phenomena such as social norms and people’s reflexive search for modus vivendi can also be considered control parameters. As the effects of control parameters are felt by the complex system via its selforganizing powers, system-wide patterns of behaviours emerge, as the system itself reaches some degree of morphostasis. At this point in time, control parameters then become order parameters, which then act as forces constraining future movements by the system. In other words, complex systems aim to retain stability, largely by relying on past experience, as they react to ongoing contextual influences and interact with other complex systems in their environment. Coming back to, and further unpacking, the system view provided by CDST, we must also distinguish between the homeostatic view of system—a system (e.g., an organism or a cell) reaching equilibrium mainly as a result of self-regulating processes—with the morphogenic view

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of system—a system whose structural features develop over time, as a result of a complex interaction between internal and external sources of pressure and influence. Buckley (1998: 71) clarifies this important distinction thus: If we see the system as only homeostatic we tend to view variations as abnormal, external, and potentially disruptive and hence always counteracted by a system whose viability hinges on maintenance of a given structure. If we see the system as morphogenic, we are prepared to see variations as normal, internally generated, potentially constructive, and utilizable by a system whose viability may be promoted by structural change. (p. 71)

With this argument, Buckley characterizes CDST essentially as a theory of change, a view also expressed by Byrne (2005). Again, it would be mistaken to conclude from the above discussion of core features of complex systems that they are chaotic, hopelessly fluid and constantly shifting entities. On this point, Williams and Dyer (2017: 4) observe that, “in the social world, most outcomes exist within relatively stable rule-bound social structures, but change comes about as a result of perturbations – the greater the perturbation, the greater the change.” From a sociological perspective, while we can posit that society and its constituting parts are complex systems, and that all complex systems are characterized by indeterminateness (Denzin, 1983), we must also account for how it is that social order exists and is maintained and, perhaps paradoxically, how sometimes it breaks down or changes quite dramatically. Added to this, if the world was so indetermined […] the constraints that prevent us from doing just as we wish (laws, rules, sanctions and physical constraints created by humans) should be routinely capable of transcendence, but they are not. (Williams & Dyer, 2017: 2)

As such, while CDST has largely been characterized as a theory of change, or as a set of explanatory concepts related to the study of change in a complex system (Ramiah, 2014), it is also necessarily concerned with morphostasis, or the maintenance of complex systems, for “the

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possible trajectory of a system also depends on where in its temporal life course it is. This is not just about expectations of change” (Byrne & Uprichard, 2012: 123). In a way, this is to be expected, for change cannot be successfully studied without consideration for stability as well. If we consider, for example, that the continued existence of social organizations “is not simply the product of morphostatic causes, but the outcome of an ongoing interplay between morphostatic causes, morphogenetic causes and structural possibilities” (Elder-Vass, 2010: 36), we can understand how change and stability are profoundly related, and why CDST’s interest in change is balanced by an equivalent interest in stability. As Verspoor (2015: 41) points out, “viewed from a dynamic perspective, stability is a special case of variation in which a dynamic system seeks an equilibrium state or approaches an attractor” In other words, stability is a temporary state of a complex system which suggests order in the face of an attractor or a perturbation, rather than a fixed trait or characteristic of the system itself. With regards to system morphostasis, Byrne (2003: 174) explains that complex systems are robust in two senses. One is that for much of the time they basically stay the same kind of thing with changes being neither trivial nor transformative. In complexity terminology their trajectory is contained within a torus-style attractor. The other is that they can change radically in terms of form – in complexity terminology undergo a phase shift – while retaining systemic integrity.

Knowing whether we are dealing with change or stability therefore requires consideration for time as an important factor in our analysis. Specifically, we must gain a sense of the position of a system within its life course, and explain how it is maintained over time, or how morphostasis occurs in relation to that system. In this section, I have highlighted some of the most important notions in CDST, and attempted to relate them to realist terminology when possible. There are, of course, numerous other principles and concepts central to a CDST perspective, some of which will be covered and related to a realist ontology in the remaining pages of this book. Of particular

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relevance to the current volume is CDST’s view of causality, a subject which I now turn to.

A CDST Approach to Causality The issue of causality in the social realm is understood and discussed by realist and CDST adherents in similar ways: they both view causality not in terms of causal laws which apply uniformly across contexts, but rather as the emergent outcome of the interaction between complex, multiple and contingent mechanisms, and as analytically apprehensible through theory. Byrne (2005: 105) highlights this particular conceptual parallel between CDST and realism thus: Causal processes in complex systems cannot be accessed by simple analysis. The trajectories of complex systems will always be directed by complex and contingent cause. History will matter. There will be path dependency. Context will matter. Agency will matter. This account of causation corresponds exactly with the essentials of the scientific realist description of cause.

Complexity theorists in general express considerable concern over, and have been more explicit in their rejection of, the covering law model of causality discussed in Chapter Two. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 25) discuss the non-linear quality of complex systems within AL contexts, and offer an explanation which allows us to explain system complexity in relation to time: “in complex systems social institutions, language communities or classrooms where many different components and factors interact over time, small differences in some factors at an early point in time can have a substantial impact on the eventual outcome.” As we have seen with regards to realism, time is a central element to consider in the morphogenetic cycle proposed by Archer, specifically how it relates to causality and how structure and agency influence each other in a-synchronous fashion (see Chapter Four). Consideration for time in AL research is important also because it allows us to avoid the tendency to conceptualize causal relationships as hydraulic, a view

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which has grounded variable-based AL studies to date. Juarrero (1999: 3, emphasis mine) extends this critique to the social sciences, arguing that “understanding all causes as collision-like, and the explanatory ideal as deduction from deterministic laws, are two examples of a trend that has characterized the history of philosophy for over two thousand years: the progressive elimination of time and context from metaphysics and epistemology.” The author explains how this model of causality unfortunately remains largely accepted in contemporary theories of action, particularly in how social scientists seem to explain the links between intention, volition and action in behavioristic terms—i.e., reducing their explanatory claims to stimulus–response patterns. In this sense, Juarrero’s overall argumentation is of considerable value to CDST and realism as they pertain to language learning and agency. Of particular interest to the author is the fundamental epistemological shift currently taking place in the social sciences with regards to the issue of causality, especially considering how both philosophy and the social sciences have largely failed to explain and predict human behaviour. As the author explains with regards to the study of agency, “philosophers lack a satisfactory theory of how causes cause and how explanations explain. Considering this egregious lacuna, it is not surprising that philosophers are unable to conceptualize and explain either voluntary self-motion or an agent’s purposive actions” (Juarrero, 1999: 15). In short, realism and CDST share the convictions that (a) accounting for causal relationships is central to social research, (b) causality is not hydraulic but rather complex, multiple and contingent and (c) the study of causality involves looking at the interaction between structure, culture and agency (including the involvement of underlying mechanisms) over time. The CDST view of action, notably the one provided by Juarrero (1999), also allows for an understanding of agency, of top-down and bottom-up causation and of the notion of self-cause or self-organization. Juarrero points out that self-cause has largely been rejected by scientists and philosophers throughout much of history because of the almost hegemonic Aristotelian model of causation which only accepts the idea that causality can happen only if it is between two (or more) ontologically different things (an argument which I have made previously in this volume). With self-organization, complex systems can be explained as

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able to initiate changes within themselves partly in response to external influences. According to the author, “complex adaptive systems are typically characterized by positive feedback processes in which the product of the process is necessary for the process itself. Contrary to Aristotle, this circular type of causality is a form of self-cause” (Juarrero, 1999: 5). With self-organization, we can conceptualize not only the possibility of parts affecting complex wholes, but also of complex wholes affecting their parts—i.e., inter-level causality. The understanding here is that, when complex systems are no longer in equilibrium, their parts begin to fluctuate depending on the phase change involved. In response, the complex whole constrains and restructures the movements of its parts, sometimes in novel ways, so as to adjust to the external stimuli. In this way, one of the distinguishing characteristics between wholes and parts is that wholes provide a kind of framework for what takes place at the level of the parts, something which parts are not able to provide. As Juarrero (1999: 130) explains, “complex adaptive systems exhibit true self-cause: parts interact to produce novel, emergent wholes; in turn, these distributed wholes as wholes regulate and constrain the parts that make them up.” This ontological distinction between parts and wholes is crucial to the current understanding of self-cause, especially when defining human agents as complex adaptive systems. However, it is crucial to remind ourselves that the Aristotelian view of cause is not entirely without merit. Understanding causality—at least from a realist standpoint—requires an understanding of the distinct and emergent properties of phenomena involved in a causal relationship. At the same time, this does not necessarily contradict Juarrero’s point: according to both CDST and realism, the properties of parts are different from that of wholes—i.e., they have distinct and emergent properties of their own. Because of that, self-cause or self-organization can indeed be understood as a causal relationship between different things: wholes and parts. Unfortunately, this important conceptual nuance is not always maintained or made explicit in CDST discussions of self-cause/selforganization. Despite these minor shortcomings, CDST’s view of causality remains rich and insightful, and provides much in terms of explanatory potential. Further enriching CDST’s view of causality is Waldner (2012:

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79, emphases mine), who suggests five possible outcomes to causal complexity: Possible incarnations of causal complexity are equifinality or multiple causes of an outcome; temporal dependence, where the causal effect of a variable changes over time; interaction effects, where a variable causes one outcome in some cases but a very different outcome in other cases; endogeneity, where outcome variables exert feedback effects on their causes, and path dependence, where the cause of an outcome may depend on where the cause is located in a sequence that includes many other variables.

Gerrits and Verweij (2013: 174) see further parallels between realism and CDST when it comes to the issue of causality: “complex causality is an interaction of generative mechanisms in specific contexts, resulting in unidirectional outcomes, meaning that the outcomes are subject to timeasymmetry. […] causality is both real and complex, and, importantly, its contingency also applies to those studying it, implying that causality is, by definition, interpreted.” In arguing thus, the authors bring us back to a core realist principle that causality is not an empirically accessible and measurable phenomenon; instead, it is situated at the level of the real, and therefore as accessible through empirically-informed theory. The authors’ statement also makes reference to the morphogenetic cycle and the idea that structure and agency are phenomena unfolding in asynchronous fashion, thus further reinforcing the conceptual parallels between CDST and realism. Causal complexity is also defined by Mason (2008a) in relational terms as multi-factorial, a principle which posits that many factors are involved in causal relationships, and that consequently researchers cannot effectively isolate factors which can only have their effects if working together, as in successionism and variable-based research. When applied to the study of social phenomena, Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 68) point out that the CDST view of causality has three important characteristics: “(a) effects and outcomes are produced through a combination of complex conditions, (b) several different combinations of conditions can produce the same phenomena and (c) certain conditions can have

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a different impact on an outcome at different times.” The authors also argue along realist lines to suggest that complex causality is not chaotic but rather stochastic, and underline that any account of causality in CDST-grounded research must include time as a crucial factor in determining complex causal outcomes, as well as the conscious human agent as complex causal force. Again, these principles fit rather well within a realist ontology. Unlike the Humean view of causality as constant conjunction, the general CDST view posits that the structure of complex systems includes the conditions of their creation. This historical view of causality, which again is shared by CDST and realism, successfully integrates the notion of time. Both views are also similar in their rejection of covering law models of causality. They are also similar in that they both consider system constraints (or in sociological terms, structural and/or cultural constraints) not exclusively as limiting influences but also as triggers for new possibilities: “if all constraints restricted a thing’s degrees of freedom […] organisms (whether phylogenetically or developmentally) would progressively do less and less. However, precisely the opposite is empirically observed. Some constraints must therefore not only reduce the number of alternatives: they must simultaneously create new possibilities” (Juarrero, 1999: 133). As made clear in this statement, constraints can lead to new possibilities because of the self-organizing potentials of complex systems. From this basis we can also suggest that contextual enablements are not exclusively about new possibilities: they also produce constraints. For example, while the existence of an education system can be enabling mainly by offering a broad range of learning opportunities for students, students must be part of the system to enjoy these enablements, while also potentially ‘framing’ their worldviews within the confines of specific ideological structures. Furthermore, and this cannot be stressed often enough, time is a central analytical factor in the study of complex systems, for as Juarrero (1999: 139) points out, “precisely what makes these complex systems dynamical is that a current state is in part dependent on a prior one. Feedback, that is, incorporates the past into the system’s present “external” structure. Feedback thus threads a system through both time and space.” Rosmawati (2014: 69) expands on this notion thus:

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A dynamic system interacts with factors existing in the environment and continuously adapts itself based on the feedback from the previous interaction. It shapes itself via internal self-organisation […] and proceeds to test out the newly adapted structure to collect feedback afresh, which will then be internalised again through a self-organising mechanism […]. This process is repetitive […]. During this massive restructuring, the system is highly unstable and displays variability and unpredictable behaviour […]. Hence, high variability is a visible indicator of growth.

Although CDST can be said to offer interesting conceptual and methodological avenues for studying causality, some scholars remain sceptical about such potential. The realist scholar Forbes-Pitt (2013: 116), for example, claims that CDST is unable to provide a necessary theory of causality, because it rejects the kind of empiricism we would see in Humean constant conjunctions by expressly denying the kind of ‘law’ that would enable the statement ‘where A occurs, B will always occur’ as the very foundation of the term self-organization denies this kind of predictability. […] So we are left with an apparent enduring implicit meta-theoretical assumption of relations between elements being causal, but with no causal theory that would uphold this. This leaves complexity theorists in a weak position to make causal claims.

The problem with this critique, of course, is that causal explanations are not exclusively or inevitably aimed at the formulation of generalizable predictions. Indeed, the argument can be made that complex causality does not necessarily imply predictability. As Lass (1980: 105) underlines, “in more complex systems (e.g., ecological interactions) the success rate of predictions is much lower, and interesting patterns of indeterminacy arise.” Almost half a century ago, Mayr (1968) identified four reasons for such indeterminacy in complex systems: “the randomness of events, their uniqueness, extreme complexity and, of course, emergence.” Furthermore, and perhaps more aligned with a realist perspective, causality can be explained in terms of mechanisms, patterns or tendencies (Maxwell, 2012), or again trajectories (Byrne & Uprichard, 2012). The denial of predictability in the social sciences is, after all, not a problem, since it

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reflects a crucial understanding of social phenomena, including reflexively endowed human beings, as complex, dynamic, open and non-linear systems. At the same time, one would be justified to claim that CDST is less specific with regards to causality in the social realm—i.e., with regards to the complex interaction between structure, culture and agency. The complex realist thinkers Byrne and Callaghan (2014), however, are positive about CDST’s capacity to provide theories of causality in the social realm, or at least provide the ontological grounds upon which such theories can be developed. There are, however, differences between the causal views offered by realism and CDST. One such contrast involves the notion of underlying causal mechanism. As we saw in the previous chapter, critical realism offers a robust view of underlying causal mechanisms, while social realism offers a robust view of agency. CDST, however, holds a rather ambivalent stance regarding agency and underlying generative mechanisms. Mason (2008a: 9) for example, claims that “causation is too multi-dimensional, too fast, and in some senses too unpredictable to occupy the full focus of our attention. Complexity therefore suggests a shift from our preoccupation with causes to a focus on effects.” For realist thinkers, this shift from cause to effect is mistaken, for not only does it focus on only one side of the equation, it also tilts towards interactionism, or empiricism to be more precise, by giving much less attention to the ontological properties and powers of underlying causal mechanisms in the production of social life. As Elder-Vass (2010: 56) underlines, our causal capabilities as human individuals derive from our possession of emergent properties in just the same way that the causal capabilities of other entities do. If this is so, then the same type of argument that justifies attributing causal powers to human beings may also justify attributing them to some social structures.

This is precisely the point Mason seems to miss. Instead, he offers a problematic view of causality, as revealed in the following statement: “From a complexity perspective, things emerge at particular points in the history of a set of multiple interactions through time, simply as a result of

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the interactions among constituent elements, rather than as the result of ‘deep’, generative causal structures.” For critical social scientists, this view is problematic because (a) it dismisses the reality that various mechanisms of oppression—e.g., gender discrimination—are systems with antecedent properties and considerable causal effects on flesh-and-blood people; and in doing so, (b) it fails to explain why these systems, or mechanisms, are causally efficacious in the first place, and how they are “taken in” or drawn from by people on the ground. This shows not only how certain strands of CDST offer little in terms of the solutions to social oppression and the development of approaches to social emancipation (a significant shortcoming which will be discussed later in this chapter), but more importantly why CDST needs to be integrated within a more robust social ontology, an argument which I will develop in the remaining pages of this book. In short, CDST’s tendency to focus on the local and on the effects of things rather than their causes considerably diminishes its capacity to explain antecedent structural and cultural constraints and enablements. While CDST offers a dynamic view of system, its view remains influenced by interactionism to some extent, and demonstrates a penchant towards empiricism. Ragin (1987: 26) attempts to explain the difficulties involved in approaching complexity in the social realm, and in doing so, provides a perhaps more sophisticated viewpoint than that of Mason: Social phenomena are complex and difficult to unravel not because there are too many variables affecting them, although the number of causal variables is certainly important, but because different causally relevant conditions can combine in a variety of ways to produce a given outcome. In short, it is the combinatorial, and often complexly combinatorial, nature of social causation that makes the problem of identifying order-in-complexity demanding.

In my opinion, however, viewing causality in complexity terms should not lead to an empiricist viewpoint, or a movement back to interactionism and a prioritization of local phenomena over broader structural and cultural realities, including underlying causal mechanisms. As we have seen previously in this book, phenomena which we cannot perceive

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or measure through our senses and research instruments (e.g., democratic peace, social class distribution, social inequalities, self-fulfilling prophecy, cognitive dissonance, endowment and contrast effects, learning, etc.) can nevertheless play an important causal role in the production of social realities, including the phenomena we can indeed perceive and measure. Because of these reasons, they must also be considered as real and as worthy of our investigative efforts. To be clear, however, unlike other paradigms aligned with interactionism, CDST does not reject the notion of underlying causal mechanisms outright. As Mason (2008b: 35) argues, CDST accepts the existence of certain essential generative elements in a particular field, but suggests that the field as a whole is much more than merely predictably determined by the primary generative element. While this may be a trigger, and indeed only one of many triggers, of subsequent phenomenal (in the literal and figurative sense) developments, complexity theory suggests that it is the manifold interactions among constitutive elements or agents, whether essential or not, that are responsible for the phenomena, the patterns, properties, and behaviours that characterise a particular field.

In essence, this view is aligned with a realist ontology. What needs to be added to it, however, is that discussions about the causal potentials of underlying mechanisms certainly do not have to be deterministic or positivistic in structure and content, as the discussion about underlying causal mechanisms in previous chapters has demonstrated. In the next section, I look at the CDST view of agency which, as it stands today, remains somewhat incomplete in sociological terms.

CDST and Agency One of the central arguments in this volume purports that CDST requires a robust social ontology, and that realism can offer it. One justification for this position is that CDST—within the context of the social sciences—has yet to offer a clear take on the structure–agency

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debate (Al-Hoorie, 2015); indeed, this debate is most often dismissed by CDST adherents as a product of “dichotomous thinking” (e.g., Mason, 2008b). Admittedly, not all of them agree. Al-Hoorie (2015: 64), for example, reveals awareness of the ontological differences between people and context thus: “If our behaviour were solely a product of the terrain, looking back and feeling proud about one’s achievements would become meaningless.” As such, while there is recognition among some CDST adherents of the need to ontologically distinguish structure from agency, there remains a marked tendency among them to succumb to relationism, particularly a Giddensian-like conflation between structure and agency as “two sides of the same coin.” Perhaps symptomatic of CDST’s need for a robust social ontology is its rather limited insight into human agency. This shortcoming can be explained by the facts that (1) CDST has yet to develop fully, given its recent introduction in the social sciences, and (2) CDST comes to some extent from the natural sciences, which for the most part is not concerned with human agency. However, CDST is certainly not silent on the issue of agency, as Juarrero’s (1999) own work attests. Byrne (2005: 97) also asserts that CDST offers a dynamic view of human agency as causally efficacious because it “necessarily places human social agency as of crucial historical and potential significance for the constitution of planetary reality as a whole, precisely because human agency can change system trajectory.” Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 22) parallel this view by suggesting that “the centrality of agency to human and social systems makes it necessary to include within any system’s boundaries an agent, or agents, capable of exercising intentional action that contributes causally, though not deterministically, to the outcomes and processes of change that arise from that system under investigation.” Offering perhaps the most explicit discussion about the nature of the structure–agency relationship from a CDST perspective within the context of AL scholarship is LarsenFreeman (2019), who argues that “CDST maintains the structure-agency complementarity while bringing to the fore the relational and emergent nature of agency.” What is often missing from CDST accounts of the structure–agency relationship, however, is more specific insight into how that relationship unfolds. Merely saying that structure and agency are equally important and that they are consequently complementary fails

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to enrich the debate. As we saw in Chapter Three, most perspectives in social theory begin with this premise, but end up with often radically different conclusions about how structure and agency are related to each other. In light of this, I maintain two complementary arguments: while CDST’s limited insight into human agency can be explained by its lack of a robust social ontology, CDST nevertheless offers interesting insight into agency as complex system, as the following summary reveals. The most interesting things CDST has to say about structure and agency, at least from a realist standpoint, are that they are both complex, dynamic, open and non-linear systems with the capacity for self-organization, and that they are causally related in complex ways. While most would agree that people can self-organize, others might doubt that structure can do the same. However, we only have to think about how the members of an institution or an organization can disagree with the direction this institution/organization is moving while continuing to contribute to its processes and existence, further highlighting how structure and agency are ontologically distinct, and showing that both structure and agency—because of their dialectical relationship— have the capacity to take external input and produce internal changes by, for example, reconfiguring their constituting parts. However, given the distinct and emergent properties and powers of structure and agency (e.g., people being biological entities, institutions being in large part the outcomes of sets of power relationships, etc.), self-organization is also understood as unfolding differently for agency and structure. While humans can learn and act to change their conditions, institutions for example cannot. It is only through the actions of their members that institutions can change. It is, however, possible to argue from this basis that institutions can “act” through its members, through for example the roles and responsibilities it makes available to its members. Moreover, structures are not closed systems subjected to hydraulic forces. They cannot be reduced to their constituting parts, nor can they be dismantled and put back together to regain their original properties intact. Institutions are thus complex, non-linear and dynamic as well. Given these conceptual properties and powers of people and institutions, structure and agency can arguably—undeniably in my view—be considered as complex systems, perhaps not of the same type, but complex systems

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nevertheless. CDST can thus offer valuable conceptual insight about both strata of the social realm, and provide explanatory insight into how they interact over time. This contribution alone is very helpful in understanding why, for example, the structure–agency relationship is never one-directional or deterministic, and why small changes or input can lead to considerable changes for both structure and agency. Concentrating on human agency, CDST scholar Al-Hoorie (2015: 55) recognizes the centrality of agency in the social sciences thus: The uniqueness of the social sciences might lie in people’s ability to choose how to behave. Particles and molecules do not make choices, as their behaviour is predetermined and predictable by physical and chemical laws. That such precise predictability is absent in human behaviour is a strong argument for our ability to exercise free will through rational thought. In fact, it is the human ability to think and make rational choices that underlies ethical and moral judgments.

The author is careful, however, to argue that, unlike free will, agency is manifested not in people’s direct control over their own behaviour, but rather in their capacity to identify, evaluate and resist unconscious impulses, or to choose a direction despite often diverging impulses. Juarrero (1999: 17), on the other hand, questions this view of choice even further: “Not all voluntary behavior, however, is explicitly ‘chosen.’ Only those acts brought about by a person’s own efforts as a result of deliberation should be described as ‘chosen.’” Despite these conceptual divergences, however, these are productive attempts by CDST adherents to understand agency and its relationship with structure. Perhaps the most explicit and extensive attempt by a CDST adherent to explore agency from a variety of epistemological angles is by Juarrero (1999), who also emphasizes the complementary nature of the structure– agency relationship. As the author argues, human beings are neither linear, closed, nor near equilibrium, nor likely to be understood by models with these assumptions. People are neither isolated from their surroundings nor simply dropped into an environment that pushes them hither and yon. On the contrary, they are embedded in

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their environment, which they in turn influence. (Juarrero, 1999: 116– 117)

Later on in her book, she provides a much more detailed view of how this complementary relationship might unfold: By means of second-order context-dependencies established by persistent interaction with the environment, agents effectively import the environment into their internal dynamics by recalibrating these to incoming signals. Over time, that is, both phylogenetically and developmentally, people establish interdependencies between the environment and their internal dynamics such that the former becomes part of their external structure: their boundary conditions. (ibid : 197)

In her work, Juarrero provides a rather detailed CDST-guided explanation of what she calls a “neurological hierarchy” in the brain. The author presents self-consciousness and intentional action as examples of agency’s emergent properties and powers, by arguing that (a) the interaction among the component parts of people leads, over time, to higher levels of neural organization through self-assemblage, and (b) greater degrees of freedom can be experienced at higher levels which, through this morphogenetic process, come to present constraining and enabling influences upon the lower-level parts. Inherent to the issue of agency is debate over the notion of free will, and Juarrero tends to be rather sceptical on this point. She agrees with Dupré’s (1993) argument that humans are complex because they have an “extraordinarily dense concentrations of causal capacity,” a view which leads her to lend support for the related view that free will should be understood “not as the absence of external determining (Newtonian) causes, but as the human capacity to impose order on a progressively disordered world.” While this view is aligned with realism, it is also important to state that having the capacity to change things and gain some degree of control over the environment, while a distinct and emergent property of human beings, does not necessarily amount to free will, nor is it found in equal proportion among all human agents. In my view, what Juarrero refers to is the capacity of people to do A and B, but not C or D, given that human reflexivity and choices are structured

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within contingent social contexts. In this sense, I share Juarrero’s doubts regarding the potential for the notion of free will to provide much insight into agency. The problem I have with Juarrero’s CDST account of agency is that, given the author’s explicit focus on agentive action, the author is surprisingly ambivalent towards the issue of human consciousness, and by extension, the issue of human reflexivity. Indeed, the author is quite clear about her desire not to be drawn into what she calls the “debate on consciousness.” In my view, her almost exclusive emphasis on the neurological and cognitive aspects of human action, presented by the author as part of agency’s hierarchical structure, unfortunately bypasses reflexivity as another important—and emergent—“layer” in agency’s complex composition. In doing so, the author seems to present a rather direct line between neurological processes, cognitive processes and then action. From a realist angle, reflexivity must be included as an emergent feature of human agency with causal potential, and as a potential complex system in and of itself, a view which as we saw in Chapter Four is richly developed by Archer. At the same time, CDST is not necessarily a unified perspective, and we can certainly find other complexity theorists demonstrating a great deal more interest in human consciousness and reflexivity. For example, Byrne (2009: 1–2) clarifies that “in social systems we have also to take account of the reflexive agency of the human actors in the system. In other words, people can understand their world and act on the basis of that understanding in order to change it.” While this signals progress within CDST bastions on the issue of human agency, further conceptual developments are needed. Without an explicit theory or set of concepts related to reflexivity, there is also a sense that CDST struggles to find a place for human agency. When talks about agency surface, they unfortunately tend to be of a determinist penchant. For example, assuming that agency is a complex, open and dynamic system, and that “if the geometry of a competing attractor state is such that the system is drawn away from the position previously occupied, a phase shift will take place, the system self-organising into a new pattern of behaviour” (Henry, 2015: 91), CDST then seems to offer the picture of a human agent—as a complex system, let’s not forget—that will inevitably self-organize in the presence

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of a phase shift. In other words, we have an agent who is compelled to reorganize in light of contextual constraints and enablements. This effectively removes the role of reflexivity in explaining human action. If we consider the additional example provided by Uhl-Bien et al., (2007: 299), who overemphasize the importance of consensus by arguing that “complex adaptive systems are neural-like networks of interacting, interdependent agents who are bonded in a cooperative dynamic by common goal, outlook, need, etc.”, we can see more clearly CDST’s conceptual limitations when it comes to the study of human beings in their social environment, particularly with regards to reflexivity. Filipovi´c (2015), an AL scholar who approaches her work from a complexity perspective, also reveals this tendency to overemphasize consensus in her discussion of language maintenance and shift: If the members of interested communities of practice continue to use innovative forms in a series of good-willed, non-aggressive (lowintensity) and high-quality (contextualized, purposeful) interactions with the members of other communities of practice (enabling language leadership), there is a possibility of this emergent language behavior to be recognized outside of the interested community of practice as well.

While consensus is certainly an important mechanism in the production of social life, it must also be stressed that human beings do not inevitably share common goals with other agents, nor do they automatically act in cooperative ways, and that even if their actions are not filtered through consensus they can nevertheless be considered as “agentive,” thus as consequential in the production of social life. This is not only because people, social groups and institutions are complex systems interacting in complex ways, but more specifically because people are reflexive complex systems. Offering a slightly different take, although still failing to integrate reflexivity in the equation, is Callagham (2008), who views agency as constitutive of structure. As we saw earlier in this book, this aggregative view of structure is simply insufficient to account for its distinct and emergent properties and powers. When studying human beings and their actions, it is therefore crucial to ask questions such as Why are human

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agents – as complex systems – interacting with structure in the first place?; and What prompts agents – as complex systems – to generate complex and contingent causal links with other complex systems? Answers to these questions necessitate a model of human reflexivity, itself emergent from a stratified view of the social world. Specifically, and as we have already seen, human agents must deal with structural and cultural constraints and enablements because they have (a) goals and projects to achieve, and (b) reflexive powers to first recognize these constraints/enablements and then calibrate their involvement in order to achieve their goals. CDST adherent and AL scholar Filipovi´c (2015: 36) defines agency as “ways of interaction in various communicative domains (private, educational, professional, administrative, religious, to name but a few) which are carried out by members of different speech communities of practice and interest.” This definition of agency, however, is clearly reminiscent of interactionism, and only focuses on potential outcomes, not processes. In response to Filipovi´c, I would ask What are ‘ways of interaction’, and what are the conditions for their emergence? Also revealing a rather ontologically flattened view of agency within a contingent social world is the tendency among CDST adherents to focus on local realities because other things are too complex to deal with. Mason (2008a) makes this rather unsatisfactory argument by saying that structure, culture and underlying generative mechanisms are simply too complex to deal with from a CDST angle. As argued earlier, this prioritization of local matters can be problematic especially for critical social researchers because it overlooks the systemic features of institutional power and relationships, notably various forms of oppression such as sexism, and the fact that these systems have antecedent properties and considerable causal powers to constrain the lives of people on the ground. It also overemphasizes the effects of systems of oppression on people rather than the reasons why oppression takes place and what this means in terms of the structure–agency relationship. Although in the next section I look at CDST’s limited critical insight in more detail, suffice to say here that some CDST adherents do show a propensity towards empiricism, and that when this tendency surfaces in the study of human agency, it necessarily weakens social critique.

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I have shown in this section that CDST adherents have, for the most part, failed to conceptualize reflexivity as one of human agency’s distinct and emergent properties, and (potentially) as a complex system in itself. Because of this, CDST’s view of agency remains weak. Despite these problems, however, CDST is arguably on its way towards developing a clearer view of agency. The works of Juarrero (1999), Semetsky (2008), the entire edited volume by Dörnyei, MacIntyre and Henry (2015), and Larsen-Freeman’s (2019) insightful article on learner agency, are all examples of CDST-oriented works which provide a broad range of detailed conceptual insight into agency as complex system embedded in, and dialectically related to, context. However, directly and uncritically applying CDST to the study of all aspects of reflexive human beings and their actions in the real world might not be advisable. For one, not all components of a person, a community or a social system are engaged in processes aligned with each other, nor do they all work together through consensus. In addition, people do not inevitably self-organize in the face of external pressure or influence: this self-organization process must be the outcome of internal deliberations (i.e., reflexivity). Although the argument that human beings are complex systems is, in my view, undeniable, what matters in a CDST approach to human agency is explaining how people make structured choices in structured contexts through their reflexive potentials. It is therefore appropriate to characterize human beings as complex systems, but perhaps not exactly as homologous to other complex systems in nature and society, such as the weather or even social structures. It is precisely these distinct and emergent ontological properties of humans that CDST must address in order to fully understand the causal potential of reflexive human beings in context. Uncovering the important distinctions between reflexive entities (i.e., humans) and non-reflexive entities (institutions, structures, etc.) in the social realm requires, however, different conceptualizations of core notions in CDST, notably agency, self-organization, emergence and of course system.

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CDST and Critical Social Research As we saw earlier in this book, a viable critical perspective necessitates a strong version of human agency as powerful particular. Unfortunately, CDST has been criticized in part by its adherents and by others including myself as providing a weakened critical perspective, a problem which in my opinion can be traced back directly to its weakened view of agency. This problem, it must be reiterated, has profound consequences for the social sciences concerned with educational issues, a strand which includes AL. Applying CDST to the philosophy of education, Mason (2008a: 3) questions the use of complexity theory to a sociology of education, stressing that CDST “is a descriptive theory that is […] silent on key issues of values and ethics that educational philosophy should embrace.” Similarly, Morrison (2008: 26) explains that complexity theory is amoral, it only describes—and maybe explains— what happens and has happened. Complexity theory alone cannot provide a sufficient account of education, as education is a moral enterprise requiring moral debate and moral choices. Complexity theory does not rule out discussions of good or bad, desirable and undesirable; it simply regards them as irrelevant.

To be fair, since CDST adherents of all strands and persuasions advocate theoretical and methodological pluralism, it is important to state that CDST does not actually reject a critical agenda: it simply does not provide one. This lacuna seriously undermines the commonly accepted claim that CDST offers a meta-theory for the social sciences (e.g., Byrne, 1998; Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020). My position is aligned with that of Davis and Sumara (2008: 8, emphases original), who state that “complexity thinking does not rise over, but arises among other discourses.” The authors instead define complexity thinking as oriented towards explaining contingent social phenomena in viable, reasonable, relevant and contingent terms, yet as dependent on active engagement with reflexivity in research. To me, the latter part of this argument, although fully justified, is more of a call for improving existing CDST principles rather than a description of current complexity thinking.

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Many reasons can explain this recalibration of CDST from metatheory to way of thinking. For one, not everything in the social realm can be identified as complex: we interact with numerous closed or relatively closed systems on a daily basis (systems with easily identifiable boundaries which allow limited or no interchange with their surrounding environment, such as clocks, cars, CD players, family budgets, etc.) and these systems do play important causal roles in the production of social life. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 20) recognize this when arguing that certain phenomena in the social world are complex. From this basis, it would be presumptuous to characterize CDST as providing a social ontology, or a unified conceptual account of social phenomena in a broad sense (Urry, 2005), or a set of coherent principles of reality and principles of knowing (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020), or an effective way to organize the world (Castellani & Hafferty, 2009). Given its ontological limitations, it would also be presumptuous to claim that CDST provides “the intellectual blueprint for conducting and evaluating research about the human and the social world” (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020: 20). CDST has also been presented by adherents as facilitating description and explanation of social change, although it provides somewhat limited insight into social stasis, which is a crucial element to consider when attempting, for example, to explain the existence of beliefs, norms and social roles, as well as the antecedent properties of various forms of social oppression. Indeed, CDST seems to prefer a focus on constant flux as a permanent condition of the social world. More importantly, to be considered a meta-theory within the social science, a perspective or paradigm cannot merely describe phenomena but also explain them in causal terms and provide ways in which society can and should evolve. In other words, it must have both ontological depth and an ethical angle. Part of the problem here is that, when applied to the study of social phenomena, the scope of CDST tends to be limited by its adherents to the empirical and to situated social interaction. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 3, emphasis mine), for example, claim that “complexity is an empirical reality of the human and social world,” a view drawn largely from Morin (2007). Let’s also remember two additional points of crucial importance to critical social research: (1) the effects of

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cause–effect relationships can be empirical, not the relationships themselves, and because of that, (2) causal explanations must therefore be concerned with processes at the level of the real. I do not believe that CDST is strictly empirical: we only have to look at its numerous statements about the causal mechanisms binding complex parts and complex wholes to realize that CDST is deeply concerned with ontological issues, and therefore processes located at the level of the real. This limitation in complexity thinking is, in my view, mistakenly imposed by many CDST adherents, a problem discussed by Davis and Sumara (2008: 7) in the following way: “we do not regard complexity thinking as an explanatory system. Complexity thinking does not provide all-encompassing explanations; rather, it is an umbrella notion that draws on and elaborates the irrepressible human tendency to notice similarities among seemingly disparate phenomena.” In other words, while CDST’s analogical potential is great, more work by its adherents with regards to ontological issues needs to be done to apply complexity thinking fully to the study of social phenomena. I therefore see the above issues not as problematic per se but rather as part of a potential yet to be fully realized. Clearly undermining CDST’s critical potential, however, is its relationist tendency, exemplified in Mercer’s (2015: 73–74) CDST account of social networks: “social networks do not exclusively refer to online networks of relationships, although it can include such a setting. Instead, the term refers more broadly to a way of understanding the nature of social structures and their interrelations in the form of a networked structure.” What we have here is not necessarily a conflation of social structures to networked relationships, but a view of structure which does not account for their distinct and emergent powers and properties which transcend situated interaction. Mercer’s statement about social networks also overlooks the emergent outcomes of the interaction between people and structure, notably antecedent—and entrenched—power inequalities, as well as the potential for social transformation through active and sustained agentive engagement. As Elder-Vass (2012: 158) rightfully points out, “an explanatory social science must still remain a critical social science if it is not simply to conceal by omission the operation of social power.” Cochran-Smith et al., (2014: 110) extends this argument to apply to the research process itself: “in order to get the study

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of a society ‘right,’ explanatory theories must include not simply analysis of the ideas that make the society possible, but also the critique of those ideas. Challenging the structures that reproduce inequalities is thus dependent on adequately interpreting the social world in the first place.” It is therefore difficult to see at this point in time how CDST—at least how it is currently being discussed and developed by its adherents—can offer a viable critical perspective if it can only provide another version of interactionism. After all, of vital importance to those who experience and suffer from social injustice is not merely the possibility for them to formulate and perform alternative identities or “rearrange” relationships: it requires the ability to see and understand the forms of oppression to which they are subjected as systems—i.e., as distinct, emergent and causally efficacious outcomes of the interaction between structure and agency—and develop collective systemic approaches to dismantling them. In sum, because CDST generally fails to explain (a) agentive potentials including reflexivity, and (b) the distinct and emergent properties and powers of social structure, its current ability to provide a viable critical perspective remains considerably limited. One must therefore question Byrne’s (2003: 175) claim that “complexity is emancipating in terms of the potential it offers to local actors. This is very far from trivial and may be the most important single thing complexity can give to us.” In a broader sense, and as I have already argued, one must also question the rather popular claim among CDST adherents that CDST constitutes a meta-theory for the social sciences. Despite these considerable shortcomings, CDST has a great deal to offer to social critique and critical social research. Its novel and dynamic view of system are crucial not only to critical social research but to the social sciences in general, for as Walby (2007) reminds us, social inequalities and social change need to be understood as outcomes of different social systems intersecting with each other. According to the author, the issue of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) has been rather poorly addressed thus far in the social sciences, and we are only recently beginning to understand the implications of oppression as a network of multiple systems of inequalities interacting and (often) reinforcing one another. Fortunately, CDST has much to offer in this regard:

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The relationship between systems is differently addressed using complexity notions. Rather than a simple hierarchical or nested relationship, complex adaptive systems coevolve, mutually adapting during the process. The conceptualization of the process of mutual adaptation is crucial to the theorization of the mutual constitution of complex inequalities that is so important for the analysis of intersectionality. (Walby, 2007: 463)

And precisely because multiple forms of inequality can be conceptualized as interacting complex adaptive systems, we must also attempt to uncover the full ontological depth of each set of relations, as emergent outcomes of the complex interaction between structure, culture and agency. Walby (2007: 454) explains that “rather than there being merely a single base to each of these sets of social relations, there is a much deeper ontology, including the full range of domains: economy, polity, violence nexus, and civil society.” With this in mind, and honing in on the more detailed features of complex systems as they (potentially) apply to the study of social inequality, one could reasonably claim that CDST has the capacity to enrich critical social research if the notion of control parameter —as it applies to people, social groups and social processes— is emphasized and further developed from a sociological standpoint. As we saw earlier, self-organization tends to be a rather systematic process geared towards stability, leading to the emergence of control parameters as rather regular and stable processes and, one could argue, as causal mechanisms as well. The complexity theorist Byrne (2003), who provides in my view a convincing complexity view framed within a realist ontology, also sees parallels between control parameters and generative mechanisms: “Generative mechanisms are always contingent. Generative mechanisms in the social world are contingent inter alia on the actions of human beings” (p. 177). Control parameters are defined by the author as something which can have a profound influence on the kind of future which comes to pass. The crucial questions are how can we elucidate and delimit the range of possible futures and how can expertise in dialogue with citizens help us in choosing the range of actions that can generate the future we desire? (Byrne, 2003: 174)

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In light of this, I believe it is fair to state that, while current CDST can justifiably be criticized for offering weakened views of agency and social critique, it can potentially facilitate the emergence of a broader, more complexity-sensitive approach to critical social research, if merely by reminding social researchers and practitioners (a) of the need to avoid deterministic or conflationary viewpoints, and (b) that they are dealing with complex systems interacting with each other, systems which can change direction as a result of small changes. In other words, while CDST does not offer a solid sociologically informed explanation for why there is oppression and inequality in society, and while it does not provide substantial strategies for social emancipation, it does allow researchers to contemplate the very real consequences of social oppression and inequality as complex phenomena, along with all the theoretical and methodological implications this entails. This CDST-informed viewpoint is indeed a very powerful conceptual tool for critical social researchers to have at their disposal. As Mason (2008b: 43) postulates with regards to the core critical element in education, If education is about fostering the emergence of learning, of creativity, of imaginative and critical perspectives, then educators would be fair in asking of complexity theory how we might set about establishing, or at least contributing to the establishment of, the conditions, insofar as it is possible to influence those conditions, for emergence to occur.

Although Byrne (2003: 174) agrees, he warns that systematic understanding can be part of the basis of social action directed towards the future. It allows progress back into the narrative. However, what it does not allow back in is the notion of progress as inevitable because complexity’s greatest attraction for me is that it reminds us that futures are multiple and that social actions can determine which of the possible futures will actually come to pass.

Perhaps the most elaborate and convincing critical perspective within the complexity sciences to date is developed by the feminist scholar Walby (2007), who criticizes the broad tendency in social research towards conceptual fragmentation and cultural reductionism, especially

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in how the central notion of identity has so far been developed. As the author explains, Not only is the intersection of gender with class important, but also those with ethnicities, nation, religion and other complex inequalities. While there is a wealth of empirical material on these intersections in sociology and other social sciences, their theorization remains difficult and contested. Their theorization as intersecting systems is challenged by the critique of the old systems theory, but the major alternative theorization within postmodern paradigm has a tendency to fragmentation and to micro or cultural reductionism especially in the use of the concept of identity […] a revised concept of social system is necessary to adequately achieve the theorization of the intersection of multiple complex inequalities. Complexity theory offers a route toward the resolution of these theoretical dilemmas. (p. 450)

Although I do not yet consider CDST, at least in its current state, as a robust resource for the development of critical social research, nor do I consider it a robust meta-theory for the social sciences, there is clearly much potential to contemplate. After all, we can all agree that all these issues and all these sociological factors are complex and that they involve complex systems interacting together in complex ways; and if we can agree on that, we must then recognize the value of CDST to our attempts at understanding them. Walby’s approach to a CDST-informed critical social research adds much value to the development of CDST within the social sciences, particularly in the way she approaches the idea of complex systems being “nested.” In my view, however, the problem here is that nested-ness presupposes a hierarchy between systems, and therefore the existence of “a specific set of determinant interconnections” (Walby, 2007: 460). Arguably, some complex systems are nested within others, although not all complex systems can be described in those terms. The author recognizes this point by noting that a view of complex systems as separate “enables us both to keep the notion of system, and the notion of systematic inter-relatedness, while yet not pre-specifying, in a rigid way, the nature of these inter-connections” (Walby, 2007: 459). Put in the context of language learning research, for example, Walby’s approach also

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allows us to conceptualize language learners as different kinds of complex systems in different contexts, embodying different types of social relations depending on the contexts they are in and the purposes they seek to achieve at different times. In other words, the complexity view developed by Walby allows us to present human agents as complex systems moving within a complex intersection of systems of social relations, each with their differentiated sets of constraining and enabling influences. In this sense, Walby’s view is very much aligned with a realist ontology. More importantly, if we consider that AL is in large part concerned with educational issues, and that an ethical viewpoint is central to educational projects (given that education centers on moral debate and choices and the future of societies), a CDST-informed AL scholarship can perhaps be further solidified by greater consideration for and engagement with Walby’s work.

CDST, Transdisciplinarity and the Issue of Metaphorical Borrowings With growing awareness by scientists of all strands that their objects of study are complex and cannot be fully accounted for through the application of simple one-to-one, hydraulic causal models, many began to look beyond their academic disciplines for answers, leading in part to growing interests in exploring the numerous parallels between natural and social phenomena. CDST emerged out of this desire for new insight, making CDST-informed inquiries prime examples of transdisciplinary scholarship. Davis and Sumara (2008: 3) define transdisciplinarity as a research attitude in which it is understood that the members of a research team arrive with different disciplinary backgrounds and often different research agendas, yet are sufficiently informed about one another’s perspectives and motivations to be able to work together as a collective.

From this perspective, most CDST-informed research to date has emphasized methodological plurality and transdisciplinary approaches,

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and embraced the possibility of multiple ontological parallels between natural and social phenomena. Within the field of SLA, The Douglas Fir Group (2016) cogently reveal the multifaceted, multi-layered and complex nature of both language learning and use in the real world— and by extension, justify the need for transdisciplinarity in SLA research. They also identify numerous benefits and challenges emerging from the application of a CDST approach to the study of language learning and teaching. Beyond AL scholarship, CDST and other complexity-based approaches have also been adopted in transdisciplinary fashion to (a) study a broad range of natural and social phenomena, and (b) trigger important shifts in the structure of knowledge within both the natural and the social sciences (Larsen-Freeman, 2015). A broad range of (often) diverging understandings and applications of transdisciplinarity can be noted, however. Although my goal in this section is not to provide a comprehensive summary of those divergences, I do want to identify some of the problems related to what I would call “casual” or “liberal” applications of transdisciplinarity in AL research, or what Davis and Sumara (2008) label “soft complexity science”— i.e., the practice of borrowing concepts from other fields of knowledge and applying them directly to the study of language-related phenomena. Block et al., (2012: 9) offer similar warnings, arguing that transdisciplinarity, “if it is to create new insight for the disciplines involved, must do more than simply cross-reference. It must define the parameters within which the common ground is being established and in so doing, it may shine a new light on the core concepts of the different disciplines.” This is not a mere empirical exercise: as with the task of elucidating causal relationships in our data, defining these parameters— as this section will argue—requires active engagement with ontological issues, and thus with theory. In my view, thinking of CDST as a mere “way of seeing the world, an interpretive system rather than a route to or representation of reality” (e.g., Davis & Sumara, 2008: 18) creates metaphorically laden (thus ontologically problematic) accounts of the phenomena under scrutiny. This problem can be observed in “casual transdisciplinarity”: an approach which, in part, encourages casual “level-jumping” between agentive and structural phenomena without acknowledging important ontological

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differences between levels. Level jumping offers a simplistic scalar view of structure and agency (i.e., agency/small/local – structure/big/global), reduces structure to a mere aggregate of multiple agentive realities, and promotes a somewhat mechanistic understanding of the complex and contingent relationship between structure and agency. Level jumping, in this sense, is very much the same process as making direct equivalences between natural and social phenomena: ontological parallels are seen as evidence that, at their core, things are all pretty much the same, and can therefore be explained using the same conceptual and methodological tools. Both theoretically and methodologically, level jumping is considerably problematic. Of particular concern here is the CDST-informed transdisciplinary view of AL research provided by Filipovi´c (2015: ix, emphasis mine), who describes transdisciplinary research as “a complexity driven process which does not respect boundaries of scientific disciplines, or define research problems using exclusively scientific terminology.” This is a radical reading of a more tempered statement by Byrne (2005: 97, emphasis mine), who argues that complexity theory “breaks down the boundaries between natural and social as objects of knowledge and action.” Although the boundaries between natural and social realities are certainly porous, and while there is arguably much value in eliminating some of the epistemological confines perhaps artificially imposed by traditional scientific views (which are indeed grounded to some extent in acceptance of artificial boundaries between disciplines), not respecting the boundaries of scientific disciplines is a rather different and certainly more problematic matter. For one, it implies that scientific insight gained from diverging disciplines can be used without consideration not only for the ontological differences between objects studied across disciplines (e.g., rocks and people are, at their core, the same ‘things’ ), but also for the epistemological traditions which have emerged over time within specific disciplines, traditions which are fundamental to our collective understanding of the phenomena we study. Filipovi´c also promulgates a somewhat inconsistent ontological view of the social realm when discussing issues linking macro and micro realities, as pertaining to AL scholarship. The author explains that her approach to CDST-driven AL research is

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a systematic formation of a bottom-up, complexity-driven approach to language education policy stemming from the concept of language leadership and based on learning understood as an emergent process in which human action is reshaped through adaptive and creative communicative processes which equip and encourage the learners to seek for new points of view and look for innovative, socially adapted solutions. (Filipovi´c, 2015: ix )

Although the principles outlined here are of great value to an emancipatory AL scholarship, Filipovi´c is unfortunately not committed to this view throughout her book. For example, while her focus remains very much on local realities and bottom-up processes, she also defines her approach as “based on macro-complexity-driven language study in which language is viewed as a function of communicative action, as an integral component of human social interaction, deeply and absolutely rooted in cultural, historical, political, social and other domains of our private and public lives” (pp. ix–x ). This confusion between agency-based and structure-oriented viewpoints becomes more apparent in her statement that “the structure of our social and speech communities, which directly and indirectly impact each individual’s positioning on a social hierarchy based on power, segregation and hegemony, stands in close and intrinsic correlation with language choices we make every time we engage in social interaction” (p. 1). Again, even if acceptable at face value, the problem is that Filipovi´c is level jumping rather too freely, not only in the above cited statements but throughout her entire book. The unfortunate result is that micro and macro realities are distinguished not at the level of ontology but merely in scalar terms, thus overlooking the important emergent properties and causal powers of people and social structures. To her credit, Filipovi´c identifies crucial features and advantages of transdisciplinarity in AL scholarship, pointing out that “transdisciplinarity does not define research problems using exclusively scientific terminology; rather, it includes a wide range of interested parties into the process of problem identification and definition, as well as its solution” (p. 60). This is an important argument to consider when engaging in transdisciplinary social research, particularly that which is concerned with educational issues. However, her statement actually has less to do

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with the need for robust and scientifically grounded ontological statements about AL phenomena, and more to do with emphasizing and nurturing the links between scientific research and social practice. While a practical approach to AL scholarship is crucial for the development of the field—let’s not forget that AL is an applied field of inquiry—one must remain cognizant of the important differences between research as a practice of inquiry and discovery of the world on the one hand, and the application of research findings to real-world tasks and problems on the other. More importantly, while disciplines do stand on common epistemological grounds to a large extent, there are discipline-specific terminologies to acknowledge—a fact which incidentally is emblematic of our collective commitment to objective knowledge—and acknowledgement of this fact is crucial to transdisciplinary engagement. In the type of transdisciplinary engagement advocated by Filipovi´c, however, there is the very real danger of scholars using terms and concepts from a variety of diverging fields for metaphoric effects rather than for the development of sound and reliable ontological insight. To be fair, the author rightfully points out that “different stakeholders, different interested parties, very often possess not only different types or degrees of scientific knowledge, but also enter the research process with extremely different cognitive cultural models and ideologies” (p.61). What is left unaddressed in this statement, however, is how researchers invested in transdisciplinarity can enrich their work and add further sophistication to their fields without making casual—thus problematic—equivalences between ontologically distinct natural and social phenomena. Another advantage of transdisciplinarity highlighted by Filipovi´c is that it helps researchers overcome positivism and other forms of reductionism by facilitating the introduction of a complexity perspective in both research and problem-solving processes. Transdisciplinarity does so principally by countering a diametrically opposed problem: the galvanization of disciplines as separate areas of knowledge evolving exclusively according to their own resources and specificities. For transdisciplinarity to achieve this result, Filipovi´c encourages increased and “continuous dialogue with a number of stakeholders within and outside of academic communities with an ultimate goal of improving peoples’ lives” (p. 71).

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While arguing thus, however, Filipovi´c prioritizes the adoption of qualitative research approaches to transdisciplinary studies, thus overemphasizing the inductive element in social research and foregoing the potential of quantitative approaches, including statistical analysis, to describe broader, population-based complex realities. Again, the issue here is ontological: it has to do with the author’s problematic macro–micro distinction, which leads her to dismiss quantitative research as “dogmatic” and positivist. In other words, while Filipovi´c expresses numerous ideas of considerable value to a renewed and transdisciplinary AL scholarship, these ideas are not grounded in a robust social ontology, leading to a problematic epistemological position which, in my view, counters the author’s goal of transforming AL scholarship into a genuinely transdisciplinary discipline. To see why Filipovi´c’s CDST approach to transdisciplinarity is problematic, let’s consider the following example. Arguably, viewing both human beings and the weather as complex systems, and identifying a series of parallels between both phenomena, can be instructive in the sense that it can remind us that the natural and the social are not mutually exclusive universes but rather parts of what we understand broadly as “the world.” At the same time, as emergent complex systems, the weather and people do have important distinct and emergent properties. For example, natural phenomena are said to possess dissipative structures, or the capacity to dissipate energy/matter through the process of adapting to contextual pressure or change. In more extreme cases where such external forces become overwhelming and undermine the integrity of natural complex systems, leading to “uncontrollable” internal disturbances within these systems, it is possible for weather patterns to “fall apart” or “dissolve.” Filipovi´c (2015: 32) explains this process thus: “If the information becomes such a large disturbance that the system can no longer ignore it, the real change is at hand. At this moment, jarred by so much internal disturbance and far from equilibrium, the system will fall apart. In its current form, it cannot deal with the disturbance, so it dissolves.” As a language teacher, I must ask at this point: Can language learners also ‘fall apart’ or ‘dissolve’ when they face problems or disturbances during the language learning process? What becomes clear here is that two profoundly diverging understandings of dissipation, of system collapse

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and of complex systems are discussed by the author: one pertaining to natural phenomena and another pertaining to people. Without explicitly contextualizing these complex processes within an understanding of the distinct and emergent properties and powers of language learners and the weather, it is difficult to see how some of the metaphorical terminology within CDST can be of use to the study of people and social phenomena, much less elucidate their causal involvement in social contexts. Also problematic in terms of its metaphorical quality is the notion of initial condition, a notion central to a CDST perspective and discussed earlier in this chapter. Verspoor (2015: 38) explains the relevance of this notion to our understanding of complex system change and adaptation in the following way: A dynamic system traces a particular (1) trajectory (i.e. a sequence of states) (2) over time (3) in the state space. The emergence of such a trajectory is based on the fact that a dynamic system describes iterative processes; take the first state to produce the second, take the second to produce the third, take the third to produce the fourth, and so forth for as many successive states as are needed to describe the system’s time course. The iterative nature of the processes involved is central to the notion of development, where the next ‘state’ of development is a function of the preceding state and a condition for the next state.”

While arguing that initial conditions of complex systems are crucial for determining the trajectory of change, Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 49) explain that “all complex systems have a history and no system can be conceived of without taking that history into account. Nonfinality is an important aspect of that history; what this means is because final states do not exist for system development, complex systems are not defined by progressing towards an endpoint.” This is an important argument to make, especially with regards to phenomena studied in the social sciences, given the high degree—and different kind—of complexity involved when studying human beings. However, how can the notion of initial condition be conceptualized as a core characteristic of a complex system marked by nonfinality? Similarly, Sealey and Carter (2004: 12) also question the usefulness of the concept of initial condition (or critical condition) to many of the phenomena studied in the social

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sciences. As they point out, “it is difficult to establish the primary […] constituents of marriage, since it is an institution which has changed over a long historical frame. It is the emergent product of previous emergent products, as contemporary social practices nearly always are.” Similarly, in defining the language learner as active agent within a contingent social realm, I would question the usefulness of the notion of initial condition as (a) allowing complex systems to evolve over time, while (b) being relative to the observer, or not being “initial” in a literal sense (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020). This problem is noted by Juarrero (1999: 257) in the following way: “since we carry our history on our backs we can never begin from scratch, either personally or as societies.” As a potential solution to this conceptual dilemma, some researchers including Verspoor (2015) have suggested that, in the study of human beings, the concept of initial condition should refer to the first moment the data is collected by the researcher. The realist thinker Elder-Vass (2010: 33–34) makes a similar argument thus: There is no single causal explanation of any particular state of affairs, since this will inevitably be a consequence, not of a single previous state, but rather of a series of previous states at different points in the past. It is a matter of judgement which previous states of affairs we consider most relevant in any particular case, although it is common to think in terms of the most recent change as the most relevant cause.

Although a sensible solution, it goes somewhat counter to the need to understand contextual factors at play, including the historical roots of complex systems in order to understand how they evolve and how they relate to context as well as other complex systems. Although the notion of initial condition is not without value to the study of social phenomena, more needs to be said regarding how it applies to people and their engagement in the world, and how it can illuminate causal relationships in a specific ontological sense. This section has revealed how some of the concepts in contemporary CDST literature are, upon greater scrutiny, not necessarily well-suited to the study of humans, despite the fact that the latter can undeniably be presented as complex systems. In many ways, this highlights some of

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the important challenges involved in transdisciplinary research, notably the need to acknowledge and respect the important differences between scientific disciplines. Huckle (2004: 38) identifies three core differences between the social and the natural sciences: • The subject matter of the social sciences cannot be reduced to that of the natural sciences (e.g., human behaviour cannot be reduced to biochemical reactions), there are qualitative differences; • Social reality is pre-interpreted. Society is both produced and reproduced by its members and is therefore both a condition and an outcome of their activity (social relations and structures). The social sciences have a subject-subject relationship with their subject matter, rather than a subject-object one of the kind that characterizes the natural sciences; • Social structures, unlike biophysical structures, are usually only “relatively enduring.” The processes they enable are not universal or unchanging over time and space. Admittedly, many CDST adherents have, to date, identified a range of challenges in applying complexity thinking to the study of people (e.g., Davis & Sumara, 2008), including the problem of metaphorical borrowing across disciplines. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 6), for example, argue with regards to AL research that uncritically importing mathematical methods wholesale from complexity science would be of limited productivity, given that the objects of interest in applied linguistics sometimes differ radically from those in the natural sciences, and because the social sciences do not have the sort of data that the physical sciences use to model complexity mathematically.

However, CDST adherents have yet to explain in detail why metaphors, although perhaps intellectually productive, inspiring and in the spirit of humans’ marked capacity for analogical thought, can indeed complicate the development of robust ontological statements necessary for the development of knowledge within and across disciplines. While there is certainly a great deal of potential involved in transdisciplinary

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exchanges of insight, there needs to be acknowledgement by CDST adherents that ontological differences between the natural and the social are real, and by extension, different phenomena require different conceptual and analytical approaches, and not all of these will necessarily benefit from, or might be relevant to, a complexity perspective. As Elder-Vass (2010: 21) observes, different kinds of entities need different kinds of theories to explain the mechanisms that produce their emergent properties, and complexity theory may be useful in helping us to understand some of these mechanisms, but even quite simple objects can have emergent properties and it may be entirely possible to explain these properties without the help of complexity theory.

In light of this, one might ask the following question: What motivates a complex system to follow specific pathways and not others? For plants and insects, movements in one direction and not another are most likely the outcomes of an interaction between internal and external forces, although we would not necessarily categorize these movements as “choices” in the same way a human might choose, for example, to learn a language, engage in altruistic behaviour, strive to attain a life of luxury, or commit suicide. Clearly, these human phenomena entail a different kind of complexity to that which is experienced by non-reflexive entities in the world. Although not entirely disconnected from the need people have to survive in this world, reflexive choices are possible for reasons other than an inherent system-preserving function. Stated differently, human reflexivity cannot be reduced to the pursuit of instrumental goals. Furthermore, unlike animals or other natural entities, humans are also able to radically change their environment and, at times, bypass or bifurcate external forces. For example, people can “escape” (to some extent and only momentarily) a particular environment by moving very far away from it; they can also escape the clutches of (some but certainly not all) structural and cultural pressures (although it is crucial to state here that they can only do so at a cost). Moreover, while there are certain structural and cultural realities from which we simply cannot extricate ourselves—e.g., our need to use symbiotic means to communicate, our

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need to secure specific physical and material conditions for survival, etc.—there are other structural and cultural realities from which we can temporarily “do without”—e.g., not paying taxes for a while, teachers disregarding state-mandated language-in-education policies. Of course, we can learn different languages and engage in alternative modes of communication, a power which non-reflexive, complex natural entities simply cannot enjoy. These differences matter a great deal when we try to understand what people do in context and why they do so. Given that some of the principles and notions in CDST are more pertinent to the study of non-reflexive complex systems, an improved transdisciplinary CDST research of benefit to AL scholarship therefore requires a thorough review of the concepts of relevance across disciplines, and those of discipline-specific value. To that end, I encourage readers to consult Byrne (2009), Cochran-Smith et al (2014) and Reed and Harvey (1992), who discuss the usefulness of CDST to the social sciences, without in my view losing sight of the important features differentiating people and other natural objects. In the process, they can also gain a clearer understanding of the challenges involved in transdisciplinary scholarship. Possibly, complex realism—a recent fusion between complexity theory and realism—offers a broad range of possibilities in this regard. According to Byrne and Uprichard (2012: 110), a complex realist perspective to the social necessitates a radical re-jigging of some of the key building blocks of empirical social science. Furthermore, we are aware that the language we use is taken and adapted from a relatively wide range of disciplinary fields, so some readers might understand some terms (e.g., near neighbors, state space, control parameters) with respect to their research backgrounds, which may or may not be precisely what is meant.

In other words, this acknowledgement necessitates a critical approach to the use of metaphors in the development of scientific discourse, and a rejection of casual level jumping. CDST-informed AL research also requires acknowledgement that humans are also natural objects embedded in a natural world. This position is important to a realist

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ontology, particularly as it applies to causality. Acknowledgement of humans as natural objects embedded in a natural world, however, should not lead to the posthumanist conflationary argument that social and natural phenomena are ontologically equivalent (see Chapter Two for discussion). The issue of metaphors in scientific discourse is indeed a difficult one to untangle, if not mainly because human thought is in large part analogical and nourished by creative associative processes. By extension, just as all scientific terminologies are theory-laden, both the natural and the social sciences depend on metaphors to develop ontological statements about their objects of study (Lopez, 2001), as metaphors serve rather specific and important ideational purposes. As Juarrero (1999: 239) explains, the purpose of using concrete imagery and metaphors is to induce the explainer or interpreter to “see it fresh” by recognizing that criteria used to identify “similar” and “different” reflect the particular shared experience from which they are formulated. Metaphors and analogies become especially necessary when explainer and explained do not share a common tradition.

Considering that we use language to conduct research, and that language is inherently associative and possesses core non-representational functions, it is appropriate to acknowledge the metaphorical grounds upon which our work as scientists becomes possible. Brumfit (1997) is, in this sense, correct when arguing that researchers constantly navigate between idealizing and explaining, or apprehension and explanation. As we attempt to balance these two projects, “metaphors act as hypotheses, to be rejected where they are felt to be no longer useful” (p. 89). My point, however, is that the use of analogies and metaphors for their illustrative potentials is one thing, and the scientific development of ontological statements about particular objects of study is another. Both processes are, of course, deeply related and certainly mutually influential, but they are certainly not the same. Dörnyei et al. (2008) also identify this tendency as part of a soft complexity approach, and warn against

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liberal metaphorical borrowings from the hard sciences by underlining the distinct and emergent properties of people. As the authors note, many of the core metaphors of complex dynamic systems theory – for example the central notion of ‘attractor states’ – originate in pure mathematics […] and it is questionable whether we can meaningfully deploy such metaphors by mapping them onto a social reality. […] The social and the mathematical realms are not isomorphic. (p. 3)

From a similar standpoint, Byrne (2005) warns against letting CDST become a mere metaphorical apparatus in the social sciences. However, I disagree with the author on the point that “this can only happen if the complexity frame of reference shapes the actual tools of investigative social science themselves.” For one, and as I have suggested previously, not everything in CDST is useful to the study of language users as people and human agents. For example, the notion of fractals is, in my view, not a particularly insightful one because it can lead to problematic observations about people and societies being structurally similar, only to be distinguished on scalar terms, thus bifurcating their respectively distinct and emergent properties and powers. Davis and Sumara (2008: 43) define fractals as generated through (potentially) infinite recursive processes—in contrast to Euclidean forms, which are built up through finite linear sequences of operations. At each stage in a recursive process, the starting point is the output of the preceding iteration, and the output is the starting point of the subsequent iteration […] every stage in this process is an elaboration, and such elaborations can quickly give rise to unexpected forms and surprising complexity.

In my view, there are considerable problems with using fractals as metaphors to explain different social phenomena such as people, groups, institutions, structures and society. Granted, fractals are not identical in shape, but the reason why scientists discuss fractals as important elements is that they are judged to be sufficiently—i.e., statistically— similar enough for them to draw causal inference between them, or to be more precise, between smaller parts and larger wholes. Fractal theory

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demonstrates this parallel essentially through statistical analysis, specifically to demonstrate that certain phenomena and objects (both small and large) in the natural world are not only morphologically or geometrically similar but that they are also “scale-free,” a notion which does not fit well within a stratified and emergentist realist social ontology. Specifically, fractal-based statements lack the ontological depth necessary to the formulation of robust claims about causal links between people and organizations. In this sense, Davis and Sumara (2008: 66) are correct when specifying that while nested phenomena “can be understood to have deep similarities, they cannot be collapsed into or reduced to one another. New laws emerge and new rules apply at each level of complex organization.” Again, this is because of the process of emergence, which produces more complex interactions at higher levels of organization. Given the commitment to objective knowledge advocated by both realists and CDST adherents, metaphorical analogies should be understood merely as temporary labels to be replaced by more conceptually sophisticated language when possible. Aligned with this view, complexity theorists Davis and Sumara (2008: 70–71, emphasis mine) propose the notion of interobjectivity in the following terms: Efforts at the generation of knowledge are suggested [within a complexity perspective] to be not just matters of intersubjective accord, but of the mutually affective relationships between phenomena and knowledge of phenomena – that is, interobjectivity. […] interobjectivity does not assert a direct causal connection of descriptions and the things described. The point is not that things change because they are noticed and described, but that knowers’ actions are altered by virtue of their descriptions.

At the same time, objective knowledge is what we are after, not necessary how we discursively—and further along, metaphorically—apprehend reality. Let’s remember that our various and variegated transitive understandings of the world are about the intransitive aspects of that world, rather than exclusively about those understandings themselves. Because of that, we must be mindful of how we formulate our observations about the world so as to develop robust ontological statements which are not complicated by the weight of metaphors. For example,

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the statement which says that language (or languages, language learners or language classrooms for that matter) is like or similar to a complex system in the natural world, and the statement which says that it is the same as any complex system in the natural world, present two fundamentally different epistemological positions regarding language. The first one can be insightful and perhaps even motivate researchers to consider alternative conceptual possibilities, while the second is somewhat controversial and is very likely to be contradicted by conceptual and empirical research. Liberal uses of metaphors in soft complexity science can, in other words, lead researchers to overlook the need for robust theoretical principles to describe and explain the social world, the phenomena within it, and the complex causal relationships between them.

Emphasis on Evolutionary Change Another important aspect of CDST deserving critical scrutiny is its emphasis on evolutionary change. This is noted by Morrison (2008: 19–20), who states that “complexity theory is a theory of change, evolution, adaptation and development for survival.” To be sure, evolutionary approaches within the social sciences are not germane to complexity theory, nor are they particularly new, as social scientists of various strands began to adopt evolutionary principles not long after the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. The characterization of Marx as an early social evolutionist provides a good example of the importance and relevance of Darwin’s work to the social sciences. Evolutionary theory has helped shape social fields such as evolutionary anthropology, anthropological genetics, paleoanthropology, as well as influencing a range of theories in psychology, human cognition, language studies, economics, archaeology, law and politics. Within realist bastions, evolution is considered an important underlying generative mechanism within society, with Sayer (2000: 26) stating that “social change is evolutionary – path-dependent yet contingent, shaped by legacies yet affected by contingently related processes or conditions.” In this section, I do not argue that evolution-based ideas cannot be applied to the study of social phenomena; rather, I argue that they cannot explain the full range

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of possible human thoughts, discourses and behaviours. Extending the argument made in the previous section, I also aim to identify some of the problems associated with CDST adherents making direct conceptual equivalences between evolutionary processes shaping natural phenomena and those shaping social phenomena. Akin to emergent processes to some extent, there are undoubtedly numerous social phenomena that can be characterized as outcomes of evolutionary processes. For example, we can compare tribal social structures with the emergence of international institutions such as the World Health Organization and reasonably conclude that a great deal of social complexity has emerged throughout history as a result of evolutionary processes. At the meso level, a similar observation is made by Allen (2009: 454) thus: “successful organizations require underlying mechanisms that continuously create internal microdiversity of ideas, practices, schemata, and routines […] It is this that will drive an evolving, emergent system that is characterised by qualitative, structural change.” We can also consider a person’s growth over the years and observe that the development of his/her sense of morality, maturity and so forth are the results of years of cognitive, emotional and moral evolution, in the sense of greater complexity and ability to deal with structural and cultural constraints and enablements. Clearly, evolution plays a big part in the ongoing production of individual and social phenomena. CDST posits that the initial conditions of a complex system allow it to evolve over time through an intricate process of co-adaptation between phenomenon and context (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020). With particular relevance to the issue of learning, adaptation is also understood within CDST as the self-organization capacity of a complex system essentially geared towards improvement and optimal performance, and not merely to reach a balance or ensure stability. In light of these core principles and more, Morrison (2002: 6, emphasis mine) defines CDST as highly pragmatic, as “a theory of survival, evolution, development and adaptation [which] suggests that what is right at any moment is what works at that time to ensure survival” (p. 27). Mason (2008b: 40) echoes this view thus: “Darwin and complexity theory are […] complementary in their explanation of evolution, in their explanation of the nature of change.” Allen (2009: 454) explores complex non-linear system theory as it relates

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to organizational psychology, and draws a direct link between CDST and the theory of evolution thus: Evolutionary drive was put forward some years ago […] as the underlying mechanism that describes the change and transformation of complex systems. In this view, evolution is driven by the interplay over time of processes that create microdiversity at the elemental level of the system and the selection operated by the collective dynamic that results from their interaction together with that of the system with its environment.

Juarrero (1999) offers a slightly more general understanding of complex systems as goal-directed rather than goal-intended, reflecting a consensus among CDST adherents that evolution is core to the complexity approach, acting as a generative causal mechanism, with survival as the ultimate purpose of complex systems. A similar point is also made by Ramiah (2014). At the same time, progress can be more than an evolutionary trajectory and can indeed be defined in myriads of ways. In my view, when CDST adherents discuss education or language learning as an evolutionary process, for example, they are referring largely to evolution of a moral kind. While survival and evolution are certainly important processes explaining the trajectories of complex natural systems, moral or ethical judgments are more or less irrelevant to an understanding of those. In light of this, can we apply the same strategy (or perhaps metaphor) to the study of human beings and social institutions? Can we say that language learners, for example, “do what they do” because they are engaged in a quest for survival in hostile social and natural worlds, and that regardless of their engagement in this process, researchers have no justifiable reasons to offer moral judgement? Obviously, this leaves a lot unaccounted for, notably the complex, rich and non-linear nature of human reflexivity and the moral nature of educational projects. It is also difficult to overlook the teleological core of this social evolutionary viewpoint. Processes observed throughout human history, including language learning, are aptly described as complex outcomes of the interaction

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between multiple causes and underlying mechanisms—themselves emergent outcomes of a contingent, diachronic relationship between agency, culture and structure. Evolutionary social progress can indeed be considered as one of the possible mechanisms, although not the only one. When looking at human history, for example, we must also account for realities such as social regress or lack of progress, destruction, genocides, unequal access to education based on gender and socioeconomic status, and of course the persistence of such systems of oppression and inequality over decades and centuries. In other words, evolutionary principles are insufficient because they fail to account for social morphostasis and morphogenesis on critical—i.e., moral—terms. After all, it would certainly be dubious, if not morally reprehensible, for us as social scientists to characterize genocide, social inequality, bullying and domestic violence as parts of an evolutionary social trajectory, and to think of evolution in the social realm solely in terms of progress. This bears considerable relevance to AL research, especially with its close philosophical parallels with education as a fundamentally moral enterprise. This is largely because the process of natural selection—core to the evolutionary model—provides an incomplete, perhaps even morally dubious, explanation of educational activities including language learning and teaching. Morrison (2008: 29) also notes this problem in the context of education, and suggests that complexity theory needs to clarify whether it is a theory of survival in an unfriendly world, or simply a call to development. If it is the former then whether this is an apt model for education is questionable. Education should be touched by humanity, rather than being red in tooth and claw.

Offering a possible resolution to this ambiguity is Guala (2012), who explores the conceptual links between biology and the social sciences in general by looking at how evolutionary theory can be applied to an evolutionary social theory. As the author clarifies, The unifying trait of evolutionary social theory is the use of biological models of transmission and selection in heterogeneous populations. A major difference between [the evolutionary program in the social

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sciences] and those of sociobiologists or evolutionary psychologists is that contemporary theorists do not attempt to provide explanations of human behavior based exclusively on genetic mechanisms of transmission and selection. (pp. 437–438, emphases mine)

This point seems to be missed by Elder-Vass (2010: 92), who argues that sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are mistaken because they attempt to account for human behaviour in relation to human genes. As Guala (2012: 437) reminds us, contemporary theorists do not attempt to provide explanations of human behavior based exclusively on genetic mechanisms of transmission and selection. The commitment to genetic explanation nowadays is considered unnecessary – indeed a liability that has caused more harm than good to the evolutionary program. [...] most contemporary evolutionary social theorists take a pluralist or agnostic stance concerning transmission mechanisms, while retaining the Darwinian emphasis on population thinking.

From this pluralist or agnostic stance and its understanding of evolution not exclusively in genetic terms but as a general mechanism of change, we can begin to consider learning and social change as evolutionary in the sense of being contingent and historical , thus moving somewhat beyond the confines of the Darwinian model. Since the social world in which we live is an open system, and that what happened in the past has had various consequences for what has happened subsequently since, it is reasonable to view human agents and social processes together as engaged in an evolutionary trajectory. To follow such trajectory is to be inherently historical, while also being time-irreversible: two core principles in CDST. The problem with this viewpoint is, of course, that evolution is given a central role. Stated differently, this viewpoint posits evolution as the principal mechanism of change, a strategy which somewhat goes against both CDST and realist principles of causality which stipulate that changes in the social world result from multiple, complex causality, not the result of a single causal force. While a complex system is sensitive to initial conditions, it also possesses a certain degree of freedom with regards to how

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it will “evolve” beyond its initial state. This is because complex systems are open, dynamic and emergent, which means that considerable unpredictability is to be expected with regards to how they change—or stay the same—over time. Also of importance, changes in complex systems—whether these are languages, discourses, or reflexive human beings—may not necessarily be aimed towards constant improvement, as they might also fail to improve and even degenerate. Focusing on culture, Lewens (2012: 458) formulates a similar view thus: “Evolution is change, and a theory of cultural evolution, one might argue, is any theory that explains cultural change, cultural stability, cultural divergence, or cultural homogenization over time.” Focusing more explicitly on the process of natural selection, the author argues that natural selection can promote the spread of skills or moral values, regardless of whether it is genetic inheritance or learning which explains their transmission. What’s more, skills and moral values are not only transmitted vertically from parents to offspring: They can be passed from children to their friends, from teachers to children, from role models to adults, and so forth. (p. 459)

From a realist standpoint, however, objections could be raised on grounds that this view of cultural change and elaboration endows evolutionary mechanisms with agentive properties and powers rather than people. Also problematic in Lewens’ argumentation is his depiction of ideas as examples of entities acting as replicators, elements which are essential to evolutionary processes. Specifically, he argues that since ideas spread from mind to mind, they can also be understood as making copies of themselves and show a capacity to adapt or fit to new circumstances, or act as replicators. The problem with this analogy is that ideas remain inert entities; as such, they do not replicate themselves, nor do they act reflexively and purposefully in the world. Ideas do not have agentive powers, nor can they be equated to cells which do have the capacity for self-organization. Instead, ideas are part of the CS and serve as cultural resources. When drawn upon by human agents through their reflexive powers, ideas then come in the form of constraints and enablements.

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Ideas can be causally efficacious when “acting through” the sense-making capacities of people who believe in them, but even then it is people who think and act, not ideas. Therefore, Lewens’ analogy constitutes a problematic metaphorical statement about ideas rather than an ontological position regarding the nature of ideas. To be fair, the author does identify some of the problems in this analogy. At surface level, it must be noted that an evolutionary perspective can indeed be appealing from a moral perspective—i.e., the idea that through greater moral engagement and sophistication, people and societies can evolve beyond predatorial instincts towards solidarity, and in the process survive the test of time. At the same time, the application of evolutionary theory to the study of social phenomena (a) considerably diminishes humans’ agentive potential, (b) presents evolution as the main causal mechanism and (c) conjures a teleological view of social processes and phenomena. Although Lewens (2012) notes that Darwin refuted a teleological viewpoint in his theory of evolution, the basic fact that evolutionary theory places survival as the central purpose of transmission, selection and adaptation makes his refutation a rather unconvincing one. For one, it is difficult to deny that the self-interest principle—also core to evolutionary theorizing—provides a rather incomplete explanatory model for human phenomena such as altruism, for example, or even suicide (to be distinguished from acts of self-destruction in the animal world aimed at the survival of the species). If we see human beings and their variegated reflexive engagements with the forces of structure and culture solely from the lens of evolutionary theory, altruism then becomes nothing more than a strategy to maximize one’s benefits or gains, and phenomena such as suicide or altruism become inexplicable human phenomena. These conclusions are unsatisfactory precisely because they bypass the importance and complexity of human reflexivity. In sum, evolutionary thinking seems to be aligned with a restricted view of complexity (Bastardas-Boada, 2019; Byrne & Callaghan, 2014), which is more appropriate to the study of non-reflexive entities, rather than general complexity, which is better suited to the study of the social world as a multi-layered, non-linear and radically open reality. CDST adherents should, in this sense, provide more nuanced interpretations of evolution as a mechanism for change, and justify why the

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term “evolution” is preferred when “change” (a much broader and useful concept in my view) seems to be what they have in mind. Viewing social phenomena through a CDST lens therefore necessitates a view of evolutionary progress in the social realm as interacting with other causal mechanisms, a view which does not conjure teleological, positivist or hydraulic interpretations of change, a stronger view of human agency, and a view which also affords researchers the possibility for justifiable ethical judgments.

A Tendency to Overemphasize the Relationship Between Things As we saw in Chapters Three and Four with regards to structural functionalism, historical materialism, Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, Habermas’s lifeworld/system distinction, as well as the various strands of realism, most social theories (despite their diverging emphases) recognize the need to appreciate the distinct and emergent causal powers of social phenomena including agency and structure. Stated differently, these perspectives can be said to appreciate the stratified nature of society in different degrees and in their own ways. As we also saw previously, however, some perspectives in social theories such as social constructionism, symbolic interactionism, poststructuralism, posthumanism and structuration theory show a propensity towards relationism (i.e., towards central conflation) by defining social phenomena as existing only because of their relationship with other phenomena. The basic principle guiding relationism—and the reason why relationism can only provide a flattened ontological viewpoint—is that if society and individuals are so deeply connected, differentiating them must then be counterproductive to social research. With Giddens’ structuration theory, for example, we saw that structure and agency are defined as two sides of the same coin, which means that studying them involves looking at different aspects of the same thing. We also saw how conflationary thinking complicates causal explanation in large part because it fails to integrate emergence as part of the inquiry and as precondition for causal explanation (i.e., the notion that the power

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of phenomena to cause or influence other phenomena is part of their distinct and emergent properties). The problem under focus in this section, therefore, is a tendency among social scientists to confuse distinction with dichotomization. To clarify, the act of distinguishing things ontologically is essential to the task of formulating causal explanations, whereas the process of dichotomization is problematic when it comes to issues of causality because two ontologically different things are thus defined as “opposites”, thus diminishing their interplay. What usually follows this problematic conclusion is an epistemological (and perhaps even moral) choice regarding the importance of one over the other (e.g., structure = bad; agency = good ). As we also learned, realism rejects dichotomization, and while it sees science very much as a quest to understand how things are causally related, conceptual differentiation (contra relationism) remains of capital importance to the production of ontological statements and the refinement of scientific knowledge. CDST adherents, although not necessarily committed to relationism, are unfortunately less clear on this issue. Recognizing the stratified nature of society and complex systems, Juarrero (1999: 127) stressed the distinct and emergent properties of complex systems, explaining that “autocatalysis’s ‘goal’ is its own maintenance and enhancement in the face of disintegrating pressures from the environment. It is to that extent partially decoupled from and independent of the environment: autonomous.” Here, causality is seen by the author as a relationship unfolding between two ontologically different phenomena: the human agent as a specific kind of complex system, and the environment as a different kind of complex system. Byrne and Uprichard (2012: 117) are perhaps more explicit on this point, arguing that ultimately, the search to empirically describe and explore complex causality in a sociologically meaningful way is a focus on difference. A focus on difference is proposed by Cilliers, who has written about this at some length. […] once we move from variables to cases, and we think about cases over time, then we are immediately forced to think about sorting out types of trajectories.

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The strand known as complex realism is thus more explicit on this point, and provides much insight into the importance of understanding difference when explaining both change and stability in the social realm. At its core, complex realism assumes that while there is constant flux in society, patterns are observable and are worth investigation, and such investigation is likely to reveal underlying mechanisms. Complex realism is thus also specifically concerned with causality, and tends to consider probabilistic causality, defined by Williams (2021: 60) as “the philosophical and methodological approach that aims to distinguish between mere association and causal properties. Probabilistic causality is simply stated: A causes B if A’s occurrence increases the probability of B occurring.” The author adds that accounting for probabilistic causality within a complex realist ontology requires tolerance for “a certain amount of error and still be a good enough explanation of real phenomena. The methodological aim is to reduce error” (ibid : 61). In addition, Byrne and Uprichard (2012: 117) remind us that, within all realist strands, complex or otherwise, consideration for both differences and similarities are crucial. Similarly, Henry (2015: 84) understands that relationships unfold between different complex systems, explaining that the study of a system’s dynamics involves the investigation of the connectedness of the system’s constituent components, and the links between these components and those of other systems […] This means that the researcher needs to map out the system under investigation, identify its focal components, take note of other systems operating simultaneously and plot the relationships they might have with the focal system. All the while, the researcher is considering how focal components are interacting and changing.

In short, although relationships are seen as occupying central importance to research, there is clear recognition among many CDST adherents that the complex phenomena under scrutiny must also be seen as different from each other if complex causality is to be revealed. At the same time—and this is core to the critique in this section—this perspective is not always maintained consistently among CDST adherents. For

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example, while Juarrero (1999) can be said to provide numerous observations about complex systems which fit rather well within realism’s stratified viewpoint, she also argues that “it is nonsense to claim that we end at the contours of our body, or that our individual concepts and intentions exist independently of our experience and surroundings” (p. 212). While the boundaries of complex open systems are obviously porous and difficult to demarcate, and that they share a deep and ongoing relationship with other complex systems and contexts, it is certainly not nonsensical to point out the ontological differences between complex systems. Again, the problem here results from equating differentiation with dichotomization. What Juarrero seems to miss is that it is also nonsensical to see individual concepts and intentions as mere epiphenomena of experience and context. To put it differently, conflation should not be the remedy to dichotomization. Later on in her book, Juarrero (1999: 246) moves back to a stratified viewpoint, arguing that “dynamical systems are also partly independent of their parts, which, in self-organizing, have become replaceable components. Once organized, a system’s attractors serve as its formal and final cause, both preserving its identity and drawing behavior into its overall organization.” In short, her argumentation constantly moves between differentiation and conflation, a conceptual ambivalence which, in my view, can be explained by a weakened social ontology, and which considerably complicates the development of causal statements. Other complexity theorists also adhere to relationism. For example, Osberg et al. (2008) argue that knowledge and reality should not be distinguished from each other because, according to them, they are part of the same complex system. Again, we have the “two sides of the same coin” problem here. From a realist perspective, although knowledge of the world is understood as inherently about that world, the position held by the authors is problematic because it clearly conflates ontology and epistemology within a single layer of knowledge. Perhaps more radical in this approach is Davis and Sumara (2008: 34), who argue that “in a complex network, no part of the system has any meaning in isolation from the rest of the system (an assertion shared by coherence theorists), and so one must take into account the structure of the whole system.” This view is clearly problematic when applied to the study of social

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groups. In AL worlds, for example, we would face serious ethical difficulties if we were to claim that no individual language learner—as complex system—“has any meaning” in isolation from other language learners or the classroom. It is indeed unfortunate that Davis and Sumara argue thus, given that much of their overall argumentation reveals appreciation on their part for a stratified view of the social realm, particularly when the authors discuss the issue of level jumping in their complexity approach to education, or when they argue (rightfully in my opinion) that “it is the system – and not the system’s context – that determines how it will respond to emergent conditions” (p. 99). The issue, again, involves the need for scientists to maintain their commitment to objective knowledge, a scientific necessity which directly contradicts relationism. Filipovi´c (2015) is another complexity theorist providing a similarly flattened, relationist social ontology, almost entirely constituted by complex relationships, as opposed to different complex entities. As she argues, complexity theory is deeply rooted in the notion of interaction, in the idea that all there exists in this world is comprised of a much larger number of complex (rather than linear, ordained) systems consisting of components which cannot be analyzed or understood independently or in simple, one-on-one relationships. Constituents of any complex system interact with other constituents within that same system (as well as with members of other systems) in a number of ways, thus producing novel and unpredictable results which are beyond the simple objectivist paradigm (p.30, emphases mine).

This statement is considerably problematic, if not contradictory, for two reasons. Firstly, if people cannot be analyzed or understood independently from their social relations, how can their rich, complex and enduring internal lives and reflexive engagement with the world be accounted for? Secondly, while this statement is clearly guided by relationist principles, it also fronts emergence as an important analytical element. This is a considerable problem when attempting to understand the relationship between institutions and people, for example, because if people cannot be understood or analyzed independently from structures

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and institutions, their causal potentials to affect the world they live in are simply nullified. What CDST scholars succumbing to relationism fail to recognize is that complex systems are related to each other in complex ways because they are also ontologically distinct from each other. This understanding is fortunately clearly formulated by Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 29) thus: All social and human systems possess or establish functional boundaries that situate them within their environment and demarcate where their constitutive components start or stop […] Rather than cutting off the system from the rest of the environment, these boundaries remain open and allow the system to remain adaptive and robust. […] These open boundaries connect a system with its environment and to other systems through a notion known as coupling. In the absence of a coupling relationship, very little adaptation between the system and its environment will take place.

Although there are parallels between CDST’s constructivist penchants and the relationist tendencies within poststructuralism, for example, CDST adherents including Larsen-Freeman (2017) and Hiver and AlHoorie (2020) are also careful to point out that their ontological bases differ significantly when it comes to accounting for complexity and emergence in a contingent social world. Furthermore, many CDST scholars recognize the existence of both discursive and material realities as important to social processes, and in doing so, they also reject the view of knowledge as entirely discursive and thus arbitrary. In light of this, CDST is, in my view, not necessarily dependent on a relationist viewpoint; rather, it is more closely aligned with realism’s stratified and emergentist ontology. This perspective is captured by Hiver and AlHoorie (2020: 54) thus: “CDST enables a notion of knowledge which is real but bounded by the complex and dynamic contingencies of the social world.” Bhaskar (1998, 2008) would add to this argument that the transitive objects of science are always bound by the intransitive objects of nature, a notion which in my view easily parallels CDST principles. In terms of language learning, Ushioda (2015: 47) offers a similarly robust complexity perspective, arguing that

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learners contribute to shaping their contexts through how they interact with input. After all, the ways in which language learners orient and respond to language input will affect the content, quantity and quality of further input in the developing context of the interaction. In this sense, there is a dynamically evolving relationship between learner and context, as each responds and adapts to the other. […] through this process of co-adaptation, the learner necessarily becomes an integral part of the unfolding context of the interaction.

The focus in Ushioda’s statement is not whether learners are related to their contexts or not, but rather how context and learner are related through complex causal interaction. It is unfortunate, however, that later in her paper Ushioda (2015) overemphasizes the interrelationship between context and learner when claiming that “learners are not simply located in particular contexts, but inseparably constitute part of these contexts” (p.48, emphasis mine). This provides another example of occasional inconsistencies within CDST literature, and a tension between CDST’s relationist penchant and the stratified viewpoint it requires to account for complex systems, their parts, as well as their causal interaction. One can reasonably argue that a language learner, as a complex system, occupies the role of language learner largely because of the relationship (s)he shares with other learners, teachers, materials, educational structures, etc. After all, social roles are inherently relational. It is important to point out, however, that this learner also exists as a biological entity, as a person, as a friend, stranger, citizen, as a complex being with complex cognitive, emotional and mental realities unfolding somewhat outside the language learning situation. All of these features and elements are essential to the constitution of this language learner as complex system, although they may not necessarily depend on (i.e., they may be external to) the relationships found within a specific language learning situation. In light of this, we therefore cannot argue that, as a complex system, this language learner can only exist in relation to other realities within the language learning situation. The boundaries and distinct properties of that language learner (i.e., his/her distinct and emergent powers and properties) must also be accounted for. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 23)

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discuss the boundary issue in CDST thus: “if everything is connected to everything else in a complex and dynamic way, how can the representation of a complex system be reached, and how can researchers delineate the system of interest from context and from other systems without drawing lines that break up what is being explained?” In response, they propose the notion of functional wholes, whereby “instead of drawing arbitrary boundaries for systems or for units of analysis scholars remain concerned first and foremost with explaining phenomena, and any parts, processes or boundaries that are examined in the research design depend on what is being explained” (ibid ). Although an interesting suggestion, I believe that it mainly offers a teleological viewpoint by reducing objects to their functions, and by extension, bringing us back to the problematic relational principle. Instead, and as discussed in Chapter Four, the distinct and emergent properties of complex social objects and processes must be delineated before claims about relationships—i.e., causality—among social objects and processes can be formulated. In sum, when we identify ontological differences between social phenomena (e.g., people are different than institutions for the following reasons …), we are not engaging necessarily in dichotomous thinking. We are merely noting important differences between things, a strategy which allows us to explain their causal effects upon each other. While the notion of complex systems being relational entities “produced by a set of components that interact in particular ways to produce some overall state or form at a particular point in time” (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008: 26) has considerable value to the study of human phenomena, it is equally important to question the notion of “complete interconnectedness” (e.g., Osberg & Biesta, 2010), which essentially leads to a central conflation, à la Giddens. Furthermore, and as Elder-Vass (2010: 22) succinctly puts it, “although relations are thus crucial to emergence, this is sometimes exaggerated into the view that it is relations and not entities that compose our world – or the social world, at least.” In my view, CDST can easily shed its relationist tendencies, in large part because they are not necessary to its development and refinement. However, doing so will remain difficult without an understanding of the crucial difference between differentiation and dichotomization.

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Conclusion As social scientists, it would obviously be incredibly difficult for us to deny that human beings and human collectives (e.g., language learners, teachers, groups of students, etc.) are complex, non-linear, open, dynamic, emergent and contingent entities, and that both modernist and postmodernist perspectives have not necessarily been successful at elucidating such complexity. In this sense, CDST arguably offers a way out of the tension between modernism and postmodernism, towards a renewed understanding of people and human processes through the lens of complex causality. This is no small feat indeed, and while I have identified a range of problems in current CDST literature, I do believe future conceptual developments are promising. Although this chapter did not provide a comprehensive summary of CDST (for that, I encourage readers to consult other, more elaborate and informative references on CDST mentioned and cited above and in the remaining chapters of this book), it provided justification for the inclusion of complexity thinking in the social sciences by outlining some of CDST’s core concepts and by explaining CDST’s unique contributions to our understandings of complexity, emergence and causality in the social realm. This chapter has also shown how numerous aspects of CDST fit rather well within a realist social ontology. As Dooley (2009: 440) points out, complexity thinking “provides a host of generative mechanisms that explain the “how” of causation and thus enables existing theories to go beyond surface-level descriptions. It also suggests that causation can take many forms that are not simple – nonlinear, time varying, and mutual.” In this chapter, I also identified problems and unresolved issues within CDST, notably (a) its weakened view of human agency, (b) its weakened approach to critical social research, (c) the problem of metaphorical borrowings and (d) its relationist tendencies. In the next chapter, I extend this analysis by looking at some of these issues and others in relation to AL research.

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Ortega, L., & Han, Z. H. (Eds.). (2017). Complexity theory and language development: In celebration of Dian Larsen-Freeman. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Osberg, D., & Biesta, G. (2010). The end/s of education: Complexity and the conundrum of the inclusive educational curriculum. International Journal of Inclusive Education, 14, 593–607. Osberg, D., Biesta, G., & Cilliers, P. (2008). From representation to emergence: Complexity’s challenge to the epistemology of schooling. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40 (1), 213–227. Ragin, C. C. (1987). The comparative method: Moving beyond qualitative and quantitative strategies. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Ramiah, A. R. (2014). Complexity thinking in ALL practice. Journal of Academic Language & Learning, 8(3), A62–A71. Reed, M., & Harvey, D. L. (1992). The new science and the old: Complexity and realism in the social sciences. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 22, 356–379. Rosmawati, C. (2014). Second language developmental dynamics: How dynamic systems theory accounts for issues in second language learning. The Australian Educational and Developmental Psychologist, 31(1), 66–80. Sayer, A. (2000). Realism and social science. London: SAGE Publications. Sealey, A., & Carter, B. (2004). Applied linguistics as social science. London: Continuum. Semetsky, I. (2008). Re-reading Dewey through the lens of complexity science, or: On the creative logic of education. In M. Mason (Ed.), Complexity theory and the philosophy of education (pp. 79–90). Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Uhl-Bien, M., Marion, R., & McKelvey, B. (2007). Complexity leadership theory: Shifting leadership from the industrial age to the knowledge era. The Leadership Quarterly, 18(4), 298–318. Urry, J. (2005). The complexity turn. Theory, Culture and Society, 22(5), 1–14. Ushioda, E. (2015). Context and complex dynamic systems theory. In Z. Dörnyei, P. D. MacIntyre, & A. Henry (Eds.), Motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 47–54). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Verspoor, M. (2015). Initial Conditions. In Z. Dörnyei, P. D. MacIntyre, & A. Henry (Eds.), Motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 38–46). Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Walby, S. (2007). Complexity theory, systems theory, and multiple intersecting social inequalities. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 37 (4), 449–470. Waldner, D. (2012). Process tracing and Causal Mechanisms. In H. Kincaid (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of philosophy of social science (pp. 65–84). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Williams, M. (2021). Realism and complexity in social science. London: Routledge. Williams, M., & Dyer, W. (2017). Complex realism in social research. Methodological Innovations, 10 (2), 1–8.

7 Complex Dynamic System Theory and Applied Linguistics

The Relevance of CDST to AL Scholarship Given that current CDST-guided AL research is rather new and undergoing rapid development, and considering some of the problems with CDST-related social research highlighted in the previous chapter, it is reasonable to ask—and provide a reasonable answer to—the question Why do we need CDST in AL scholarship at all? The short—and very convincing—answer to this question is that most issues, variables and processes studied by AL scholars are complex, non-linear and emergent. Pickering (2016: 181–182) provides a more prudent response: “Linguists are increasingly interested in complex systems theory because of its perceived ability to bring a unity and coherence of explanation to diverse linguistic phenomena, and to suggest hypotheses for investigation that can be modeled and tested.” Although this answer is satisfactory in many ways, there is more to CDST than its perceived potential. For one, CDST provides a productive way out of the empiricism emerging from successionism and interpretivism, as well as the modernism/postmodernism tension which has unfortunately monopolized much energy and debate among AL scholars for decades. Within © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_7

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AL scholarship, CDST can thus convincingly be presented as facilitating a renewed—and in my view, realist —understanding of language learners, teachers, classrooms, etc. as complex, non-linear, open, dynamic, emergent and contingent phenomena, something which AL has long needed. CDST also allows AL scholars to move beyond mentalist tendencies, and question enduring yet problematic concepts such as skill and acquisition. As De Bot et al. (2013: 199) point out, two core principles guide CDST-oriented research on second language learning and teaching: We use the term second language development (SLD) rather than second language acquisition (SLA) in acknowledgement of two issues: the first is the bidirectionality of change in one’s language ability and performance (involving both growth and attrition), in contrast to the unidirectional vector associated with the term acquisition; the second is to emphasize a shift from seeing language as a product or thing and rather to emphasize linguistically relevant and enabled processes.

When this statement is put in the broader context of educational research, we can note that CDST offers much to a renewed and more dynamic view of education, for as Davis and Sumara (2008: 6) argue, “a great many phenomena that are currently of interest to educational research might be considered in terms of complex dynamics. Specific examples […] include individual sensemaking, teacher-learner relationships, classroom dynamics, school organizations, community involvement in education, bodies of knowledge, and culture.” Specific to AL issues, De Bot et al. (2005: 117) point out that “any language system (in a speech community at a given time or across time, in a monolingual or bilingual speaker, in an L2 learner, and so on) is by definition a dynamic system in that it meets the defining principles of a dynamic system.” Although certainly not its exclusive area of concern, much of AL research to date has been devoted to understanding and facilitating the language learning process. Because of that, we can reasonably argue, from a CDST perspective, that one of AL scholars’ central purposes in doing research is to understand and improve learning systems, which is after all what CDST is mostly interested in. Later in this chapter, I

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summarize the general CDST view of learning, and how it pertains to the learning of languages. Although not the only reason but certainly an important one, CDST has considerable potential for growth in AL scholarship because it offers the concept of emergent complex causality. Sealey and Carter (2004: 89) also note this important contribution, pointing out that “LarsenFreeman is one of the few researchers who have begun to explore more fully the implications of rejecting successionist accounts of causation, in characterizing SLA as a complex nonlinear process.” Assuming that some perhaps more problematic CDST concepts will eventually be fine-tuned to specifically address language-related phenomena in the years to come, the potential for CDST to become a leading perspective in AL scholarship is certainly possible. Weideman (2009) already calls CDST the seventh and most recent dominant AL approach since the mid-twentieth century, beginning with (1) AL guided by behaviourist principles, then by (2) the extended paradigm model, followed by guidance from (3) the multidisciplinary model, then by a focus on (4) second language acquisition research, leading to the emergence of (5) constructivist AL and then (6) postmodernist AL. The scope of CDST-informed AL research has also broadened in recent years. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020) note that CDST has penetrated different areas of language studies, including language development and acquisition, attrition, change, ecology, evolution, landscapes, pedagogy, policy and planning, lingua franca English, bilingualism and multilingualism, conversation analysis and the list goes on. In terms of the research process, Rosmawati (2014: 71) points out that CDST has introduced “novel perspectives into at least three levels of SLA research, that is, the basic conceptual level underpinning the research, the practical level, and the methodological level of research design.” Although I hold the perhaps more conservative view that CDST has yet to become a dominant perspective in the field, it is not only clear that increasing attention is now paid to it in our field, that active and ongoing refinement of CDST concepts in AL scholarship has already been taking place for quite some time since Diane Larsen-Freeman’s pioneering efforts in the late 1990s, and that any comprehensive discussion surrounding the issues of complexity, emergence and causality in AL research necessitates

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active engagement with CDST. The existing body of CDST-oriented AL scholarship, in my view and despite my own critique of it, is certainly beginning to occupy a dominant presence in our field, which suggests that Weideman’s positive assessment is largely justified. To gain a clearer view of the relevance and importance of CDST to AL scholarship, let’s begin with a general understanding of CDST’s view of language and related phenomena. De Bot et al. (2013: 200, emphasis mine) state that CDST recognizes that a language (be it first, second or third), language learners (young or old), and language communities (in naturalistic or instructional settings) are each complex, dynamic systems. Systems are groups of entities or parts that function together. Any system is inclusive of embedded sub-systems, all of which dynamically interrelate with one another. The term dynamic as it is used in [CDST] has a fairly straightforward meaning and refers to the changes that a system undergoes due to internal forces and to energy from outside itself.

At the same time, not everything within AL worlds requires the application of CDST approaches, as AL phenomena do have to meet specific ontological criteria to be considered “complex” and be of pertinence to a CDST viewpoint. Lowie (2013: 1806, emphasis mine), for example, lists three such criteria which language and language development can be said to possess: “the existence of interconnected subsystems; the tendency to [self-organize]; and the occurrence of nonlinear, chaotic patterns of development.” More elaborately, and outlining a general CDST approach to AL research equipped with ample suggestions for methodological possibilities, Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020) explain that the type of complex systems of pertinence to a CDST approach in AL must: (1) be shaped by heterogeneous components—including at least one agent—in context; (2) have its components interact with each other at multiple levels; (3) experience change at the levels of parts and system, as a result of component interaction; and (4) exhibit systemwide patterns of behaviour due to the effects of component interaction. Although not a CDST theorist, Ragin (1987) mentions two approaches to dealing with what he calls the “order-in-complexity” problem: (1)

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looking at the common characteristics of multiple cases (e.g., most language learners seem to respond rather positively to this particular teaching approach)—a strategy which can involve clarifying statistical relationships—and then creating models of the types of characteristics which exist; and (2) looking at various combinations of causes and outcomes within and across cases to reveal potential causal mechanisms. The author argues that the second approach to the order-in-complexity problem is preferable because “it is relevant to the general concern in social science for causation, which, in turn, is central to explanation” (p. 20). Again, and this cannot be stressed often enough, a complexity viewpoint may not apply to everything in AL research projects. Hiver and Al-Hoorie recognize this possibility in their discussion of a case as a complex system, where the authors stress that “individuals, groups and interactions are [from a CDST perspective] all suitable units of analysis (i.e., cases), but components, abstract variables and other artefacts are less so” (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020: 22, emphasis mine). Of course, this does go against the commonly shared view that CDST offers a comprehensive meta-theory for AL research. Rather, CDST’s potential and usefulness as a research perspective can be appreciated more fully in the study of specific AL phenomena which have so far been difficult to apprehend both conceptually and methodologically through other perspectives. As mentioned earlier on a few occasions throughout this book, an important part of AL scholarship is devoted to the teaching and learning of languages. This means that AL research also requires educational theory. The next section hones in on this issue by exploring some of the basic CDST principles regarding knowledge and learning, and by exploring how CDST can be better aligned with contemporary educational theory through the improvement of specific concepts. Although what follows includes a rather selective take on educational theory, what will be made clear is the marked postmodern view of knowledge within CDST-informed AL scholarship, a tendency which, it must be pointed out, contrasts somewhat from recent developments in educational theory and research.

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CDST and the Question of Knowledge Although a unified CDST perspective on knowledge has yet to emerge, there is consensus among its adherents that knowledge is not “a preexisting entity, a ‘thing’ and learning [as] a process of acquiring and internalising the ‘thing’” (Ramiah, 2014: A62, emphasis mine). Knowledge is not understood within CDST bastions as existing “out there” waiting to be consumed by learners; instead, it is generally seen as developed by learners as a result of the complex exchange of meaning amongst learners as both interactants and complex systems. This view is outlined by Cilliers (1998) who identifies the complexity view of knowledge as inherently local and echoed by Byrne (2005: 99) who argues that knowledge is local and socially constructed, although neither relative nor reified. However, unlike the postmodernist view of knowledge, which rejects the notion of universal knowledge altogether, complexity theorists recognize that some aspects of knowledge exist beyond local interaction. Nevertheless, as Abbott (2001: 5) proposes, “there is only […] a universal knowledge emerging from accommodation and conflict rather than from axioms, a universal knowledge that provides tentative bridges between local knowledges.” In my view, this position is acceptable but somewhat unsatisfactory. If we consider, for example, Lowie’s (2013: 1809) valid point that “learning takes place over time, and is strongly dependent on the preceding state of the system […] learning strongly depends on pre-existing knowledge”, it is rather clear that, within CDST, a distinction between subjective and objective knowledge in the Popperian sense (Popper, 1972) is presupposed. At the same time, this stratified view of knowledge remains rather ill-defined within CDST, for the notion of “pre-existing knowledge” remains underdeveloped. Do CDST adherents mean the type of preexisting knowledge available in dictionaries and grammar books? Or do they only refer to pre-existing knowledge accumulated exclusively within the mind of individual learners? As these two possibilities point in sharply diverging conceptual and methodological directions, such ambiguity needs to be resolved. What is clear, however, is that knowledge is not seen by CDST adherents as static, unchanging, or universal, but rather as a situated process

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taking place between learners as interactants. Within the context of AL research, Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008: 131) justify the notion of knowledge as process with the argument that “from a complexity theory perspective, it is a mistake to assume that the result of the language acquisition process is an autonomous static competence or a fixed inventory of symbolic knowledge.” Osberg et al. (2008: 213) more or less characterize as outdated the view of knowledge as “a representational epistemology: one which holds that knowledge is an accurate representation of something that is separate from knowledge itself.” As a replacement, the authors adopt a relationist angle to argue that “‘knowledge’ and ‘the world’ should not be understood as separate systems which somehow have to be brought into alignment with each other, but that they are part of the same evolving complex system” (p. 214). In their own words, this view provides a novel view of education and the development of knowledge: This understanding of knowledge suggests that the acquisition of curricular content should not be considered an end in itself. Rather, curricular content should be used to bring forth that which is incalculable from the perspective of the present. The epistemology of emergence therefore calls for a switch in focus for curricular thinking, away from questions about presentation and representation and towards questions about engagement and response. (p. 213)

In other words, this process-oriented view of knowledge is perhaps an important area of potential development, particularly when it comes to dealing with CDST’s currently limited critical potential, as discussed in the previous chapter. As I attempt to demonstrate below, this view of knowledge as situated engagement and response is justified to some extent, but it also leaves a lot unsaid, notably the idea that engagement and response by students do not come without some form of presentation and representation of both knowledge and truth, two concepts which, within CDST at least, remain underdeveloped. For one, if we assume that human knowledge of A is inherently about A (i.e., knowledge of atoms requires atoms to exist prior to our attempts at knowing what they are, and by logical deduction, that those attempts

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must be about atoms existing as realities ontologically separate from those attempts), then it is reasonable to accept the idea that A and the knowledge of A are two distinct complex systems, even if closely interrelated. In this sense, the CDST view of knowledge and its object as parts of the same complex system remains, at least from a realist angle, a problematic proposition because by placing truth and people’s conceptualizations of it within the same system, ontology and epistemology become two aspects of the same thing, thus constituting a central conflation. Even more problematic, of course, is the statement by Osberg et al. (2008: 214) above that “‘knowledge’ and ‘the world’ should not be understood as separate systems which somehow have to be brought into alignment with each other,” which clearly rejects both the correspondence theory of truth and scientists’ necessary commitment to objective knowledge, and entirely reduces knowledge to a social construction. I believe that, from a CDST perspective, it is entirely possible—and necessary—to maintain a commitment to objective knowledge by, in part, distinguishing between ontology and epistemology, and by distinguishing between knowledge, people as entities with the capacity to know, and the objects known. This distinction between knowledge, knowers and objective reality is vital to education, particularly when it comes to assessment because it is from this conceptual distinction that we can judge the value of information to be taught and construct curricula, develop effective assessment strategies, and in the process extend our commitment to objective knowledge. As Winch (1998: 194) puts it, If truth is relative to conceptual schemes then one scheme cannot be employed to form judgements about the truth of propositions in another, since the truth conditions for that judgement would not be acceptable to those who adhered to the other. This conclusion strikes at the heart of education as a truth-imparting exercise, as it suggests that there are no coherent grounds for supposing that adult rather than child conceptual schemes have any monopoly of truth.

Furthermore, distinguishing between knowledge, knower and the known object does not in any way undermine or counter engagement and response, which Osberg et al. (2008) identify as core to CDST’s

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view of knowledge, truth and education. Quite the opposite: it introduces precisely the stratified and emergentist perspective necessary to education and social critique. To be fair, the perspective on knowledge criticized here is perhaps more characteristic of a postmodernist approach to AL, and it would certainly be mistaken to conclude that all CDST adherents hold homologous views towards truth and knowledge. At the same time, there is unmistakeable evidence that postmodernism has sway within CDST, and this can be observed in, for example, an ambivalent commitment by some of its adherents to the notion of objective knowledge. Before I go any further, however, let’s revisit the distinction between objective and subjective knowledge, and how this distinction is necessary to the development of educational projects including language learning and teaching. Echoing Popper (1972), Sealey and Carter (2004) distinguish between subjective knowledge, or what anyone of us knows at a particular moment, and objective knowledge, or the type of knowledge found in theories, notions, models, etc.—i.e., knowledge which exists regardless of whether anyone of us knows it or not. Although theories and models are human creations, and therefore very much the products of discursive processes, they are necessarily about realities beyond people’s understandings of them. They also possess objective properties in that they also occupy a place beyond situated interaction, which is why we can collectively refer to certain theories as being “wrong”, “outdated” or “at the cutting edge of scientific development”, and work to improve them. In a very clear sense, it is impossible to conceive of CDST adherents developing CDST views without there being some form of understanding on their part that CDST concepts and models are about phenomena distinct from these concepts and models, and that these concepts and models can be shared and improved because they also occupy a place beyond debates and deliberations among scholars—i.e., as CS resources distinct from interaction within the SC. According to Sealey and Carter (2004: 15), objective knowledge is “independent of anybody’s belief, or disposition to assent, or to assert or to act. Knowledge in the objective sense is knowledge without a knower; it is knowledge without a knowing subject.” For realists, and arguably for anyone interested in

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developing theories and human knowledge in a general sense, objective knowledge beyond local interaction is therefore indispensable, if only as a necessary force guiding—and helping us improve—our situated and culturally-laden negotiations of knowledge. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 15) underline with regards to objective knowledge, precisely because it is ’knowledge without a knower’, it is capable of refinement and methodological development. The social practice of knowledge production has this as an aim, albeit one which is often imperfectly and only partially realized. Without objective knowledge it is hard to make any case for improving theoretical understanding or for the epistemic authority of research.

The notion of objective knowledge in the social sciences does not conjure the positivist notion that humans can also be rationally autonomous, detached from context, able to access unmediated truth through a human nature “out there” which predates human history. It is rather a critique of perspectivism, or the kind of hopeless relativism found in much of postmodernist thought, which posits that because knowledge is (partly) socially constructed, there is simply no truth to be sought or any a-political form of knowledge available. The postmodernist rejection of objective knowledge comes from a radical and rigid adherence to the idea that concepts or categories of human thought are inherently situated, historical, and deeply cultural, and that ultimately the work conducted in the social sciences is inescapably contingent on culture. Accordingly, the knowledge included in textbooks and other resources of relevance to educational projects can never be understood as neutral: all of it is inescapably biased. Postmodernism then builds upon this idea to justify the broad critical project of “decolonizing” knowledge and discourse. Given that even our identities and social positionings are also seen by postmodernists as exclusively discursive (i.e., cultural and therefore biased) phenomena, the process of decolonization then becomes a matter of valorizing localized negotiations of knowledge, at the cost of insight into structural phenomena. In Chapter 3, I discussed at length why such a view is problematic.

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Sealey and Carter’s distinction between subjective and objective knowledge cited above also serves as a critique of “the ‘myth’ that objectivity requires that cognitive agents be ‘disengaged from the world’” (Siegel, 1998: 31). It is also reaffirmation of a core assumption at the heart of all scientific endeavours that, while humans do not access and analyse brute facts directly or neutrally, while scientific observation is theory-laden and therefore profoundly cultural, and while science will never provide a theory of everything, science is inherently oriented towards the discovery of objective knowledge. This means that the scientifically-grounded answers we currently have are not ultimate truths per se: they are instead the best answers we have so far. Sealey and Carter’s distinction is also a reminder that the correspondence theory of truth is central to this discussion and to scientific endeavour in general. To reiterate, the correspondence theory of truth posits that the truth or falsity of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world and whether it accurately describes (i.e., corresponds with) that world. As the philosopher Radford (2008: 145) notes, The concept of correspondence between propositions and their objects, of a mind-independent reality that is represented in our language, remains a necessary assumption of rational empirical enquiry. The only way in which we can understand our propositions as bearing truth is, at least theoretically, in relationship to that which they represent and which is accessible to us through our experience.

Of particular concern here, of course, is the issue of criticism (further elaborated below). If we accept the postmodernist view that there is no objective knowledge, that instead knowledge is entirely situated and negotiated in local contexts, and if we accept this view as a comprehensive account of human knowledge, then on what basis can we build any viable critical agenda? If knowledge is simply a discursive—and by extension, political —exercise of persuasion without any rational basis or relationship with objective knowledge, and if education (an inherently moral enterprise, let’s not forget) is a mere question of developing and sharing perspectives, how can educators then provide moral viewpoints, deal with questions of truth, reinforce particular values beyond

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the immediacy of convenience and pragmatic uses, and judge the values of students’ expressed perspectives? In asking these questions, I am not suggesting that teachers are doing (or must do) their job from a purely neutral perspective. What I am instead suggesting is that being biased or inescapably cultural does not in any way remove the fact that we also live in a world occupied by objects and phenomena which possess objective properties and powers distinct from our understandings of them, and of capital importance to our understandings of them. Again, it is a conceptual mistake, as some CDST adherents seem to make, to assume that the understanding of objective knowledge necessitates an a-cultural, a-ideological being to access it. This relationship between subjectivity and objectivity should therefore not be controversial in the least, for as Siegel (1998: 27) states, “our representations in some sense depend upon our interaction, as agents, with the world which our representations represent.” In other words, while our perspectives are cultural, they are also inherently oriented towards the discovery and development of objective knowledge; and this remains a core purpose of all scientific and educational endeavours. What therefore needs to be asserted more forcefully in current CDST literature is a reaffirmation of CDST’s commitment to objective knowledge, a commitment which again is not only a feature of realism but also of complexity thinking and hopefully of all approaches to scientific inquiry. As Siegel (1998: 23, emphasis original) puts it, the realist view of knowledge stipulates that “truth is independent of the beliefs of epistemic agents: our thinking that something is true does not make it so; what does make it so is its successful capturing of some independent state of affairs which obtains independently of our thinking that it does.” This understanding goes at the heart of educational research and practice, because students must develop the skills necessary for rational inquiry and a moral approach to social life. They must therefore be able to evaluate the value and veracity of knowledge presented to them, rather than merely developing perspectives relevant to their own lives or to the goals they set out to achieve. We only have to remember that rules and principles learned in math class, for example, are not developed by students themselves. We can also remember the nonsensical claim by Trump’s press secretary Kellyanne Conway that there are “alternative facts” out

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there to understand that (a) subjective and objective knowledge, while ontologically different, are nevertheless related to each other in complex ways and that consequently (b) human knowledge is not exclusively a local process of negotiated interaction: our deeply subjective attempts to understand the world are inherently constrained by, and geared towards the discovery of, objective truth. While CDST adherents are partially justified in claiming that “all knowledges are at best partial and multiple, always in interplay, always in flux and never definitive” (Ramiah, 2014: A70), it is also important to note that, because knowledge of a particular thing or phenomena is socially shared and developed, to undergo these processes knowledge must necessarily occupy a position “outside” human interaction—i.e., as a resource with antecedent properties distinct from everyday interaction. While knowledge is indeed negotiated, it must also be understood as an emergent entity in itself, and not be reduced exclusively to the localized practice of knowledge performed by human beings (as this view constitutes an upward conflation). Reducing knowledge to the practice of knowledge development (or mere perspectivism) also seriously diminishes the value of knowledge itself, for it suggests that all perspectives towards reality are equally justifiable. When put in relation to the study of the Holocaust, the two nuclear detonations over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, this view obviously loses all credence. While we are justified in being relativist about knowledge, we simply cannot afford to be relativist about truth. The next section looks at how learning has so far been presented by complexity theorists, and reveals perhaps more explicit traces of CDST’s ambivalent yet evolving commitment to objective knowledge.

CDST, Language Learning and Change Although CDST requires a more explicit and ontologically layered view of knowledge, its view of learning is, however, more developed and aligned with a realist view. Positing the CDST approach to learning in contrast with much of psychology-oriented educational research to date, Davis and Sumara (2008: 12–13, emphasis original) define learning as

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“a matter of transformations in the learner that are simultaneously physical and behavioral – which is to say, in biological terms, structural . Learning is certainly conditioned by particular experiences, but it is “due to” the learner’s own complex biological-and-experiential structure, not an external stimulus.” In other words, learning is not understood as the direct outcome of teaching—as an external, empirically observable force—but very much as a process or mechanism of self-organization— i.e., the result of a causal interaction between parts and wholes—and, in a broader sense, as a process of emergence involving not only cognitive processes but rather a complex and emergent interaction between neurological, cognitive, behavioural, emotional and cultural changes, all complex and layered realities in themselves unfolding in relation to contextual constraints and enablements. This view is further developed by Lowie (2013: 1808), who notes that “language acquisition, like other phenomena expressing natural growth and development, is a selforganizational process […] This position is corroborated by increasing amounts of evidence in favor of an emergentist view of language acquisition.” CDST thus sees learning as a process unfolding also beyond the individual learner, to include groups, classrooms, communities, language(s), norms and expectations, material realities and conditions, and so forth. From a realist standpoint, however, CDST is less explicit on the point that these stratified realities are ontologically different. These ontological differences suggest, for example, that the type of change human brain cells undergo during the learning process is not homologous with the learning a language learner experiences or the kinds of decisions and actions undertaken by a group of learners in a language classroom. Although there might exist some parallels, they are not exactly the same because the properties and powers of phenomena within different layers of a complex system are not isomorphic. Because of this, it is important for AL scholars adopting CDST perspectives not to use principles as metaphors to describe processes uniformly across layers or strata. While complexity theorists Davis and Sumara (2008: 14) argue that “it is not at all inappropriate to say that a discipline “argues” or a cell “knows” or a culture “thinks””, realists would warn that such phrasings can be construed as manifestations of anthropomorphism, and that while

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numerous parallels can certainly be found across layers, the distinct and emergent powers and properties of phenomena situated at various layers should remain of primary epistemological importance, particularly in the formulation of causal statements. Stated differently, although selforganization (and by extension emergence) can be said to take place at multiple levels, the process cannot be deemed ontologically identical across levels. To a large extent, CDST provides a view of learning which can reasonably be identified as stratified and emergentist. Looking specifically at second language acquisition (a term which incidentally LarsenFreeman (2019) rightfully dismisses as modernist, instead preferring the more complexity cognizant term development ), Lowie (2013: 1809), for example, argues that “applied to L2 development, resources comprise the learner’s internal capabilities, such as aptitude and working memory, as well as pre-existing capabilities and motivations. They also include external resources, such as the learner’s environment, time, and material resources.” The author also states that this stochastic view of language development (i.e., as statistically analysable although not predictable) is supported by ample evidence from numerous longitudinal AL studies. Learning, when seen from a CDST perspective, is understood as a process of self-organization that unfolds largely because of variations within the learner and the context of language learning acting as potentials for change. In this sense, the CDST view of learning departs somewhat from both positivism/behaviourism and postmodernism—and adherence to the postmodernist view of knowledge discussed earlier— because it is layered, and as such it remains grounded in an appreciation for the stratified nature of the social world and the phenomena within it. Again, learning does not take place entirely within the mind of learners, nor is it a direct outcome of teaching. To understand how students learn, researchers must therefore contend with other important realities, including the classroom itself as a complex system, and how learning unfolds at the collective level. In this sense, Davis and Sumara (2008: 92) are justified in arguing that phenomena such as personal cognition, collective action, educational structures, and cultural knowledge are dynamically similar. All are

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learning systems, where learning is understood as a process through which a unity becomes capable of more flexible, more creative activity that enables the unity to maintain its fit to its ever evolving context.

With this complex, dynamic, and non-linear view of learning comes the associated view of teaching, which Davis and Sumara (2008: 100) also define rather well: “the act of teaching must be understood in terms of a sort of emergent choreography in which the teacher’s and students’ actions are able to specify one another.” This view clearly departs from the commonly accepted notion in behaviourist/successionist AL scholarship that teaching must somehow lead to learning, or that application of the ideal teaching approach or use of the ideal teaching materials is sufficient to improve learning outcomes, commonly presented by scholars through pre-test/post-test studies. The principal reason why the causal relationship between teaching and learning is never onedirectional and so difficult to apprehend by researchers is that teaching is largely an empirically observable phenomenon—i.e., we can see and record a teacher giving a lesson—whereas learning is an underlying mechanism—i.e., we cannot pinpoint any exact moment when learning happens, we can only conceptualize it. In other words, they unfold at different levels. As such, most of the complex causal relationships at play within the language classroom, including learning and teaching, must be unpacked conceptually, or at the level of the real, with consideration for phenomena beyond what is available in empirically gathered data. This important distinction between the empirical and the real is made by Ragin (1987: 26), who argues that the problem that social scientists face is to unravel the empirically relevant causal combinations. In other words, once the possibility of multiple conjunctural causation is admitted, it is necessary to determine how different conditions fit together – and in how many different combinations – to produce a given outcome. The identification and interpretation of these causal configurations (or causal complexes) allows the investigator to delineate the different empirical processes and causal mechanisms relevant to a specific outcome.

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In contrast, pre-test/post-test comparisons simply cannot reveal the causal links between teaching and learning, or other underlying mechanisms at play in the language classroom for that matter. As revealed in the previous chapter, there are tendencies among some CDST adherents to look at complexity research as a strictly empirical endeavour. However, this is simply an oversight on their part, for much of the argumentation they provide can indeed be characterized as stratified and emergentist. Specifically, the consensus among complexity theorists regarding education stipulates that the teaching–learning relationship is dynamic and non-linear because it is emergent, and so for them to claim that CDST is strictly an empirical exercise is simply mistaken. Mercer’s (2015: 73) own complexity view also captures this idea rather well: “complexity perspectives highlight how we are fundamentally social beings embedded in multiple layers of contexts and social relationships stretching across time and place. The challenge for researchers is to find ways of capturing this socially embedded complexity of individuals within a dynamic systems framework in an empirically researchable way.” To this statement, I would add that facing this challenge requires a combination of empirical data analysis and conceptual development of causal models appropriate to the object(s) of inquiry. Although as previously argued the notion of scale is somewhat problematic from a realist standpoint, De Bot (2015: 32) offers a similarly layered CDST view, and emphasize the importance of time, or timescales, in this sort of research: Language development is a complex process that takes place on many interacting timescales, and the timescale chosen will have an impact on the selection and interpretation of the data. […] Development on one scale is influenced by what happens on smaller and larger scales. […] Higher level skills, such as conceptual processing, take more attentional resources than highly automatized skills, like lexical access and articulation.

From this perspective, language learning can then be conceptualized as the emergent outcome of the complex interaction, or causal influences, between various phenomena including (although not exclusively) neurological, cognitive, emotional, psychological, interactional and cultural

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phenomena over time. This would explain, to some extent, why the teaching of a pragmatic feature of language, for example, might not lead to learners’ improved pragmatic performances soon after the teaching episode has concluded; rather, it can potentially be observed over time, through repeated instruction, exchange of meaning and both targeted and holistic practice. De Bot (2015: 36) also talks about motivation in similarly stratified and temporally-sensitive terms: motivation to learn a foreign language can vary from one moment to another and may be influenced by different types of motivation on different timescales. Long term motivation may come from career plans, shorter term motivation from the wish to pass an exam, an even shorter term motivation from expressing a view in class. The motivation at different timescales interacts with other processes and may vary in strength over time. In order to study motivation in a particular setting, for example in a classroom, data from different timescales have to be gathered and combined to get the full picture.

This view is in synch with the realist view of motivation “not as an individual characteristic, nor as a quantifiable variable possessed in different measures by different learners, but as emergent from relations between human intentionality and the social world” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 206). It is also closely related to Juarrero’s (1999: 201) complexity view of human agency, and her argument that “cognitiveaffective attractor regimes, including intentions, must be viewed whole cloth as open dynamical systems embedded in a physical, historical, and social fabric.” The CDST view of teaching and learning outlined thus far has profound ramifications for AL studies of language learning and for the development of teacher training programs because, for one, the teacher is no longer seen as the main source of information and “engineer” of human knowledge. Stated differently, causal efficacy does not come from a single source in the CDST model of learning, but is rather distributed among classroom actors. Classroom activities, when viewed from a CDST perspective, are indeed much more distributed undertakings where the exchange of information between classroom actors (teachers and students alike) matters most, although they never quite fully escape

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structural and cultural constraints and enablements. This viewpoint also posits that teacher-centered approaches are more constraining than enabling, thus potentially counterproductive to the learning process (although given the complexity of the culture–agency relationship, this claim cannot be made uniformly with regards to all cultural contexts). Moreover, classroom-based activities do not require the use of ideal pedagogical strategies and materials, for those are understood as making sense, or relevant, only within a hydraulic or mechanistic view of the teaching– learning relationship. In addition, while there is a noticeable tendency towards interactionism in the complexity vision outlined so far, CDST’s stratified outlook ensures that the ontologically flattened view afforded by interactionism is largely avoided. In short, CDST-informed AL scholars generally accept a stratified perspective towards language learning and teaching, although relationism tends to surface in CDST literature at times. The Douglas Fir Group (2016: 24–25, emphases mine), for example, demonstrate adherence to both stratified and conflationary viewpoints in the following mission statement: We see L2 learning as an ongoing process that begins at the micro level of social activity (the smallest concentric circle), with individuals recruiting their neurological mechanisms and cognitive and emotional capacities and engaging with others in specific multilingual contexts of action and interaction, resulting in recurring contexts of use that contribute to the development of multilingual repertoires […] The engagement in these contexts uses all available semiotic resources, including linguistic, prosodic, interactional, nonverbal, graphic, pictorial, auditory, and artifactual resources. These contexts are situated within and shaped at a meso level (the middle concentric circle) by particular sociocultural institutions and particular sociocultural communities, such as those found in the family, school, neighborhood, places of work, places of worship, social organizations like clubs, community sports leagues, political parties, online forums of various kinds, and so on. Importantly, the institutions and communities at the meso level are powerfully characterized by pervasive social conditions (e.g., economic, cultural, religious, political), which affect the possibility and nature of persons creating social identities in terms of investment, agency, and power. Together, these

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institutions, communities, conditions, and possible identities provide or restrict access to particular types of social experiences. Finally, at the macro level (the largest concentric circle) there are large-scale, societywide ideological structures with particular orientations toward language use and language learning (including belief systems and cultural, political, religious, and economic values) that both shape and are shaped by sociocultural institutions and communities (middle circle) as well as by the agency of individual members within their locally situated contexts of action and interaction (smallest circle). While each of the three levels […] has its distinctive characteristics, no level exists on its own; each exists only through constant interaction with the others, such that each gives shape to and is shaped by the next, and all are considered essential to understanding SLA. They persist only through constant interaction with each other and so exist in a state of continuous change.

This view is inconsistent with both realist and CDST perspectives because it presents the processes involved in learning as layered on the one hand, yet with the obvious relationist angle adopted here, also as epiphenomena of each other on the other. At the same time, much of what is said in that statement is valuable to the development of a more robust CDST-oriented AL scholarship, because the authors present learning not as a moment of change but as a trajectory of changes occurring at different levels of a complex system over time, as the system interacts with contextual constraints and enablements. In other words, without the relationist angle, this statement by The Douglas Fir Group can indeed be considered as aligned with a realist perspective. With regard to learner motivation, Larsen-Freeman (2015: 12) is more specific when arguing that “system change is seen as movement in a trajectory across a ‘state space’ or ‘phase space’. As the learner’s motivational system moves across state space, it is attracted to certain regions of state space, repelled by others. The former constitute attractors in space, places where the system settles, usually temporarily.” The main implication for AL research methodology is that accounts of learning involve the identification of phase space on the one hand, and some form of historical narrative (Byrne & Uprichard, 2012) on the other. As Williams and Dyer (2017: 4) point out, “within ‘phase space’, all outcomes are possible, but some are very much more probable than others. Yet it

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is often the ‘improbable’ outcome that brings about greater change. The challenge is to develop a method that can follow these changes, or map these trajectories, in actual systems over time.” This view is closely aligned with the view of culture offered by the realist thinker and researcher in education and human development Joseph Maxwell (2012), who states that culture is not exclusively the outcome of consensus, that it should rather be conceptualized as a combination of differences and complementarity between people. This leads the author to argue that an understanding of cultural change requires a conceptual emphasis on what lies at the margins of cultural life. It is possible to extend Maxwell’s point by adding that the closer we move towards consensus and “the rule of the majority”, the closer we get to hegemonic cultural forces, thus closer to cultural stasis. In this sense, what lies at the margins of a complex system can not only be understood as phase space but also as including the necessary conditions for morphogenesis. Identifying phase space and developing a historical narrative require decisions regarding the point of departure, or initial condition, of the learning complex system. As we saw in the previous chapter, however, the notion of initial condition is problematic given the nonfinality of human beings as reflexive complex systems. As such, it is important not to take the ‘initial’ portion of this concept too literally, and instead see it as the first moment the data is collected by the researcher. The initial condition, in this sense, constitutes an interruption in the ongoing development of a complex system, for the purpose of research. From this basis, it is also important not to adopt a deterministic outlook but rather conceptualize learning complex systems as possessing some degree of freedom regarding the direction and type of development undertaken. Let’s remember that complex systems are open, dynamic and emergent, and that consequently there is considerable unpredictability to contend with when mapping the learning of a complex system through time. Verspoor (2015: 45) discusses study abroad programs as complex systems, thereby providing a rather clear example of the CDST view of change and learning: The researcher who would like to take a dynamic approach to the effects of a study-abroad programme will have to consider the initial conditions of all the relevant sub-systems involved and measure them very frequently

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(probably daily) in the first few weeks, as the emotional sub-systems especially are likely to show considerable variability early on. However, after a month or so, the systems should have settled and then measuring once a month should suffice.

This process of “settling in” can, in retrospect, be considered an attractor state. With regards to classroom processes, Hiver (2015: 20) observes that traces of the existence of such attractor state in learning contexts can be noted in, for example, statements from teachers that “things are falling into place”, or that “things just seem to click”. But again, while these notions, causal accounts and methodological possibilities are interesting in the mapping of learning within language learning contexts, populated by real people such as students and teachers, a CDST view should not necessarily be applied to the study of all elements involved in language learning. If we consider the emergence of language varieties, or the emergence of new lexical and syntactic rules over long periods of time, for example, can we say that a language—as complex system—learns in the same way flesh-and-blood language learners can? Echoing realist principles, Pickering (2016: 184) would answer in the negative, pointing out that although the terms “complex systems” and “complex adaptive systems” are often used synonymously, adaptivity, strictly speaking, is a property of only some complex systems. In the case of languages, a mixture of stability and change is evident from the fact that languages change at a rate that is much faster than human biological evolution, but much slower than cultural development.

To explain how a language changes, Pickering distinguishes the empirical from the conceptual by rightfully suggesting that “a different definition of language is needed, one that not only supposes that microlevel interaction leads to the emergence of macro-level structures and processes, but one that connects observed variation in speech to the theoretical notion of variety and selection in complex adaptive systems” (p. 187). Here, we have a complex view of people, language, and the learning of languages which can comfortably be placed within a realist ontology.

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What the author also reminds us of is that change can take on different forms and involve rather different processes, depending on the distinct and emergent properties and powers of specific complex systems. With language, change is not only inherently cultural, it is not initiated by the language itself, for again languages do not have agentive properties to act in the real world. In contrast, language learners—as reflexively endowed powerful particulars—experience change, or learning, at the biological and cognitive levels and so forth as a result of interacting with language as a CS resource and the constraining and enabling forces of structure and culture. In other words, change—or learning—is not a homologous process regardless of the complex system being studied. Realization of this point means that researchers must constantly address ontological issues to delimit the distinct and emergent properties and powers of the phenomena studied, whether they are people, language, languages, or processes and phenomena related to language learning and/or teaching. Without this important back and forth between empirical and conceptual work, there is the very real danger that CDST-informed AL research might succumb to problematic metaphorical tendencies. Despite these shortcomings and challenges, CDST does offer a conceptually and methodologically layered and insightful view into the process of learning, with profound consequences for AL research.

CDST and Research Methodology CDST is not a specific methodology for AL, but rather provides a perspective, a way of thinking about specific AL phenomena as complex, open, dynamic and non-linear systems. As such, a more detailed answer to the question Why do we need CDST in AL scholarship at all? should perhaps look at the different stages of, and the different variables and factors involved in, AL research projects, then determine the relevance of CDST principles in relation to specific stages and/or variables. Arguably, CDST facilitates the conceptual stage of AL research, specifically the development of a robust theoretical viewpoint. Once this conceptual work is achieved, methodological decisions must then be made, in relation to the conceptual work previously done, and here CDST offers

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many possibilities. CDST also helps with the descriptive stage (i.e., what is happening in my data?) and the explanatory stage (i.e., why are things happening this particular way and not any other way?) of the research project, and facilitates a movement back to theory. In short, CDST is pertinent at specific stages of AL research projects and does not prescribe one methodology or a narrow set of methods. Rather, it allows us to understand our data as complex, shape our research projects from a complexity standpoint, and appreciate complex causality as we formulate causal statements. That being said, there are both quantitative and qualitative research methodologies that are arguably more appropriate to a complexity approach than others. On this point, I invite readers to consult Hiver and Al-Hoorie’s (2020) volume which surveys a broad range of both theoretical and methodological issues related to CDST-informed AL research, with clear and easy-to-understand examples. The authors identify specific quantitative methodological traditions appropriate to CDST-guided AL research including multilevel modeling, experience sampling method, single-case design, latent growth curve modelling, panel designs, idiodynamic method and time series analysis. In terms of qualitative methodological approaches, the authors discuss qualitative comparative analysis, process tracing, agent-based modeling, retrodictive qualitative modeling, social network analysis and design-based research methods. To this list, I would add that popular approaches in contemporary AL scholarship such as corpus analysis and (critical) classroom discourse analysis (both discussed in Chapter 5 on realist AL) are also particularly well-suited to a complexity perspective. At the same time, certain strands of AL scholarship—notably sociolinguistics—are characterized by a need for critical perspectives not necessarily afforded by CDST (see discussion in the previous chapter and below). While modeling and simulation are certainly two important methodological approaches in the complexity sciences, serious consideration for their relevance to the study of human beings and social realities is necessary. Pickering (2016: 183) sees much value in the application of modelling strategies to the study of complex language-related phenomena: “computer modeling can help to overcome the insuperable

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difficulties of studying communal language emergence in large populations over long periods of time (and often with little or no historical evidence).” As with corpus analysis, computer modelling can arguably reveal traces of specific underlying mechanisms, and a similar observation was made in Chapter 2 regarding statistical analysis. However, while computer simulations, for example, can parallel specific human behaviours and replicate to some extent the complex structure of cases, the very real and causally efficacious powers of both underlying causal mechanisms and people’s reflexive powers and potentials can never be fully captured in this way, since modeling and simulation can never map out all contextual constraints and enablements and possible reflexive processes. Similarly, although from a different angle, Byrne (2003: 173) explains that “simulations, while capable of generating emergent complexity, cannot at present (so far as I understand them) generate structure and structure must be related to agency in any adequate account of the socially real.” One reason for this difficulty is that simulations and modeling are fundamentally descriptive tools, and can therefore only provide traces of potential causal links in the data. It is with these traces, however, that conceptual work can then concentrate on the formulation of causal claims. Again, statistical analysis as well as computer modelling and simulation can only reveal traces of phenomena located at the level of the real, and not the processes themselves. Despite these shortcomings, CDST has the potential to move AL research beyond the positivist/postmodernist divide through greater appreciation for complexity. CDST is thus not only necessary to the improvement of AL: it is epistemologically aligned with the type of complexity AL scholars are concerned with. Also important to remember: while the methodological tools and traditions listed above can be deemed as sensitive to complexity in the social realm, they are certainly not homologous. Because they pertain to the study of some phenomena and not others, it is therefore important in CDST-informed AL research to adopt methodological plurality. This point is made by Gerrits and Verweij (2013: 167) thus:

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Each method or analytical tool used in the complexity sciences has a number of implicit or explicit ontological and epistemological assumptions, and these assumptions differ greatly across methods. Each method brings with it different assumptions about the nature of complexity, differing levels of access to reality, and differing explanations for observed phenomena.

Through a CDST-informed application of such methodologies, AL scholars can gain more sophisticated insight into how language and language-related phenomena at both local and broader levels (e.g., language learning, language use, language change) emerge and unfold over time. De Bot et al. (2005: 117) point out that while a CDST approach sounds like (and basically is) an ultimately mechanistic metaphor for language and language use, it is able to make clear the link between the social and the psychological aspects of the individual and language through the interconnectedness of systems. It can explicate why language development includes both growth and decline, because resources needed to keep the system going are limited and have to be shared. It can explain why multilingual and monolingual language systems are fundamentally different systems. It can also account for stages of development and fossilization in SLA.

Although as pointed out earlier, the mere application of CDSTsensitive methodologies does not lead directly to explanatory statements; rather, the latter can be produced through the use of conceptual causal models and concepts provided by realism and CDST about complex systems. CDST is perhaps more appropriate to the study of local languagerelated phenomena. Given the necessary granularity of CDST-informed research, it is much more feasible for researchers to unpack the complexity of local phenomena than deal with the exponentially more complex dynamics at play in larger populations. For this reason, complexity-informed AL research is often presented in the literature as prioritizing cases. Many realist thinkers and researchers also adhere to a similar view of cases, and often advocate the development of

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middle-range theories (e.g., Pawson & Tilley, 1997), or theories that are both abstract enough to apply to a range of phenomena and concrete enough to be testable. The main benefit of middle-range theories is that they are specific enough to explain specific phenomena while also containing enough elements of pertinence to a larger, more conceptually rich analytic framework which helps us understand not only language learning processes but also how these relate to broader social processes. Given CDST’s characteristically local quality, it is reasonable to state that while clear demographic patterns may be difficult to reveal from a CDST perspective, conceptual generalizations can be drawn to some extent from specific cases. As Byrne (2013: 217) states, every complex social intervention has to be considered as a ‘case’. Systematic comparison across cases allows us to generalize within limits − but this still means we can transfer knowledge beyond the unique ideographically described instance. […] through careful comparison and exploration of complex contingent causation, we can begin to get a handle on what works where (in what context), when (in what temporal context), and in what order.

Yet, as the case seems to be prioritized in both CDST and realism (particularly social realism), the task of science in a general sense is to provide insight into processes and realities beyond what is only locally relevant. To recall what was suggested in previous discussions on realism, and on this point both CDST and realism are in agreement: what is usually generalizable from the case is an empirically grounded understanding of underlying generative mechanisms. As Larsen-Freeman (2015: 17) points out, most researchers seek to generalize beyond the particulars of a given study […] how this is to be achieved would be pursued in different ways. One way is to probe intraindividual variation of person-specific factors rather than interindividual variation at the level of population […] Individual case studies may not reveal much about the population of language learners, but they do have a direct bearing on theory.

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Similar arguments about generalizability being about the relationship between data and theory are also made by Rosmawati (2014) and van Geert (2012), with Rosmawati (2014: 76) adding that “the findings from longitudinal case studies can further verify-and-validate (or refute-and-reject) the theory and claim the generalisability of the theory to individuals.” In short, CDST-guided AL research involves active and preferably long-term engagement in the detailed, or granular aspects of language-relate phenomena. Such engagement is crucial if we are concerned with mapping change not as a linear but as a complex trajectory. However, considering the principle of non-linearity, change must also be understood as irregular and often unpredictable. Weideman (2009: 69) provides strong empirical justification for this type of granularity, arguing that teachers and language course designers can also find an explanation not only for individual variation, but also of apparent lapses in language learning […] individual growth may vary in terms of fluency, vocabulary complexity and grammatical complexity for a number of language learners […] in a single learner, there may be both growth and lapses. Since these learners are seen as organisms that are free to explore new behaviours […] and since language growth does not follow a linear path, a complexity theory explanation can readily provide an interpretation for a phenomenon that many teachers will attest to.

Variations, when seen from a CDST angle, thus constitute potentials for change, which makes them important elements in the study of human beings and language-related phenomena. Similarly from a realist perspective, variations can also be understood as the necessary outcomes of a variety of human agents drawing partly from a variety of antecedent cultural and linguistic resources as they engage in a variety of communicative purposes. In other words, variety in situated language use can come from (at least) three sources: people, cultural/linguistic resources, and communicative purposes and context. Yet, as De Bot et al. (2007) suggest, this does not seem to lead to outright chaos in the data, as we can indeed denote patterns, for example, in the large body of data studied in corpus analysis and developmental linguistics. Whether or not undeniable cultural and/or linguistic universals exist remains a contentious

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issue beyond the scope of this volume. That being said, human communication in a variety of contexts and times does exhibit relatively stable characteristics, and these also need to be explained through conceptual and empirical analyses. Arguably, they can be understood as the results of rather stable features of human cognition, emotionality and reflexivity across linguistic and cultural contexts. Emergent and antecedent structural forces do play important roles in the way people communicate; however, I would not use this argument to then agree with claims that certain structures act universally in a downward fashion upon active and reflexive human agents/communicators everywhere. What we have certainly learned from postmodernism is that scientists should avoid such determinist and universalist conclusions. Whether we are dealing with change or with stability, what we learn from realism is that inquiry should remain focused on the complex relationship between agency, structure and culture as distinct and emergent layers of the social realm. This principle is certainly not foreign to complexity science. De Bot et al. (2007) point out that the main differences between CDST and the general approach to the study of language learning in AL scholarship is that the latter tends to see interlanguage as a fixed system, which then leads to a search for the causes of variation. In contrast, CDST is more concerned with the degree of variability rather than its cause. As we saw earlier in this book, CDST rejects the classical notion of causality which stipulates that “similar conditions produce similar effects, and consequently dissimilar results are due to dissimilar conditions” (Buckley, 1998: 71). A realist AL scholar might point out that (a) there are different types of causal relationships beyond the classical version, and (b) both the causes and the degrees of variation are important to the study of interlanguage processes and language learning and teaching in general. Indeed, the causes do need to be understood if we want to gain a clear picture of the degree of variation and change. In sum, CDST research is concerned with the trajectory of complex systems and their constituting subsystems over time, whether they change or stay the same. In methodological terms, this requires the application of methods that allow us to record phenomena so that their full complexity—i.e., their emergent properties and powers—and their complex interaction with contextual forces over time can be appreciated.

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CDST, Variables and Statistical Analysis As stated above, CDST is not entirely committed to any specific methodological approach. What it rejects, however, are approaches that are aligned with or reinforce the successionist model of causality, because these are understood as reifying variables in abstraction from complex systems. Instead, by prioritizing long-term system and case analysis, CDST aims to approach variables as complex systems, and in doing so, capture as much of the complexity involved. Byrne and Uprichard (2012: 110–111) assert that “the entities that matter in relation to causality are not variables but systems […] cases are also taken to be complex systems and variables are mere traces of those systems.” Furthermore, seeing variables as complex systems allows us to see variables such as age, motivation and so forth not as closed, self-contained systems but as open, non-linear and interacting complex systems. Hiver (2015: 25) not only sees variables of relevance to learner motivation research as complex systems but more specifically as attractor states: While motivational outcomes such as apathy, flow and learned helplessness could be considered variables in the traditional sense, in keeping with recent developments in SLA research we may need to conceptualise states like these as emergent, dynamic and context-dependent rather than as absolute. Because they are all categorical patterns that L2 learners can settle into (when casing one or more L2 learners as the dynamic system), they can be considered as attractor states.

Looking at variables as complex systems and possible attractor states opens the conceptual possibility that changes in one variableas-system can influence change in another variable-as-system, or how energy from one system can flow into another system, contributing to either greater variability/unpredictability or stability, depending on the context and nature of the exchange. Stated differently, the complex system view of variables allows researchers not only to organize their research program differently—i.e., beyond the successionist or interpretivist models, towards a complexity viewpoint—but also understand in

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greater conceptual detail how variables, as complex systems and potential attractor states, influence each other in context and over time. As Rosmawati (2014: 70) puts it, variables, as complex systems, are inextricably intertwined and their interactions contribute to the learning as a whole. The existence of and the interactions among these highly interconnected variables further demonstrate that learning is a dynamic process. […] development is dependent on the availability and distribution of resources. When one type of resources is depleted—for example, lack of motivation—the system can hardly maintain its optimal state and may slide back to its previous state unless compromised by other types of resources; for example, extensive exposure to the target language and the need to communicate.

The importance of this interaction between variables as complex systems is also underlined by Pickering (2016: 182), who notes that “sociolinguists have discovered that the use of certain elements of speech (sociolinguistic variations) in a language tend to correlate with age, class, and gender. Researchers in this area have also found that sociolinguistic variations and their social correlates correspond to social networks.” In other words, the fact that variables mutually influencing each other has not escaped the attention of AL scholars, regardless of whether or not CDST principles have been considered. What CDST adds, however, is a novel and dynamic conceptual viewpoint—i.e., a complexity perspective—which allows researchers to formulate more detailed and conceptually rich explanatory statements which yield insight into specific ways variables are related, for particular reasons, with particular effects, in specific contexts. Unlike Lowie (2013), however, I am less enthusiastic about CDST’s capacity for prediction. As explained in Chapter 2, the task of prediction in the social sciences becomes considerably difficult when human reflexivity is considered. In the study of human beings, while simulation and modeling can provide approximate pictures, they can never predict future behaviours and how things will unfold because the basis upon which simulations can be designed can never factor in multiple and unpredictable reflexive pathways. We only have to look at the constant inaccuracies of election poll analyses, for example, which rarely

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provide accurate predictions. One reason for this is that simulations and modeling are more relevant to the study of restricted complexity—or a type of complexity which arises out of the interaction of simple elements, largely closed systems—rather than general complexity, which is the type of complexity AL scholars must deal with, and which has so far been the focus of discussion in this volume. As Byrne and Uprichard (2012: 125) point out, “laws based on simplicity and simulations confined to representing restricted complexity never can cope with the general complexity […] of social reality.” In this sense, while Mercer (2014) is justified in claiming that people are contradictory, dynamic and inconsistent, and that this particular feature of people should therefore be conceptualized as causally relevant in our data, she is less justified in her claim that “from a complexity perspective, these characteristics of the self […] could, indeed, potentially be predicted from models of system dynamics” (p. 164). This is because models of system dynamics cannot be applied uniformly to all social complex systems. At the same time, if we consider Larsen-Freeman and Cameron’s (2008: 161) notion of language as “emergent patterns stabilized from use”, we can also see the usefulness of complexity theory to a study of language and discourse as complex dynamic systems, partly distinct from situated interaction, yet embedded within social reality—itself a complex dynamic system. However, this should not lead CDST adherents to conclude that reflexivity can successfully be modelled by complex dynamic models and that this can lead AL researchers to make predictions about how language learners will ultimately learn.

Disentangling CDST from its Poststructuralist Tendencies So far in this book, I have maintained a markedly critical view towards interpretivist AL scholarship, particularly poststructuralist AL. Admittedly, such critique is rather common in contemporary social theory and sciences, for postmodernism—as a general umbrella term for a range of anti-realist perspectives rejecting modernist principles, prioritizing the fluidity and discursively constructed aspects of social life—has, in my

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view, successfully been critically unpacked from multiple angles in recent decades, by social scientists of all strands. In this way, it is fair to ask whether a critique of postmodernist/poststructuralist AL scholarship is even necessary at this point in AL history, or whether the development of a robust realist social ontology for AL scholarship is achievable without a critique of anti-realism. My position is that a CDST-informed realist approach to AL research has the potential to offer more solid conceptual foundations for AL research, and for this potential to materialize AL needs to come to terms with the problems associated with interpretivism and postmodernism. Another important reason for extending my critique of interpretivism within CDST at the end of this chapter is that, because our focus in AL research is inevitably on language and, more broadly speaking discourse as “intertwining structures – linguistic, social, and so on – that frame a social or cultural group’s preferred habits of interpretation” (Davis & Sumara, 2008: 66), input from postmodernism is, to a large extent, necessary to the work we do. After all, understanding language, its real-world uses and how it is taught and learned around the world necessitates a clear understanding of the (partly) constructed nature of society, the central role of both language and discourse, people’s sensemaking activities, and the poststructuralist notion of power as “social glue” in the production of educational realities and social life. Especially since postmodernism provides much valuable insight into the social world, an ongoing critique of anti-realism is indeed necessary. Although I fully agree with Weideman’s (2015: 4, emphasis mine) statement that, “though one may in passing imagine that [CDST] is yet another variation of postmodernism, that thought will soon be dispelled when its typically modernist starting points, specifically its affinities with the natural sciences and computer modeling of language, are revealed,” there is no doubt that anti-realist tendencies persist within CDST—as the above discussion on the CDST view of knowledge and truth has revealed—and that these issues must be resolved for further progress to be made. In this section of the chapter, I focus on traces of postmodernist thought in CDST, notably by honing in on problematic features in the argumentation provided by CDST adherent Filipovi´c (2015). I also argue that, for CDST to gain firmer grounds within AL research in the

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years to come, it must maintain its commitment to objective knowledge by aligning itself to a realist ontology. To begin with, CDST can easily be distinguished from anti-realism simply by underlining the latter’s rejection of the very idea of system. As Weideman (2015: 2) explains, “poststructuralist thinking ignores its main current rival, dynamic systems theory. There remains within poststructuralism a certain uneasiness with the notion of ‘system’, with some proponents declaring it anathema, and others retaining an ambiguous perspective.” This rejection of system is, by extension, a rejection of the principle of emergence and the related idea that social structures are also consequential social realities to account for. As such, by flattening social ontology down to the local, poststructuralism is ill-suited to deal with the idea of social progress or regress, thus imposing a rather unnecessary ontological problem for CDST-informed AL scholarship. After all, without a view of system researchers then have limited means to deal with the pressing issue for all social scientists: to find the “most adequate ways of thinking about the interconnections between different features of social life” (Layder, 2006: ix). Even if CDST—as with realist social research—is focused on the case, local realities must also be analysed in relation to realities beyond their situatedness. While Mercer (2011) and Ushioda (2015) provide convincing arguments for focusing on situated learner individuality and complexity at the local level, and while case study research certainly offers valuable and detailed insight into lived social realities, it is equally important for CDST adherents to maintain their focus on systems, both local and broader, and not succumb to methodological individualism. Also problematic is the related tendency among some CDST adherents to conflate ontology and epistemology, a distinctly anti-realist strategy. We can see clear signs of this in Filipovi´c’s (2015) work, particularly how the author links CDST to a constructivist and/or interpretivist epistemology, notably when she explains the underlying principle guiding constructivism (and by extension her approach to CDST-oriented AL research) as a matter of researchers “reading” (i.e., interpreting) data and theoretical models in their own ways, depending on the theoretical traditions they adhere to. For example, she describes a constructivist approach to research, which according to her allows

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researchers to be “free to shape their work in terms of necessities rather than received ideas as to what they ought not to be doing” (Filipovi´c, 2015: 22). Although perhaps the emancipatory potential in these statements can be appealing, truth is effectively reduced by the author to truth claims—an untenable scientific strategy. In developing her view of CDST markedly inspired by constructivism, Filipovi´c thus conflates ontology within epistemology, and fails to recognize that “justifying one’s belief in Y is not the same as explaining why Y is the case” (Ylikoski, 2012: 41). More alarmingly in my view is how Filipovi´c’s commitment to anti-realist principles undermines CDST both theoretically and methodologically. Anti-realist (and by extension, relationist) AL is problematic because it is conflationary, not only because it reduces the world to people’s understanding of it, but also because it collapses language-as-resource within language practice, social reality within discourse, and people to their social relations. Again, Filipovi´c (2015) demonstrates this tendency when discussing language standardization as representing “an outcome of active, purposeful interventions of groups or individuals in the process of language maintenance or language change. These interventions are practically always externally motivated; they are about language functions and domains, but much more than that, they are about sociopolitical and scientific orientations of language planners” (p. 52). Rather commonly accepted in the field of language policy and planning, the idea expressed in this statement is, in and of itself, not particularly problematic. Problems begin to surface, however, when this argument is used as a basis to promote the related idea that standard languages are “not real” or “an affront on language users’ rights” (e.g., Pennycook, 2013; Shohamy, 2006). Filipovi´c, unfortunately, commits this conceptual mistake, notably in her statement that language is strictly a social phenomenon (thus eschewing the referential function of language), and her rejection of langue, or language as an intransitive and relatively organized system of signs independent of its users. Indeed, there is ample evidence in Filipovi´c’s argumentation of a lukewarm commitment by the author to CDST’s system view of complex systems. As I argued in Bouchard (2018), the idea that language can be both a system of signs, have a standardized version, and be a situated

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and constantly negotiated social phenomenon is neither paradoxical nor contradictory: it is simply a recognition of language as a stratified and emergent social reality. Sealey (2019: 962) makes a similar argument thus: “one can recognize that different languages are not unitary, distinct entities and yet acknowledge the partial success of practices that reify, codify, and separate them.” Again, when we communicate in everyday life, we do not create language out of nothing: we draw from linguistic and symbolic resources as emergent CS elements with antecedent and relatively enduring properties, existing partly beyond the realm of situated interaction, thus as partly objective phenomena. This, however, does not mean that language-as-CS-resource dictates or determines how we ultimately choose to communicate. It only means that, as a CS resource, language provides us with constraining and enabling influences as we communicate in the real world. Defining language as both a system and as a situated practice, in my view, is not only necessary to understand the full complexity of human communication: it is also entirely consistent with a CDST approach to the study of language and related phenomena. Furthermore, a stratified view of language also serves as a reminder that the study of language is very much a matter of understanding the transitive and intransitive aspects of language, or the relationship between the ontologically distinct and emergent properties and powers of language as a stratified social reality. To reiterate an important point in this book, the fact that two things are deeply and causally related to each other does not mean that they are necessarily homologous, that they are inseparable, that they cannot be understood outside of their relationships with other phenomena, or that they can only make sense to researchers when studied at the local level. If that were the case, there would not be much complexity to account for. Failure by AL scholars to recognize these points, in my view, is somewhat ironic if we consider, for example, how anti-realist AL scholars view only situated language practices as meaningful on the one hand, while constructing their arguments by drawing from antecedent and enduring rules and standards of academic writing on the other. Therefore, while Filipovi´c’s critique is somewhat warranted with regards to the relationship between standard language varieties and situated

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communicative exchanges, it cannot be applied to other communicative phenomena, including the production and consumption of academic discourse. Also confusing in her argumentation is her reiteration of the notion of emergent language behavior throughout her book. Without a proper definition that could help us distinguish it from other notions already available in CDST literature, one must therefore wonder: (a) What or where do these emergent language behaviors emerge from? and (2) Are there language behaviours which are not emergent? In short, one cannot talk about emergence on the one hand, while rejecting a stratified viewpoint, including notions such as systems, the process of language standardization, and language as CS resource on the other. One can only understand emergence as a fundamental mechanism in the production of social life from a stratified, anti-conflationary viewpoint. This conflation between ontology and epistemology is also denoted in numerous AL studies—CDST-informed and otherwise—which consider survey data as sufficient access to truth, or at least to the lived realities of individual human agents. Mercer’s (2011) CDST-informed analysis of interview data is a good example of what Mann (2011) calls a generally undertheorized approach to interview data in contemporary AL research characterized by researchers (a) commenting liberally on short and largely decontextualized interview quotes extracted from broader interview transcripts, (b) claiming to use specific approaches to interview analysis without clearly specifying what these are in comparison with other methodologies, and (c) presenting interviews as co-construction between interviewer and interviewee, yet failing to explain how the interviewer’s voice actually influences the data and presenting and analysing only the voice of the interviewee(s). To this, I would add that Mercer (2011) assumes a direct relationship between interview statements and the complex reality of self-concept and identity work—i.e., seeing people’s understandings and descriptions of their experience as providing direct insight into and reliable ontological statements about the experiences themselves. In this sense, one has to wonder if her approach to survey data analysis has more to do with interview discourse than with self-concept, the core issue in her paper. We can thus begin the task of separating CDST from its problematic anti-realist penchant by honing in on instances of conflationary

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thinking within CDST literature. Oddly, conflationary thinking, and the related critique of dichotomous thinking, also tend to be developed inconsistently in CDST literature. Filipovi´c (2015), for example, dichotomizes various paradigms in social theory and the phenomena they are trying to explain, within a broader critique of dichotomous thinking. For example, she posits empiricism/positivism and critical theory/constructivism/participatory research as opposites. This tendency becomes explicitly demonstrated in a table on page 33 of her book, taken from Bastardas-Boada (2013), showing the complexity perspective on the right against a said “traditional” perspective on the left. This table lists attributes of each to suggest that the perspective on the right negates the perspective on the left. Ironically, the table includes an attribute of the “traditional” perspective on the left as the prioritization of “either/or dichotomies,” whereas the complexity perspective on the right is said to advocate “and/both integration and complementarity.” In short, Filipovi´c employs dichotomization to advance an anti-dichotomist argument. The problem in my view is that the author fails to distinguish differentiation from dichotomization. In moderate contrast, CDST adherents Kostoulas and Stelma (2016) successfully present the psychological dimension, specifically intentionality, as a complex system using a stratified (and arguably realist) ontology. In their study of learner intentionality as a complex system, the authors maintain a stratified ontology by stating that, given their research purposes, ontological distinctions between individual, small group, and societal levels of activity are maintained. They also make productive uses of the notion of system, arguing that their chapter “looks into phenomena of language learning psychology such as the relation between agency and structure, and the emergence of spontaneous behaviours among language learners, and it puts forward a conceptual model, which we call a Complex System of Intentions, for the interpretation of such phenomena” (p. 8). The authors’ more conceptually robust CDST approach leads them to conclude, in part, that intentionality motivates language learning activity, and the source of this motivating ‘effect’ may be either more individual (i.e., agentive) or more social, depending on the level of analysis. Intentionality, we argue, is an

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emergent phenomenon, which comes to existence from the co-activity of multiple system constituents, such as needs, beliefs, aspirations and affordances that are present in a system. (p. 11)

Of much appeal in the work conducted by Kostoulas and Stelma is the possibility that intentionality—as complex and stratified system—can also be conceptualized in realist terms as a causal mechanism, presenting constraining and enabling influences upon language learners when activated by agentive powers and potentials. Despite making reference to the structure-agency debate as reinforcing dichotomous thinking, the authors nevertheless ably combine insight from both CDST and realism when arguing that CDST “provides us with insights into the reciprocal determination between higher and lower levels of activity, such as individual action and social values and policies, and in doing so, helps us bridge the dichotomy between agency and structure” (p. 22). Despite some minor conceptual problems, their statements can nevertheless be characterized as stratified and emergentist and compatible with a realist ontology.

CDST, Critical AL Research and Critical Language Education A central argument in this volume is that, as a branch of the social sciences, AL requires a social ontology, and for reasons provided thus far, a realist ontology arguably offers much in terms of robust conceptual notions with which to study both social morphostasis and morphogenesis. Related to this argument is that CDST-oriented AL research, while offering valuable insight into complexity, emergence and causality, also needs to be integrated within the robust social ontology provided by realism. Situating both AL and CDST within a realist ontology means gaining a unique view into the structure-culture-agency relationship, not as a battle between opposed entities, nor as to the result of upward, downward or central conflations, but rather as a complex and necessary interaction between three distinct and emergent strata of the social realm over time in the ongoing production of social life. A robust social

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ontology is, in a broader sense, also necessary when studying people and their social activities to (a) avoid any form of determinism or voluntarism in our descriptions and explanations, (b) understand how culture and structure both constrain and enable people on the ground, and how people make sense of these forces and calibrate their efforts in light of these, and (c) highlight the problems and challenges imposed by various forms (or systems) of social inequality emerging from human activity. A robust social ontology, in this sense, is crucial if one of our objectives as social scientists (and as people living in the world, for that matter) is to improve society and the lives of the people in it. These concerns are not abstract in the pejorative sense of having limited relevance to the situated and lived experiences of people: they are real issues with real consequences for educators and social scientists, including AL scholars. Understanding language learning and teaching within the larger ethical projects of education and human emancipation makes a robust social ontology even more important, for the relationship between structure and agency must then be conceptualized and unpacked through description, interpretation, explanation and critical analysis. This need is felt by both AL scholars and language teachers and learners as well, for critical thinking and critical analysis are core to education’s central goal of promoting rational inquiry and judgement, and the ability of flesh-and-blood people to self-correct in light of new evidence. As Bailin (1998: 209) points out, critical thinking presupposes, for example, a fallibilist epistemology, that is, the view that our knowledge can never be certain but is always open to the possibility of revision in the light of new evidence and arguments. […] It is because we cannot be certain that our current body of knowledge is true that the critical assessment of this knowledge in light of new evidence and arguments becomes central.

In sum, it is important to view much of the work we do as AL scholars, language teachers and language practitioners as rooted in critical inquiry, a practice that requires descriptive, explanatory and ethical engagement. By extension, and given the inherently social nature of what we do, our work also requires sociological knowledge. A critical perspective—both

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for research and pedagogy—therefore requires a stratified viewpoint not only as a way to understand how social structures both constrain and enable human intentions (Sealey & Carter, 2004), but also to understand social phenomena as unfolding within and across different layers, or different domains, of society (Layder, 1997). This stratified look is crucial to critical analysis, for the oppression of human beings must also be understood as a specific causal relationship between people and social phenomena, each possessing distinct and emergent properties. If we want to understand (a) how language learning is related to broader socio-economic and political realities, (b) how language ideologies gain hegemonic status while others do not, (c) how people within language learning contexts and beyond suffer or are discriminated against, (d) why some forms of oppression seem to persist throughout history, and perhaps more importantly (e) how systemic forms of oppression can be dismantled, we need to ground our work in a clear and informed understanding that phenomena such as people, institutions, laws, and society are different, with distinct and emergent properties of their own. Without this stratified viewpoint, it would be extremely difficult to develop viable educational strategies helping students nurture and apply analytical judgement, or develop effective evaluative and corrective strategies that can help people move towards social emancipation. While the stratified perspective in CDST remains promising, we saw in the previous chapter that its critical angle remains weak, in large part because of its (currently) underdeveloped accounts of human agency. As we saw earlier in this book, a critical perspective requires a strong version of human agency, because it is people—as reflexively endowed powerful particulars—who have the capacity to engage in discursive practices, critical questioning and social engagement and effectuate social change. Consequently, if we want language learners to develop a critical viewpoint towards (a) why they should learn a particular language, (b) standard language varieties and local varieties, and (c) constraining ideologies within language learning contexts including native speakerism, our focus should not be placed exclusively on systems of oppression but also on what flesh-and-blood people can do to improve their lives. To successfully empower language learners, educators should thus present social inequalities as complex systems with antecedent properties and

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powers somewhat beyond the reach of individual human beings on the one hand, and help learners identify the causes and effects of, and the solutions to, social inequalities within their range of experience on the other. Unfortunately, CDST fails to provide much specific, or sociologically informed, view in this regard. In addition, given its rather marked emphasis on the study of local realities, CDST also tends to provide an ontologically flattened view of agency within a contingent social world. Instead, what we often read in CDST literature is the unsatisfactory suggestion that structure and agency are “equally important” or that they are “complementary” (e.g., Mason, 2008a, 2008b). The weakness of CDST’s critical angle is also due to its limited insight into collective action for social change. An effective critical language learning and teaching approach, for example, focuses on (a) the development of learners’ awareness of systemic forms of oppression—the notion that sexism or racism, for example, are not merely negative aspects of individual personalities or faulty personal worldviews but are also and very importantly antecedent and enduring cultural and structural forces systematically disempowering some for the benefit of others—and (b) the need for and strategies to effectuate collective action towards change—i.e., the idea that sexism or racism will not be dismantled only through a focus on the self and individual sense-making processes but rather through long-term, consistent, structured collective mobilization. In other words, what is missing in CDST is a critical realist view of social oppression as a broad and consequential underlying causal mechanism, and a strong vision of both individual and collective agency to counter its effects. To a large extent, these core elements in critical pedagogy and critical social research go against the CDST view regarding the structure of complex systems and networks that “a decentralized network is a more viable structure for any system that relies on the efficient exchange of information—a category that includes all living and learning systems” (Davis & Sumara, 2008: 88). While certainly strong justification for student-centered education, in my view this principle also goes against another core feature of effective critical pedagogy and inquiry: the orientation towards collective critical discourse and action to dismantle systemic inequality. Weideman (2015: 4, emphases mine) is also critical of the lack of engagement with the structure-agency debate in CDST:

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There is nothing close to [concerns for power inequalities] in the manifestations of [CDST] within applied linguistics. Moreover, the views of those working within a [CDST] paradigm on human agency are a world apart from the transformative human action foreseen by postmodernism, not only in its critical, but especially in its poststructuralist conceptualisation. [CDST] has little to say about the overtly political agenda of postmodernism in applied linguistics.

While I agree with the author’s point regarding CDST to a large extent, I disagree with his characterization of postmodernism/poststructuralism—clearly relativist, anti-realist viewpoints— providing a robust and theoretically consistent view of transformative human action, or as providing an overtly political agenda. As Bailin (1998: 209) argues, the practice of critical thinking […] rests on a non-relativist epistemology. A radical relativist account of knowledge holds that all views are merely subjective preferences that are equally valid. The enterprise of rationally assessing claims makes no sense in this context. Critical thinking presupposes the existence of criteria for judgement and hence the possibility of justification.

And justification cannot come from relativism/anti-realism: it can only come from commitment to objective knowledge, as I have argued previously in this volume. That being said, some complexity theorists have tried to open new conceptual possibilities for a critically-informed CDST view of agency in AL contexts. Some are even more positive about CDST’s potential to strengthen critical social research at large through the introduction of complexity-informed concepts. According to Alhadeff-Jones (2008: 73), “complexity theories have substantial emancipatory potential. Concepts like ‘control’, ‘autonomy’, ‘organisation’ or ‘self ’ may enrich our representations of alienation and emancipation as complex processes. They might encourage reconsideration of the meaning of social and philosophical critique.” Specific to ethnographic social research, Agar (1999, cited in Cochran-Smith et al. (2014: 108)) identifies further evidence of CDST’s critical potential:

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While complexity theory does not change many of the fundamentals of ethnographic research, it adds considerably to this research by overcoming the “bias” of an anthropological approach toward localized groups and by emphasizing trends in larger interacting systems with a focus on mechanisms that show how things work, not simply how they are.

Within AL scholarship, Cochran-Smith et al. (2014) see the application of CDST to teacher training research and programs (which contain important critical elements) as beneficial. As they argue, CDST approaches “offer trenchant critique of problematic but persistent ideas, such as transmission-oriented approaches to teacher training, linear views of teaching and learning, process–product logic regarding teachers’ learning, and university-school knowledge hierarchies that separate theory and practice” (p. 108). In sum, by offering novel ideas and concepts with which to study complex systems and their causal interactions within the social realm, CDST can arguably be posited as adding further critical strength to existing AL research. However, this critical perspective remains at this point more or less focused on ontological issues rather than questions of social injustice. Filipovi´c (2015) is perhaps more elaborate in her attempt to develop a critical CDST-informed AL research approach. As pointed out earlier, however, the author adopts essentially a constructivist approach which, according to her, is aimed at bringing to the front the centrality of the human subject, or as she puts it, “recognition of local, specific, historically and geographically limited categories which allow for a plurality of perspectives in analyzing a single phenomenon, depending on the way it actualizes itself on one hand, and on experiences and ideologies of the researchers, on the other hand” (p. 15). By emphasizing the importance of discourse—and by extension presenting the agent as emerging through situated discursive practices—the author also commits the mistake common among contemporary constructivist and poststructuralist AL researchers of overemphasizing the importance of discourse in the production of social life. As we saw in Chapter 3, this strategy effectively decentres the human subject and weakens people’s reflexivity and potential for critical engagement and change. This problem becomes rather evident in the following statement by the author: “Human history

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is history of communicative actions. Everything we do, learn, think or believe, we perpetuate or change through discursive practices we employ along the way” (Filipovi´c, 2015: 116). Although human agents in this statement seem to be identified at the engine in the production of social life, this view is problematic on two fronts: (a) human history is not simply a “conversation” but also—and very importantly—about the material, non-discursive realities such as earthquakes, tsunamis, pandemics, global warming, wars and mass murders; and (b) agency— not discourse—is the powerful particular. In this way, the author fails to explain why people choose to engage in particular discursive practices and not others; instead, she merely states that they do, which is insufficient for a critical perspective. In developing a critical angle, Filipovi´c (2015: 16) argues for what she calls a utopian politics of possibility aimed not only at countering social injustices but also at imagining a radical democracy that has yet to emerge in our world. Although these suggestions are appealing and creative, and certainly relevant to the Japanese foreign language education context in which I work, I cannot help but note a clear positivist tendency (i.e., contra postmodernism) in her argumentation, specifically the idea that society and people should aim to develop a world (which has yet to exist) which would allow them to reach their full potential via ongoing, constructive and (I assume) democratically rooted processes of realization and emancipation. In retrospect, it is reasonable to observe that Filipovi´c’s discussion of agency and criticality is a mere “add-on” to her core definition of CDST, rather than a successful, or conceptually consistent and robust, alignment of agency and criticality with CDST principles. This rather a-critical combination of somewhat conceptually divergent ideas is rather common in Filipovi´c’s book, notably when she contrasts a somewhat essentialized view of language policy and planning against a CDST-guided view of language policy and planning thus: In complexity theory […] management is replaced by leadership, a heterarchical structure based on “partnership, followership, empowerment, teams, networks, and the role of context”, which takes into serious scientific consideration ethical and moral principles when investigating human relations […] Leaders are initiators, motivators, and their

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authority is based on their positive outlook and respect they incite among the members of the same community, rather than on formally defined positions of power which are the principal characteristics of managers. (Filipovi´c, 2015: 45–46)

Again, the principles expressed here have much value to language policy and planning research and critical AL scholarship in general. What transpires from this statement, however, is another example of a fragile and precarious conceptual integration of agency and criticality within existing CDST principles. A similar strategy of simply adding agency and criticality to the mix is adopted by a surprisingly large number of contemporary postmodernist and poststructuralist AL scholars. As Mackenzie (1998: 61) rightfully points out with regards to (said) postmodernist critique, Oppression and injustice are certainly constructed and in many cases alterable; what prevents their alteration is commonly not what the postmodernists wish to attack, the belief that they are natural and fixed, but the power of those who commit them. And a ‘radical struggle’ against the repressive structures of society that culminates only in searing indictments in academic journals is a radical struggle that even university administrators, let alone power structures in the wider society, find easy to tolerate.

Also problematic in Filipovi´c’s understanding of agency and criticality is the way she develops the notion of a critical potential, which appears to contradict the common view of CDST research as a fundamentally bottom-up enterprise. The following statement reveals this problem: “The fact that we live in societies based on inequality has serious impact on the way we perceive, use and misuse language […] this is also a valid field of linguistic research” (Filipovi´c, 2015: 4). In other words, although the author focuses on local realities without offering a model for how people and social structures are related, there is nevertheless clear acknowledgement in her work of structural forces as consequential to the existence and endurance of social inequalities. A more worrisome problem is that Filipovi´c’s critical agenda, or main approach to social emancipation, seems to be reduced to a process

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of adjusting localized discursive practices, or as a process of engaging in individually and socially appropriate communicative practices. Her presentation of the notion of language leadership clearly reveals her marked constructivist penchant: I started using the concept of language leadership to describe this type of possible interaction between the society and the language in which interested parties use their experience and knowledge to help the others understand things about the world which are reflected in language and shaped/reshaped or changed by language. Language leaders in my research are those who belong to interested speech communities/communities of practice, and who start applying different linguistic patterns in their everyday communication in order to make language more expressive of their world view and their position in the world, but without pressuring anybody else into doing so. The working hypothesis being that by engaging in socially and individually appropriated communicative practice, we can change the world one person at [a] time. (Filipovi´c, 2015: 5, emphasis original)

In other words, while there are traces of a system view of social oppression in her statement, change is not presented as involving collective dismantlement of oppressive systems but rather as a matter of individual responsibility, which is then reduced to a process of formulating alternative identity positions through novel discursive practices—one person at a time. The same problem was noted in Chapter 3 with regards to postmodernism and poststructuralism, and was characterized as part of a neoliberalist ideology. Filipovi´c (2015: 11) also adopts a problematic constructivist viewpoint with regards to scientific knowledge thus: The politics of science seeks its epistemological affirmation in the notions of ‘objectivity’, ‘reason’, ‘reliability of data’, ‘universal scientific truth’ and the like, using positivist-science-related terminology to create the great divide between those who ‘get to do science’ and those who are not given access to this privileged field of human activity.

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This statement is problematic largely because it erroneously identifies a commitment to objective knowledge as a modernist/positivist strategy. If only modernism was committed to objective knowledge, postmodernist ontologies would then be reduced to mere pursuits of subjective knowledge, thus nullifying any possibility for the formulation of ontological claims. It would, in other words, leave Filipovi´c unable to make knowledge claims about phenomena including complex systems, language learning and teaching, language policy and planning, and language variety (to name a few core AL issues addressed in her volume). In short, the author mistakenly reduces objectivity to ideology and seems to reduce all scientific endeavours to mere ideological exercises. Secondly, Filipovi´c oversimplifies the politics of science to a process of excluding researchers and practitioners as essentialized social categories, while failing to acknowledge (a) the natural and the social sciences as also marked by transdisciplinarity to a large extent, and (b) the important contribution of AL and educational research to real-world, situated language learning and teaching practices around the world. Finally, Filipovi´c (2015: 56) offers a considerably weakened version of agency and of people’s critical potential in the following statement: We need to work on establishing critical relationships and interactions which bring us closer to other individuals who share our world views, our understanding of knowledge and science, and who also share our faith in the objectives we decide to accomplish. That is the only way for the new standard language systems to emerge.

This drastic, exclusionary and deeply ideological approach fails to acknowledge that overcoming social tensions and systemic forms of inequalities do not depend exclusively on consensus. In many ways, it is quite the opposite: it requires active and hopefully positive and productive exchanges with people who do not share our world views. Given these numerous problems, it is fair to claim that Filipovi´c’s critical perspective does not offer much beyond the already problematic critical angle within social constructivism and postmodernism.

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Despite these conceptual shortcomings, Filipovi´c (2015: 5) nevertheless identifies important features of a critical agenda in CDST-informed AL research: Scientific research, among other objectives, should have the one of helping in finding solutions to real-life problems of real people, and that in order to achieve that, a dialogue among academic communities, policy makers and interested non-scientific communities of practice needs to be established in order to come up with long-term, sustainable solutions which may ultimately lead to a more equal distribution of social power in our societies.

At the same time, such argument by the author fits rather uncomfortably with the CDST view of knowledge described earlier, for engagement and response by students does not come without some form of presentation and representation of both knowledge and truth—i.e., it does not come without commitment to objective knowledge. Outside CDST bastions, Bailin (1998: 204) provides a more elaborate and concrete understanding of the core issue in this section on critical AL research, CDST-informed or otherwise: Critical thinking is central to the critical appraisal of information which constitutes a part of subject matter expertise; the generation of effective solutions to problems; the abilities to evaluate competing claims, cut through political rhetoric and emotional suasion, and to engage in open-minded discussions that are crucial for democratic participation; and generally to the development of autonomous responsible individuals who weigh the consequences of their actions, engage in advanced and thoughtful planning, and deal in effective and innovative ways with personal and social problems.

This view is more elaborate because it (a) combines the descriptive and ethical potentials of critical thinking, (b) is more specific about what language learners and teachers can do, and (c) maintains a stratified viewpoint and a commitment to objective knowledge necessary to the deployment of critical thinking in both research and pedagogy.

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To sum up, a viable critical AL scholarship requires a stratified view of the social realm as well as a strong version of human agency. Because of this, it is fair to argue that CDST has more conceptual work to do. As of now, CDST facilitates the important task of describing social phenomena as complex systems, and offers much insight into complex and/or probabilistic causality. However, it also needs to offer an ethical perspective crucial to educational projects, including the teaching and learning of languages. To improve in this direction, CDST must provide a stronger version of human agency, maintain and reinforce its systemic viewpoint, and explicitly affirm its commitment to objective knowledge.

Conclusion The main purpose of this chapter has been to look at CDST-informed AL scholarship from the social realist ontology outlined in previous chapters. As already mentioned, CDST essentially focuses on open and learning systems, i.e., systems which interact with their environment through the exchange of information, energy or material, and evolve in the process largely through self-organization. As Buckley (1998: 44) points out, “that a system is open means, not simply that it engages in interchanges with the environment, but that this interchange is an essential factor underlying the system’s viability, its reproductive ability or continuity, and its ability to change.” The CDST approach to studying open systems thus focuses not only on relationships but also on the parts and wholes of open systems integrated within specific contexts (CochranSmith et al., 2014). As it applies to language-related phenomena, CDST is partly rooted in acknowledgement of—and engagement with—the possibility that if biological systems can be characterized by complexity and indeterminacy, cognitive, emotional, linguistic, educational, and social systems should understandably also be considered as complex, non-linear, and emergent realities. In this sense, the importance of CDST to contemporary AL is, in my view at least, undeniable and of consequence to a renewed AL scholarship. At the same time, the current state of CDST-informed AL research remains somewhat unsatisfactory, and while much conceptual work has

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already been done, very little of this work has been applied to the study of empirical data (Dörnyei et al., 2008). Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 5) explain this problem thus: the main hurdle to empirical scholarship informed by complexity theory has been applied linguists’ uncertainty regarding what designing and conducting actual CDST research entails. The result is a distinct lack of consensus regarding which phenomena or questions merit examination, how systematic investigation should be structured and conducted (e.g.., with regard to instrumentation and data collection) and how the results of this research should be analyzed and interpreted.

Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008: 14) also recognize this lacuna, as well as the limitations of current CDST theory, and recommend the use of other theories to complement it. Larsen-Freeman (2020: viii) may be right to some extent in pointing out that “if the value of CDST is to be fully realized, researchers need to take the next step beyond describing and theorizing change in dynamic systems; they need to conduct research and adduce evidence, informed by CDST.” However, while more empirically grounded and conceptually rich CDST-informed AL studies are certainly central to a renewed AL scholarship, there still remain important conceptual elements within CDST which need further development and sophistication, and this chapter and the previous one have attempted to identify some of these.

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8 Conclusion

This book has tried to uncover and bring further sophistication to the theoretical grounds upon which AL stands, with the hope that such work can inspire other AL scholars to invest efforts in a renewed AL scholarship, one which is (a) more sensitive to the complexity of AL phenomena, (b) enriched by insight from social theory and (c) aligned in transdisciplinary fashion with other strands of the social sciences. Although there are many ways to achieve these broad aims, I have chosen to concentrate principally on ontological questions and look at CDST’s recent contribution to research in the field, from the lens provided by a realist ontology, because I believe that this strategy holds much promise for the future. It has been a somewhat lengthy and demanding project to achieve, and I am sure somewhat demanding to read as well. And while issues of methodology have not enjoyed the spotlight much, I do hope that readers have gained a more solid understanding of the necessity and challenges involved in developing a robust social ontology for AL research, understanding which I believe is crucial to the formulation of more robust and complexity-informed methodological approaches. In this conclusion, I provide a short summary of some of the most salient points made in the past seven chapters. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_8

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Realism begins with the assumption that there is a reality independent of people’s understanding of it, and that knowledge of that reality also helps modulate that reality. It develops the argument that ontology affects epistemology: the way things are influences both the way we understand them and the extent to which it is possible for us to know about them. As such, realism is characterized by a commitment to objective knowledge, which justifies its emphasis on ontological issues. In other words, realism is mainly interested in knowing what entities and phenomena exist in the world, how they exist, and the kinds of relationships (causal or otherwise) unfold between phenomena. This perspective has been justified in this book and many others as valuable to the production and consumption of a non-conflationary social science. More generally speaking, a social ontology has been characterized as built upon theories and concepts related to the structure–agency relationship. From the perspective of social realism, culture was also presented as an important layer of the social realm, not to be conflated within structure or people, but rather as a distinct and emergent stratum of the social realm with its own causal potential. Specific to the issue of causality, agency and underlying causal mechanisms were presented as powerful particulars in the ongoing production of social life. This sociological insight has also been placed in relation to a range of issues relevant to AL scholarship including, at its conceptual core, complexity, emergence and causality, and at its theoretical and methodological levels, learning, teaching, identity, ideology, language shift, language policy and planning, literacy, language socialization, processing, pedagogy and assessment, to name only a few issues covered in this book. From a realist perspective, discussions about the structure-cultureagency relationship are not (a) intellectual digressions, (b) remnants of a bygone era of human knowledge, nor (c) conceptual issues to be “overcome” or “transcended.” Rather, what we do as AL scholars is informed and structured by our variegated understandings of that relationship, as it unfolds in specific contexts, at specific periods of time, for specific purposes, fulfilled by specific people as agents and reflexively endowed powerful particulars. In light of this, the improvement of current AL scholarship has been characterized as a reconceptualization of AL issues

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in descriptive and explanatory terms, in relation to, and hopefully further elucidating, the structure-culture-agency relationship. While both successionist and interpretivist tendencies within AL provide incomplete accounts because they are based on conflationary thinking, the robust social ontology provided by realism allows for some degree of conceptual and methodological combination—not dichotomization—of both perspectives, towards a “third way.” By logical extension, since realism proposes that society and its various components and phenomena should be understood as complex, emergent and thus stratified, unfolding at multiple levels of reality (e.g., biological, cognitive, interpersonal, cultural, social, educational and/or legal levels), it also supports the adoption of methodological pluralism to uncover processes located within and across levels. These are some of the strategies employed by realist scholars as they attempt to provide insight into complexity, emergence and causality. More explicit than CDST on this point, and presenting a rather sharp contrast from posthumanism, realism distinguishes between natural and social entities based on their distinct and emergent properties and powers. While the natural world also contains complex phenomena, many of its objects and processes can be explained through formulas and rules because they are either closed systems or marked by restricted complexity rather than general complexity. In contrast, people are reflexive, emotional, interested, purposeful, and causally efficacious. Furthermore, the social world can be explained as complex, radically open, non-linear, contingent and heterogeneous, characteristics which help us distinguish the social from the natural. Languages such as French or English, for example, “are not organisms, and have no genetic imperative to ‘seek’ survival […] They are not natural kinds, their boundaries are porous, their codification is indeed often a matter of politics rather than linguistics; nevertheless languages as actualized variants do have an existence as cultural emergent properties” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 73). Because of these ontological features of social phenomena, including language, the usefulness of formulas and rules to explain them is thus considerably limited. In moderate contrast from CDST, realism thus retains some degree of scepticism with regards to metaphorical uses of concepts from the natural

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sciences in the social sciences. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 77) note, AL scholars are concerned with the engagement of human beings in social interaction, and, like us, are unpersuaded by mechanistic accounts of these processes. However, we believe that the concepts of emergence and complexity are crucial to explaining social action, including social actors’ use of language […] We also believe that explanations of socially situated language use entail a recognition of natural phenomena, such as the biological endowment of human beings with particular kinds of vocal, aural and visual apparatus and particular kinds of brains, and that speakers’ language use is partly a product of various kinds of interaction between nature and culture.

Realism is also developed around the notion of a “guiding naturalism that denies that there is something special about the social world that makes it unamenable to scientific investigation” (Kincaid, 2012: 3). In this sense, realism sees an outright and complete rejection of naturalism as somewhat presumptuous, in that certain naturalist principles still retain some relevance to contemporary social science. Kincaid (2012) lists seven important tenets of a positivist philosophy of science: (1) theories are the main content of science: what we do as researchers is not simply to serve practice on the ground but also, and rather importantly, to bring further sophistication to our theoretical deliberations, in the hope that our theoretically informed practices are consistent and have their intended effects; (2) scientific concepts should have clear definitions with regards to necessary and sufficient conditions: our increasingly sophisticated concepts should remain testable against empirical evidence and further conceptual deliberations; (3) scientific explanations should have a logic: they should conform to general principles of pertinence to a broad range of scientific inquiries, rather than limited to the study of local, contingent realities, with merely local ramifications; (4) even if necessarily related to each other in their developments, scientific and philosophical inquiries remain independent enterprises with different sets of standards and different time frames, the former usually taking place beforehand and concerned with the task of applying robust and welltested methodological strategies to the study of empirical evidence, and

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the latter taking place after scientific inquiry, relying mostly on the logic of inference and with reference to scientific knowledge, drawing explanatory generalizations about how things work; (5) the irrelevance of the social nature of scientific investigation and institutions: although realism recognize the social nature of scientific research as consequential, it does not reduce research to a mere discursive—i.e., perspectival—practice, given its commitment to objective knowledge; (6) the maintenance of strong criteria for explanation and confirmation, again, in order to avoid reducing scientific practices to a hopeless relativism imposed by perspectivism; and finally (7) considering the at times radically different structures and approaches in both natural and social sciences, realism is also mindful of the debate over whether the social sciences can be considered ‘ real ’ sciences. Although it would be difficult to present a convincing approach to social research entirely based on these seven positivist principles, listing them in this concluding chapter is an interesting reminder for applied linguists and social scientists alike that outright and total rejection of positivism tends to be overly simplistic and not necessarily mindful of the history of ideas, concepts and principles found within both the natural and the social sciences. In short, while realism does not diminish the importance of relationships in the shaping of social phenomena, its commitment to objective knowledge and focus on ontological distinctions ensure to some extent that it does not succumb to various forms of relationism, or the reduction of objects to their relationships. This realization is grounded in a particular understanding of emergence as a process of greater complexity happening at different and more complex levels of organization, a sort of “growth” of a system which cannot be explained, much less predicted, exclusively through a study of the interaction between lowerlevel components. Byrne (2013) explains emergence as a condition in which complex wholes are greater than the sum of their parts. He rightfully warns, however, that emergence implies more than simple holism: that we must understand things taken as a totality and only as a totality. And plainly a recognition of emergence means that we cannot understand things simply in terms of their components, the essence of the reductionist approach that underpins

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positivist science. Instead, we have to think about parts and wholes and we must recognize that causality does not run in any one direction. So parts have causal implications for the whole, interactions among parts have causal implications for the whole, parts have causal implications for each other, and the whole has causal implications for parts (p.218).

This view of emergence to causality is important because it helps us understand why probabilistic causal explanations (Williams, 2021) are what we are likely trying to elucidate in AL, and why these will likely remain incomplete. It is important to add here that, instead of seeing causal explanations as merely “incomplete,” AL researchers should also be cognizant of the different models and approaches to causality, some of which were discussed in this book. It is also important to stress that, given the complexity both resulting from and shaping emergent social processes, social inquiry should ask “what works for whom in what circumstances and in what respects?” (Pawson, 2006: 74). This question is parallel to Hiver and Al-Hoorie’s (2020: 30) realist (i.e., anti-reductionist, anti-empiricist, anti-determinist) argument that “CDST research is concerned with determining what works, for whom, in which contexts and under what circumstances.” Emergence, and therefore stratification, also explain to a large extent why social phenomena are complex systems: as stratified entities, people as complex systems both possess and generate emergent properties through interaction with other complex systems, and as human agents they attempt to achieve their goals and fulfil their ultimate concerns by interacting with constraining and enabling cultural and structural forces. Emergent from this structure-culture-agency interaction are underlying causal mechanisms which, together with the causal potential of agency, constitute two important areas of interest in the formulation of causal explanations within AL worlds. Many of these principles, or perhaps variations of them, are also found in CDST, and in this book I have tried to identify some of these conceptual affinities between the two perspectives. Indeed, realization that “the concepts of complexity and emergence are indispensable to a realist conception of language and social action” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 84) has been a motivating force in the creation of this book.

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Sealey and Carter (2004: 79) also discuss the importance of complexity to explaining social action, including AL phenomena, pointing out that “language in the individual may be the emergent outcome of the engagement of the embodied human being with physical and cultural resources operating within particular constraints, including temporal ones.” From this perspective, the authors underline Larsen-Freeman’s crucial contribution to AL scholarship, and explain—as Larsen-Freeman herself does—that the complex process of language development is the emergent outcome of the interaction between its various components (e.g., L1 influence, learner characteristics and so forth), which means that it cannot be reduced to any one of these components, nor to the relationship between these components alone. To understand emergent outcomes in their complexity, AL research must do more than focus on any single factor at one time, in one context, in isolation from broader social realities, as do successionist and interpretivist AL. The study of each level via the application of multiple research approaches would, in principle, reveal much of the complexity discussed by CDST adherents. In practice, however, this sort of study is difficult to accomplish due to theoretical, methodological, financial and logistical challenges. Even if CDST-informed realist AL is difficult to conduct in practice, however, researchers can nevertheless identify the different layers or levels involved, reveal as much insight about each as possible, develop research methods applicable to each level, and look at possible trans-level mechanisms involved. They can do so while keeping the core principles of complexity, emergence and causality in mind, and the idea that most of the phenomena under investigation are complex systems composed of complex parts which interact in complex ways to produce, at a higher level of organization, the complex and irreducible systems under scrutiny. Part of the work necessary in developing CDST-informed realist AL is explaining where and how language education—one of the central foci in AL scholarship—is situated in broader educational realities. In itself, this task is not particularly novel to AL scholarship. However, what CDST-informed realist AL can provide is additional contextualization of AL concerns in relation to the structure-culture-agency relationship, a

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task which requires not only relating AL and educational issues theoretically and methodologically, but rather more specifically unpacking the type of struggle for ideas and knowledge within educational contexts. After all, language development is not a purely mental process taking place within the minds of individual learners: it is a complex and layered process necessitating biological, cognitive, emotional, reflexive, pedagogical, critical and social involvement. While realism has not gained much prominence in AL thus far, CDST clearly has, and many reasons can explain this development. As a theory of complex systems providing a novel way to understand the social world and its components, CDST is thus amenable to empirical testing: we can gather data about complex systems (e.g., language, learners, classrooms, policy processes, etc.) and unpack them using CDST principles, which allow for a deeper appreciation of their complexity. In moderate contrast, realism is not a theory per se, but rather represents a way to conceptualize and understand the ontological properties of the social world and how they relate in causal terms. As an ontology of the social world, it provides much needed ontological depth, and allows researchers to transcend the confines of empirical knowledge. In a sense, realist principles cannot be “verified” exactly in the same way CDST principles can, one reason being that realism’s broad scope makes it very difficult to test some of its principles through empirical means alone (Layder, 1993). That being said, realism is not a fantasy or a mere story of the social world created by scholars: it is built on a stratified understanding of social “facts” situated at the empirical , the actual and the real . Indeed, and as Layder (1993: 27) argues, “there is no reason to assume that ‘grand’ or general questions of social development are inherently speculative and unconnected with the details of empirical research,” a point which also justifies the position adopted in this book that social theory, notably realist social theory, provides firmer conceptual grounds upon which a renewed AL scholarship can indeed emerge. In previous chapters I have identified a few conceptual parallels between CDST and realism. In these final pages of the book, I reiterate a few of them and bring attention to other important parallels. There are indeed numerous concepts and notions central to CDST and social realism which converge quite comfortably: emergence, non-linearity,

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time asymmetry and irreversibility, and rejection of reductionism. Other conceptual points of convergence include the need to combine inductive and deductive analyses, and a shared interest in revealing the contingent nature of social phenomena. There is also the notion of attractor state in CDST which has been related to the realist notion of underlying generative mechanism, with learner motivation serving as a good example. This conceptual parallel is rather valuable to AL research, for as Hiver (2015: 20, emphases original) explains, “it is the norm rather than the exception to see stable patterns in human behaviour. These stable tendencies, solutions or outcomes for dynamic systems are called attractor states, and they are essential in understanding most physical and human phenomena.” Alternatively, the notion of system/control parameter in CDST—which refers to “the specific principles, constraints or rules which govern the interactions between system components and the patterns of change that take place” (Bak, 1996, cited in Hiver, 2015: 24)”, or to “principles that guide the way a system can move in its state space from one attractor state to the next” (Hiver, 2015: 24)—might serve as another appropriate parallel to the realist notion of generative mechanism. Although perhaps not explicitly, CDST can facilitate accounts of some of the important features and powers of human reflexivity as complex system. Juarrero (1999) for example, makes a clear reference to reflexivity when arguing that “the flaws of both causal and behaviorist accounts of action [highlight] the importance of and need for a casually efficacious cognitive source that doesn’t disengage once it triggers behavior, but rather guides and directs (in-forms) by flowing into behavior” (p.77, emphasis mine). Furthermore, if we consider Mercer’s (2014) statement that “the self emerges from a series of concurrent processes as the self mediates external influences by selecting, evaluating, assessing and interpreting their relevance and significance for the self ” (p.165), and Semetsky’s (2008) notion of a selective mechanism within complex systems which ensures that contextual forces do not determine the internal structure of complex systems, we can reasonably argue that CDST’s view of human reflexivity is novel and a welcome addition to the realist notion of reflexivity, as developed mainly by Margaret Archer and summarized in Chapter 4. Byrne (2009: 1–2) also makes explicit references to reflexivity in his work, notably in this statement:

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“In social systems we have to take into account the reflexive agency of the human actors in the system […] people can understand their world and act on the basis of that understanding in order to change it.” As a complexity theorist, Byrne (2011) can be said to demonstrate the greatest affinity with realism. As the author points out, the notion of underlying generative mechanism is also an integral part of a CDST perspective: We explore causality by working backwards from specific different effects—retrodiction. In other words we should engage with processes of retroduction to explain what has happened and in terms of applied social science develop a retrodictive approach to guiding actions towards the achievement of desired outcomes. This is very much in accord with the general critical realist programme of explanation. We are dealing with effects understood as system states and understand these system states to be the product of complex and multiple generative mechanisms. (p.89; cited in Byrne & Uprichard, 2012: 120).

Byrne and Uprichard (2012) also make an important distinction between the empirical, the actual and the real by placing generative mechanisms within the real, outcomes within the actual, and the activation of causal powers in contexts within the empirical. Previous attempts to bridge realism with CDST have been made, notably by Williams (2021) and by Gerrits and Verweij (2013: 178) who suggest that Critical realism appears to have much in common with the ontological statements about complexity. Its focus is on contingency, i.e. how particular configurations activate certain mechanisms and how these configurations shift in time and place. This focus on contingency has implications for the extent to which patterns are said to reoccur over time. As such, it addresses the issue of time-asymmetry. Its position on reality aligns with complexity’s properties of non-decomposability and non-compressibility. It implies that both complexity and critical realism offer an anti-reductionist take on social reality.

Specifically, Gerrits and Verweij (2013) identify Bhaskar’s brand of critical realism as a useful framework for understanding social complexity. They also identify strong conceptual links between CDST

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and critical realism by arguing that complex reality is contingent, irreducible to parts, and time asymmetric. The authors reinforce these links by arguing that “any effort to research social complexity is implicitly or explicitly informed by Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism” (Gerrits & Verweij, 2013: 167). The authors view CDST as a non-Newtonian worldview which holds that “reality is characterized by wholes rather than discrete entities and events; non-linear causality instead of linear causality; uncertainty about the future instead of total predictability; and partial truths rather than final truths” (Gerrits & Verweij, 2013: 168). Cochran-Smith et al. (2014) also provide interesting avenues for linking realism with CDST in research on teacher education. As the authors argue, “when critical realism is integrated conceptually with complexity theory […] it offers a way to explore complex and contingent causality in teacher education, in part because it accounts for both beliefs and larger contexts and structures” (p.110). In parallel, Byrne and Callaghan (2014) draw from Reed and Harvey (1992) to suggest that synthesizing complexity theory with critical realism is a productive strategy for (a) dealing with important issues in sociological theory, (b) relating macro- and microlevel realities in non-reductionist fashion and (c) taking part in the agency-structure debate equipped with a strong view of human agency which acknowledges humans’ capacity to exhibit causal efficacy within the social realm. As the multiple quotes above clearly demonstrate, parallels between realism and CDST abound, thus giving further conceptual justification for the emergence of, and the need for, a complex realist AL scholarship. In their realist approach to conceptualizing AL, Sealey and Carter (2004) refer on multiple occasions to CDST, stating that it provides a reliable means of “seeing” how language use and language change unfold over time, or as they put it, a means of visualizing the process of language change. They also present core tenets of CDST as analogous to a realist view of language, and are clear in their position that emergence and complexity are crucial to understanding social phenomena such as language and its real-world use. Indeed, and perhaps more importantly, Larsen-Freeman’s (2019: 67) states that “the dimensions of the structure constrain the actions that can be performed, and the actions that can be performed produce changes in the structure” finds a parallel in the realist

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argument regarding the stratified nature of social objects and processes and their causal interaction. Emergence not only posits these systems as complex, it also brings attention to their “edges,” or as the CDST thinker Cilliers (1998) puts it, the boundaries between complex systems. This can easily be phrased within realist terms thus: once we have identified the distinct and emergent properties of complex systems, we can then begin the task of exploring the causal links between them. CDST and social realism clearly share multiple conceptual elements and epistemological avenues. First and foremost, they are both invested in the study of the real/empirical, while valuing theory as an important tool in achieving this goal—i.e., making theory a practical element in research. Both perspectives also view social phenomena as relational, and reject accounts of causality as unmediated and binary. Furthermore, CDST and realism conceptualize time as crucial to accounting for causality and complexity (although they do so in different ways), and view emergence as an important mechanism which helps explain the complexity observable in the social realm. They also do not conceptualize increasing complexity as increasing messiness and disorder, for the social order remains an important social “fact” which can be explained (partly) by the existence of cyclical dynamics and the iteration of system components and their interaction. Both perspectives are also aligned with regards to the idea that complex open systems move in nonlinear fashion, which means that causality cannot be explained simply by moving back in time, or reversing the system back to its constituent parts. Irreversibility and non-linearity are essential conditions for selforganization. Finally, CDST and realism share the view that social mechanisms are not mechanistic but rather open and dynamic, interacting with other mechanisms to produce often unexpected outcomes. Perhaps the most explicit “bridging” of realism and CDST to date is provided by Byrne (1998), who draws extensively from the work of the critical realist thinker Roy Bhaskar. In much of his work, Byrne stresses the important collaboration between complexity theory and critical realism, not only with regards to the development of theoretical understanding but more specifically the development of complexityinformed methodological frameworks in the social and natural sciences.

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He identifies three important features of this collaboration: “a rejection of any notion of a hierarchy of methods in the description of social reality, a commitment to multiple qualitative and quantitative descriptions of complex system as they are, and an engagement through action research with active processes of change in complex systems” (Byrne, 2009: 2). His call for balancing both qualitative and quantitative descriptions in the social sciences comes with a further recommendation to use qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) (Ragin, 1987), which combines a comparative approach with the study of case. According to the author, these methodological choices are essentially aimed at revealing the centrality of path dependency in any account of causation in the social world. Byrne also provides constructive arguments regarding the need in social research to refrain from getting stuck in particularities, and to understand complex non-linear social realities through classifications. Arguably, Byrne’s complexity view offers a very clear link between CDST and Archer’s realist morphogenetic model: both bring attention to causality, consider reflexivity as central to accounts of causality, and explain a great deal how complex systems within the social realm evolve over time. There are, of course, important differences between realism and CDST, with perhaps the main one being that while realism offers a robust social ontology, CDST instead provides a way of thinking about social phenomena as complex. Slightly diverging understandings of emergence also point to important differences between the two. Emergence, from a CDST angle, is generally seen as a property of complex systems which exists only when systems are related to other systems. Arguably, this marked penchant towards interactionism renders the other often cited argument in CDST literature that complex systems evolve through self-organization rather problematic. A social realist view of emergence, on the other hand, adds that complex phenomena also possess properties which cannot be reduced to their relations with other phenomena. For example, a language learner can certainly be understood as a complex system from a realist standpoint, but can also be conceptualized as a person independent from the learning situation, for example, as a biological entity, as a friend, a stranger, an individual with complex psychological realities separate from his/her experience

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as a learner. All these aspects, however, are important to the making of that language learner, even if they may not necessarily depend on the complex network of relationships involved in any specific language learning situation. It is therefore conceptually reductive to present the language learner as a complex system which cannot exist on his/her own except only in relation to other language learners or outside the language learning situation. In this sense, realism is perhaps more explicit with regards to the centrality of emergence in accounts of causality, whereas within CDST emergence tends to be discussed mainly with reference to self-organization. Consequently, the integration of CDST within a realist ontology would involve greater emphasis on the notion that, while phenomena in the social realm are deeply related to other phenomena, they nevertheless retain distinct properties which cannot be explained exclusively as outcomes of those relations. This more refined perspective on emergence, which realism provides, is not burdened by the conceptual problems associated with relationism. Despite these occasional discrepancies, the theoretical and methodological possibilities resulting from the inclusion of CDST within a realist ontology are certainly worth careful consideration in the creation of a renewed AL scholarship. Fortunately, realism and CDST can also be understood not as finite and self-contained visions of the world but rather as open systems undergoing ongoing change. Indeed, another important link between realism and CDST is that they both favour transdisciplinarity. Reed and Harvey’s (1992) point regarding transdisciplinary interaction as potentially yielding fundamental metatheoretical ideas provides a strong impetus for concentrating future efforts in that direction. Lang et al., (2012: 25) see important practical ramifications for adopting this principle in contemporary social research, arguing that transdisciplinary research approaches “are often suggested as appropriate means to meet both the requirements posed by real-world problems as well as the goals of sustainability science as a transformational scientific field.” In their view, achieving social equality and sustainability, for example, necessitates the combination of essential knowledge from all disciplines related to specific problems under scrutiny, a complex process of negotiation which should, in principle, lead to the improvement of overall scientific knowledge and the development of emancipatory social

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practices. Greater engagement with transdisciplinarity by AL scholars is not, however, the only—or even the most important—improvement we can bring. As Weideman (2009: 63) argues, “the foundational framework that applied linguistics needs is not necessarily of an interdisciplinary […] or multidisciplinary kind, however, but is philosophical in nature.” Although in the Introduction I stated my preference for the term “social ontology” instead of “philosophy,” my view remains essentially aligned with Weideman’s. In closing, the integration of CDST within a realist social ontology in AL research necessitates a clear, complexity-informed, model for causality which places human reflexivity as a powerful force not only in the study of language-related phenomena but also in the study of social stability and change. Language learners live in a world where institutional education can be a force for emancipation and de-ideologization, while at the same time serving the purpose of ideological and social reproduction and the maintenance of the status quo (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990). Understanding why one manifestation of language education becomes more predominant in one context and not in another—or even why some learners manage to learn a language and develop communicative competence effectively while others do not—require analysis of underlying generative mechanisms, of structural and cultural constraints and enablements, and how they influence agentive movements on the ground (i.e., what teachers, learners, school administrators and policymakers actually say and do). More importantly, it also requires analysis of the different kinds of reflexive engagement demonstrated by individual and collective actors, influenced by different concerns and objectives, all within a contingent educational realm. These issues are, as I have argued throughout this book, best addressed from a realist ontology, enriched by CDST, to embrace the full complexity and contingent nature of social life. Of course, one can make the point that the existence of multiple theoretical paradigms—social interactionism, historical materialism, poststructuralism, structuration theory, realism, etc.—is beneficial to debate and progress in AL. Two arguments often made to justify this viewpoint is that different research questions often call for the use of different theoretical tools, and that we should remain critical of attempts at unifying

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all available theories into one single “grand narrative” which claims to explain all AL-related concerns. But as I have argued earlier in the book, while methodological pluralism is needed, this cannot be successfully achieved without verifying if their ontological bases are solid and aligned with each other. It is in part precisely because of this that conflationary viewpoints emerge. Although I am somewhat sceptical that a unified and comprehensive theory of AL can ever be produced, there is still in my view a particular direction the field needs to follow: that of a stratified, emergentist social ontology. For that, contemporary and future AL scholars should first move beyond successionism and interpretivism, towards a more organic system view of people, institutions, ideologies and of course language and language-related problems and projects. Part of the danger I am identifying here is that, given the transdisciplinary nature of AL research and the related practice of borrowing theories and concepts across fields, there is the possibility for an ongoing proliferation in AL of lower- and middle-range theories, or theories which deal with very specific issues while not informing our understanding of how these issues “come together” to reveal a broader and more complexity-sensitive picture of AL problems and phenomena in general, across ethnographic contexts. Given the sheer complexity of the task ahead, the present volume clearly provides an incomplete argument, in large part because of its rather conceptual quality and limited range of methodological recommendations for practitioners. Although I believe that a CDST-informed realist AL—as developed in this book, for example—has great potential, additional emphasis on the methodological ramifications of such change is indeed necessary, a challenge which I intend to approach in subsequent publications. This, however, does not diminish the value of AL the value of an AL scholarship “heavy with theory”, nor does it remove the need for greater conceptual and transdisciplinary engagement by AL scholars. Part of this shift should certainly involve questioning the reduction of AL to a mere practical matter, as is too often done in our field. Weideman (2007: 589) discusses the dangers of failing to engage with theory in AL research, warning that if

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new entrants into the discipline remain unaware of what has preceded their work, they may either uncritically accept current (usually postmodernist) definitions of the field, or, equally uncritically, fall victim to some of the ideological baggage that has historically come with the use of the term ’applied linguistics’. Both situations are undesirable, and restrict rather than open up and liberate any attempts at responsibly developing the discipline of applied linguistics.

Similar views have also been expressed by CDST adherents, including Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020), Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008) and Lowie (2013: 1811), who notes that many AL scholars working from a CDST perspective have argued that a new start must be made after a century of theory formation about language and language development. Even though both theory formation and empirical work can be expected to develop rapidly in this field, dynamic models of language cannot be developed overnight. Not only is theorizing needed, but also new research paradigms must be developed to investigate language perception and production within a continuity-of-mind framework.

Also of crucial importance in this endeavour is the task of determining which elements of AL research projects call for a CDST approach and which ones do not (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020). Related is the task of defining what—or more accurately who and what mechanism—lead to the emergence of the phenomena we study. Indeed, and as was pointed out on a few occasions in previous chapters, developing causal claims requires researchers to determine the distinct and emergent properties and powers of social entities/phenomena as complex systems, and this brings direct attention to the centrality of human reflexivity and the important role of underlying generative mechanisms in the production of AL phenomena. The possible—and I would argue necessary and eventual—integration of CDST within realism is a worthy project to engage in, that is, if our aim as AL scholars remains to produce novel and useful understandings of language and language-related phenomena as stratified and emergent social realities. Fulfilment of this goal would certainly go

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a long way towards securing a more robust position for AL within the social sciences.

References Bak, P. (1996). How nature works: The science of self-organized criticality. Springer-Verlag. Bourdieu, P., & Passeron, J. C. (1990). Reproduction in education, society and culture. SAGE. Byrne, D. (1998). Complexity theory and the social sciences. Routledge. Byrne, D. (2009). Working within a complexity frame of reference: The potential of ‘integrated methods’ for understanding transformation in a complex social system. CFSC Consortium’s paper for UNAIDS, 1–5. Byrne, D. (2011). What is an effect? Coming at causality backwards. In M. Williams & P. Vogt (Eds.), The sage handbook of methodological innovations (pp. 80–94). Sage Publications. Byrne, D. (2013). Evaluating complex social interventions in a complex world. Evaluation, 19 (3), 217–228. Byrne, D., & Callaghan, G. (2014). Complexity theory and the social sciences: The state of the art. Routledge. Byrne, D., & Uprichard, E. (2012). Useful complex causality. In H. Kincaid (Ed.), The oxford handbook of philosophy of social science (pp. 109–129). Oxford University Press. Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity & postmodernism: Understanding complex systems. Routledge. Cochran-Smith, M., Ell, F., Grudnoff, L., Ludlow, L., Haigh, M., & Hill, M. (2014). When complexity theory meets critical realism: A platform for research on initial teacher education. Teacher Education Quarterly, 41(1), 105–122. Gerrits, L., & Verweij, S. (2013). Critical realism as a meta-framework for understanding the relationships between complexity and qualitative comparative analysis. Journal of Critical Realism, 12(2), 166–182. Hiver, P. (2015). Attractor states. In Z. Dörnyei, P. D. MacIntyre, & A. Henry (Eds.), Motivational dynamics in language learning (pp. 20–28). Multilingual Matters.

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Hiver, P., & Al-Hoorie, A. H. (2020). Research methods for complexity theory in applied linguistics. Multilingual Matters. Juarrero, A. (1999). Dynamics in action: Intentional behavior as a complex system. MIT Press. Kincaid, H. (2012). Introduction: Doing philosophy of social science. In H. Kincaid (Ed.), The oxford handbook of philosophy of social science (pp. 3–17). Oxford University Press. Lang, D. J., Wiek, A., Bergmann, M., Stauffacher, M., Martens, P., Moll, P., Swilling, M., & Thomas, C. T. (2012). Transdisciplinary research in sustainability science: Practice, principles, and challenges. Sustainability Science, (Supplement 1), 25–43. Larsen-Freeman, D. (2019). On language learner agency: A complex dynamic systems theory perspective. The Modern Language Journal, 103, 61–79. Larsen-Freeman, D., & Cameron, L. (2008). Complex systems and applied linguistics. Oxford University Press. Layder, D. (1993). New strategies in social research. Polity Press. Lowie, W. (2013). Dynamic systems theory approaches to second language acquisition. In C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), The encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 1806–1813). Blackwell Publishing. Mercer, S. (2014). The self from a complexity perspective. In S. Mercer & M. Williams (Eds.), Multiple perspectives on the self in SLA (pp. 160–176). Multilingual Matters. Pawson, R. (2006). Evidence-based policy: A realist perspective. SAGE Publications. Ragin, C. C. (1987). The comparative method: Moving beyond qualitative and quantitative strategies. University of California Press. Reed, M., & Harvey, D. L. (1992). The new science and the old: Complexity and realism in the social sciences. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 22, 356–379. Sealey, A., & Carter, B. (2004). Applied linguistics as social science. Continuum. Semetsky, I. (2008). Re-reading Dewey through the lens of complexity science, or: On the creative logic of education. In M. Mason (Ed.), Complexity theory and the philosophy of education (pp. 79–90). Wiley-Blackwell. Weideman, A. (2007). The redefinition of applied linguistics: Modernist and postmodernist views. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies, 25–4, 589–605. Weideman, A. (2009). Uncharted territory: A complex systems approach as an emerging paradigm in applied linguistics. Per Linguam, 25 (1), 61–75. Williams, M. (2021). Realism and complexity in social science. Routledge.

Index

A

C

actual 187–189, 264, 348, 436 agency 3, 34, 41, 48, 55, 56, 61, 71, 73, 81, 101, 104, 105, 121, 129, 133, 135, 137, 147, 150, 153, 180, 225, 230, 231, 235, 236, 253, 263, 264, 289, 303, 312, 320, 322, 325, 328, 357, 358, 390, 413, 418, 434 applied linguistics (AL) 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, 16, 19, 20, 27–30, 38, 42, 53, 54, 81, 85, 129, 162, 256, 262, 273, 278, 286, 297, 299, 344, 346, 373, 377, 405, 429, 430, 435 attractor state 308, 309, 325, 394, 402, 437

causality 33, 40, 43, 47, 48, 50, 54, 159, 182, 200, 203, 205, 210, 219, 220, 262, 268, 270, 271, 297, 304, 312, 347, 359, 396, 402, 430, 431, 434, 435, 438, 439 complex dynamic system theory (CDST) 20, 297–299, 312, 320, 329, 336, 373, 375, 376, 378, 385, 395, 402, 404, 406, 411 complexity vs. complicatedness 10, 305 conflation central 153, 160, 194, 257, 357, 364, 380, 411 downward 194, 257, 411 upward 69, 257, 385

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3

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450

Index

constant conjunction 44, 47, 200, 205, 316 control parameter 309, 333, 437 corpus analysis 279, 290, 396, 400 correspondence theory of truth 19, 21, 139, 261, 274, 276, 380, 383 covering law model 53, 312, 316 critical discourse analysis (CDA) 55, 62, 118, 290–292 cultural system 73, 181, 185, 220, 226 culture 112, 162, 180, 221, 224, 226, 263, 430

temporal and synchronic 198, 199 empirical 31, 43, 51, 62, 68, 132, 187–189, 219, 255, 330, 388, 432, 436 empiricism 65, 66, 121, 190, 255, 318, 327, 410 ethnomethodology 123, 124, 126, 128

F

feedback loop 196, 206, 228, 303, 304, 308 free will 78, 104, 105, 230, 234, 323, 324

D

deductive-nomological model 54, 200 democratic peace 52, 204, 320 descriptive-causal generalizations 50, 52–54 dichotomization 16, 358, 360, 364, 410, 431 differentiation 358, 360, 364, 410 discourse 21, 32, 33, 55, 56, 58, 59, 63, 68, 76, 130, 132, 134, 185, 282, 291, 382, 416 double morphogenesis 206, 231, 237, 303

G

general complexity 305, 356, 404, 431

H

habitus 108, 157, 237, 240, 241 historical materialism 114, 118 homo economicus 230 homo sociologicus 145, 152, 230, 244

I E

education 7, 33, 43, 49, 80, 101, 161, 215, 264, 273, 276, 285, 329, 334, 353, 374, 379, 389, 411, 412, 435 emergence relational 307

interpretivism 31, 32, 55, 57, 58, 60, 62, 65, 66, 405 intersectionality 134, 332, 333 interview data 29, 43, 58, 61, 62, 64, 409

Index

K

knowledge 5, 20, 50, 85, 86, 97, 124, 125, 134, 136, 148, 158, 184, 226, 273, 274, 276, 277, 378, 379, 430

L

language 5, 10, 12, 17, 18, 29, 30, 32, 33, 45, 53, 55, 59–61, 72, 76, 79, 83, 109, 111, 118, 124, 132, 133, 138, 140, 141, 161, 164, 186, 187, 197, 226, 264, 265, 267, 275, 278–280, 282–285, 290, 301, 341, 376, 377, 385, 394, 407, 409, 419, 431, 435 langue 109–111, 282, 283, 407 lifeworld/system distinction 163, 164

M

morphogenesis 177, 229, 263, 304, 353, 393, 411 morphogenetic cycle 206, 228, 312, 315 morphostasis 177, 229, 263, 304, 309, 353, 411 motivation 6, 11, 18, 35–37, 213, 215, 259, 390, 392, 437 multiple determination 192

451

ontologically flattened view 58, 63, 68, 125, 281, 327, 391, 414

P

parole 109–111, 282, 283 phase shift 302, 311, 325 phenomenology 123 posthumanism 77, 78, 80, 81, 431 postmodernism 54, 57, 71, 129, 133, 382, 404, 415, 419 poststructuralism 32, 54, 57, 71, 77, 129, 133, 406, 415, 419

R

real 5, 33, 86, 125, 156, 185, 187–189, 193, 205, 219, 220, 290, 331, 388, 394, 397, 433, 436 realism complex 346, 359 critical 80, 115, 182, 191, 266, 318, 439 social 20, 21, 32, 205, 232, 288 reflexivity 28, 32, 34, 63, 82, 165, 181, 182, 230, 232, 233, 237, 244, 263, 270, 324, 325, 345, 416, 437 relationism 78, 321, 357, 391, 433 relativism 58, 67, 134, 147, 275, 382, 415, 433 restricted complexity 305, 404, 431

O

objective knowledge 12, 18, 58, 74, 76, 179, 183, 190, 209, 261, 282, 340, 349, 378, 380, 381, 415, 420, 430, 433

S

self-organization 297, 301, 307, 308, 313, 314, 317, 322, 328, 333, 351, 355, 386, 440

452

Index

social categories 34, 39, 40, 134, 420 social constructionism 32, 143, 147 social ontology 14, 48, 77, 99, 179, 319, 341, 405, 406, 429–431, 443, 444 social theory 9, 15, 19, 97, 99, 167, 168, 178, 322, 353, 404, 429, 436 Socio-Cultural Domain 226 sociolinguistics 3, 8, 11, 15, 18, 19, 28, 30, 48, 112, 148, 273, 283, 396 statistical analysis 45, 47, 49, 200, 262, 341, 349, 397, 402 stratified view 76, 88, 111, 148, 192, 206, 230, 278, 291, 327, 378, 408, 422 structural functionalism 105 structuration theory 149, 151 subjective knowledge 78, 127, 179, 381, 420

successionism 31, 32, 50, 65, 315 symbolic interactionism 119, 121, 122, 225

T

transdisciplinarity 3, 15, 21, 298, 336, 339, 420, 442 truth 50, 116, 121, 129, 142, 183, 185, 261, 273–276, 379, 380, 407, 439

U

underlying generative mechanism 238, 243, 350, 437

V

variable-based research 315 vexatious fact of society 95