Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics 9781009405416, 1009405411

Table of contents :
Cover
Half-title page
Title page
Copyright page
List of Figures
1 The Morphogenetic Approach and Its Trajectory: A First-Person Account by the Author
At the Start
Resisting the Three Forms of Conflation
Reflexivity as Mediating Social Forms
Part I Culture
2 When Culture Is Marginalized
Article Abstract
Structure in Relation to Culture
3 Critical Realists Do Debate Culture
Article Abstract
Introduction
Archer
Elder-Vass
Archer
Elder-Vass
Archer
Elder-Vass
Archer
Archer
Postscript: Analysing Culture and Its Relations to SAC
4 Should Concepts of Culture Give More Prominence to Critical Discourse Analysis?
Article Abstract
Introduction
Collaboration at the Micro, Meso and Macro Levels
The Micro Level
The Meso or Organizational Level
The Macro Level (Institutional Interrelations)
Cultural Conditioning (CS)
Socio-Cultural (S-C) Interaction
Cultural Elaboration
Conclusion
Structure and Agency
Agency
Part II Structure
5 Misrepresenting SAC as Dualism
Article Abstract
Introduction
Kemp’s Denial of Any Separation between Subject and Object
The Parody of ‘Realist Dualism’
The Structured Context Anathematized
Interests Don’t Stand Alone
Agential Concerns and Their Attempts to Forge a Modus Vivendi
How Concerns Evade Constraints – at a Price
Contextual Continuity Can Trump Enablements to Social Mobility
Conclusion
6 The Majority of Agents Are the Dead: Implications for Central Conflation
Article Abstract
Introduction
The Dismissal of Temporality by Piiroinen
Why History Will Not Go Away: The Patrimony of the Dead
Objective Interests
Opportunity Costs
Situational Logic of Action
Agents’ Personal Powers: Their Mediatory Implications
Presentism and Sociological Populism
7 Can Structuration and Morphogenesis Be Compatible?
Article Abstract
Introduction
Rob Stones’s Commentary and Arguments for Compatibility
Temporality
Structural Conditioning – Inside or Outside the Agent
Six Problematics for Practical Social Analysis
(1) Investigating the Causal Process over Time in Terms of an Unfolding Process of Interaction between Structure and Agency
(2) Investigating the Distribution of Structural Options Available to Agents at Any One Time
(3) Investigating the Durability of Particular Structures Whether Defined as SEPs (Structural Emergent Properties) (as in Archer’s work), as ‘Virtual’ Structures (as in Giddens’s Work) or as a Combination of Both
(4) Investigating the Necessary Internal Relations of Structures (SEPs), such as Landlord–Tenant Relations
(5) Investigating the Apparent Compatibilities and/or Incompatibilities between Structures in Terms of Their Situational Logics
(6) Investigating the Conjunctural, Hermeneutically Informed Relations between Social and Systems Integration
Conclusion
Part III Agency
8 Enter the Passive Agent
Article Abstract
Introduction
Conditions for the ‘Generalized Other’ to Govern Socialization in Modernity
Second-Hand Dispositions instead of First-Person Concerns
Agency without Personal Concerns
The Role of Empirical Work
9 Agents as Individuals and Dispositions as Plural
Article Abstract
Introduction
On Dispositions
On Socialization
On the Social Contexts of Action
On Concerns
‘Indeterminate Determinism’
Conclusion
10 Two Types of Agency, But Are They Not Related?
Article Abstract
Introduction
Unpacking the ‘Black Box’ of Agency
Sources of Structural Constraints?
Sources of Agential Freedoms?
Actions and Modes of Reflexivity?
Conclusion: Bringing Together Type 1 and Type 2 of Agency

Citation preview

MORPHOGENESIS ANSWERS ITS CRITICS MARGARET S. ARCHER

Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics

Margaret S. Archer was a leading social theorist who was highly influential in the development of Critical Realism. Her work cov­ ered many strands of realist social theory including what has become known as the M/M (morphogenetic/morphostatic) approach. Morphogenesis refers to social processes that amplify deviations from a given social form or state (positive feedback) and morphostasis to ones that restore or reproduce these characteristics through negative feedback. The M/M approach is intended to be of practical and interdisciplinary use in the analysis of stability and change at all levels of the social order. It differs from approaches by popular theorists such as Anthony ­Giddens, Ulrich Beck and Pierre Bourdieu, who conflated ‘structure and agency’ by conceptualizing them as ‘mutually constitutive’. In this book ­Professor Archer defends her explanatory framework through a series of responses to critics of her work and presents her reflections on debates surrounding it. Margaret S. Archer was Emeritus Professor in the Department of ­Sociology at the University of Warwick. She founded the Centre for ­Social Ontology at the Swiss Federal University, Lausanne, was the first woman President of the International Sociological Association and was appointed by Pope Francis (2014) as President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Science. In April 2023, she was awarded the British Sociological Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She wrote or edited 40 books and 95 articles and chapters including The Social Origins of Educational Systems (1979), Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge, 1995), Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory (Cambridge, 1996), Being Human: The Problem of Agency (Cambridge, 2000), Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility (Cambridge, 2007), The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity (Cambridge, 2012) and The Relational Subject (with Pierpaolo Donati, Cambridge, 2015).

Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics Margaret S. Archer University of Warwick

Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8EA, United Kingdom One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, NY 10006, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia 314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre, New Delhi – 110025, India 103 Penang Road, #05–06/07, Visioncrest Commercial, Singapore 238467 Cambridge University Press is part of Cambridge University Press & Assessment, a department of the University of Cambridge. We share the University’s mission to contribute to society through the pursuit of education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence. www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781009405416 DOI: 10.1017/9781009405430 © Margaret S. Archer 2024 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press & Assessment. First published 2024 A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Archer, Margaret S. (Margaret Scotford), author. Title: Morphogenesis answers its critics / Margaret S. Archer. Description: 1 Edition. | New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023013977 (print) | LCCN 2023013978 (ebook) | ISBN 9781009405416 (hardback) | ISBN 9781009405430 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Critical realism. | Critical discourse analysis. | Social change. | Morphogenesis. | Philosophy, Modern. Classification: LCC B835 .A66 2024 (print) | LCC B835 (ebook) | DDC 149/.2–dc23/eng/20230530 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023013977 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023013978 ISBN 978-1-009-40541-6 Hardback Cambridge University Press & Assessment has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Contents

List of Figurespage vii 1 The Morphogenetic Approach and Its Trajectory: A First-Person Account by the Author

1

Part I  Culture 2 When Culture Is Marginalized

25

(Featuring Geoffrey M. Hodgson, 1999, ‘Structures and Institutions: Reflections on Institutionalism, Structuration Theory and Critical Realism’, unpublished article)

3 Critical Realists Do Debate Culture (Featuring Margaret S. Archer and Dave Elder-Vass, 2012,

46

‘Cultural System or Norm Circles? An Exchange’, European Journal of Social Theory, 15:1, 93–115)

4 Should Concepts of Culture Give More Prominence to Critical Discourse Analysis?

76

(Featuring Jack Newman, 2020, ‘Critical Realism, Critical Discourse Analysis and the Morphogenetic Approach’, Journal of Critical Realism, 20:5, 433–55)

Part II  Structure 5 Misrepresenting SAC as Dualism

6 The Majority of Agents Are the Dead: Implications for Central Conflation

101

(Featuring Stephen Kemp, 2012, ‘Interests and Structure in Dualist Social Theory: A Critical Appraisal of Archer’s Theoretical and Empirical Arguments’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 42:4, 489–510)

122

(Featuring Tero Piiroinen, 2014, ‘For “Central Conflation”: A Critique of Archerian Dualism’, Sociological Theory, 32:2, 79–99)

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Contents

7 Can Structuration and Morphogenesis Be Compatible?

142

(Featuring Rob Stones, 2001, ‘Refusing the Realism–Structuration Divide’, European Journal of Social Theory, 4:2, 177–97)

Part III  Agency 8 Enter the Passive Agent

9 Agents as Individuals and Dispositions as Plural

183

(Featuring Bernard Lahire, 2003, ‘From the Habitus to an Individual Heritage of Dispositions: Towards a Sociology at the Level of the Individual’, Poetics, 31:5–6, 329–55)

10 Two Types of Agency, But Are They Not Related?

165

(Featuring Ana Caetano, 2015, ‘Defining Personal Reflexivity: A Critical Reading of Archer’s Approach’, European Journal of Social Theory, 18:1, 60–75)

(Featuring Colin Campbell, 2009, ‘Distinguishing the Power of Agency from Agentic Power: A Note on Weber and the “Black Box” of Personal Agency’, Sociological Theory, 27:4, 407–18)

200

Figures

1.1 Illustrative use of the Morphogenetic Approach in the book; source: Margaret S. Archer, Social Origins of Educational Systems, 1979, London, Sage, p. 616 page 7 2.1 Educational interaction in the centralized system; source: Margaret S. Archer, Social Origins of Educational Systems, 1979, London, Sage 38 2.2 Educational interaction in decentralized systems; source: Margaret S. Archer, Social Origins of Educational Systems, 1979, London, Sage 38 3.1 Relationships between the Cultural System and the Socio-Cultural; source: Margaret S. Archer, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, 2nd Edition © Cambridge University Press 1996, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission 51 3.2 Cultural Morphogenesis; source: Margaret S. Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach © Cambridge University Press 1995, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission 53 4.1 The two cultural levels and their different internal relationships; source: Margaret S. Archer, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, 2nd Edition © Cambridge University Press 1996, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission 86 4.2 Cultural Morphogenesis and its intrinsic temporality; source: Margaret S. Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach © Cambridge University Press 1995, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission 86 vii

viii

List of Figures

4.3 Cultural System: types of logical relations; source: Margaret S. Archer, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, 2nd Edition © Cambridge University Press 1996, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission 4.4 Combinations of Cultural Systems integration and Socio-Cultural integration: their consequences for morphogenesis and morphostasis; source: Margaret S. Archer, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, 2nd Edition © Cambridge University Press 1996, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission 6.1 The limited time span incorporated by conflationary theories compared with the Morphogenetic Approach; source: Margaret S. Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach © Cambridge University Press 1995, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission 6.2 The temporal development of the agent; source: Margaret S. Archer, Being Human: The Problem of Agency © Margaret S. Archer 2000, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission 7.1 Systemic integration of culture or structure; source: Margaret S. Archer, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, 2nd Edition © Cambridge University Press 1996, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission 8.1 Process without system (in Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu); source: Margaret S. Archer, 1983, ‘Process without System’, European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 24:1, 196–221. © Archives Européennes de Sociologie 1983, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission 8.2 Conditions for the ‘generalized other’ to govern socialization in modernity; source: Margaret S. Archer, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity © Margaret S. Archer 2012, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission

89

95

125

136

157

168

169

List of Figures

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8.3 The Two-Stage Model 177 8.4 The Three-Stage Model 178 9.1 Types of knowledge and the three orders of natural reality; source: Margaret S. Archer, 2010, ‘Routine, Reflexivity and Realism’, Sociological Theory, 28:3, 272–303, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9558.2010.01375.x 189 9.2 People on fixed incomes; photograph: CREATISTA / iStock / Getty Images Plus 197 10.1 Power differences and the morphogenesis of codified rules; source: I. Al-Amoudi, 2016, ‘In Letter and in Spirit: Social Morphogenesis and the Interpretation of Codified Social Rules’, in Margaret S. Archer (ed.), Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity, 2016, published by Springer, reproduced with permission. 206 10.2 The basic morphogenetic sequence; source: Margaret S. Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach © Cambridge University Press 1995, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission 207 10.3 Dominant modes of reflexivity; source: Margaret S. Archer, Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility © Margaret S. Archer 2007, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission 218 10.4 Dominant modes of reflexivity and quality of family relations; source: Margaret S. Archer, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity © Margaret S. Archer 2012, published by Cambridge University Press, reproduced with permission 218

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The Morphogenetic Approach and Its Trajectory: A First-Person Account by the Author

Society is like nothing but itself. It does not resemble any of the analogues to which it has historically been likened: the mechanism, the organism, the cybernetic system, or language. It has no pre-set form or goals. What form it does assume and what goals are pursued arise from the doings of human agents – singular, aggregate or collective – although this ‘shape’ very rarely conforms to the aims, objectives and desiderata of any particular group. The shaping of the social order and each of its constitutive institutions and cultural complexes is the product of compromise, concession, unintended consequences and contingency – it is morphogenetic. Morphogenesis refers to those processes that amplify deviations from a given form or state (through positive feedback) and morphostasis to those that are structure-restoring or -reproducing (through negative feedback).1 Morphogenesis itself is also one possible form taken by the social order, which becomes more marked the further early types of societies are left behind, though the generic process owes nothing to evolution. The Morphogenetic Approach is the explanatory framework that I have developed over forty years to account for this substantive process of transformation. As an explanatory framework, the Morphogenetic Approach is intended to be of practical and interdisciplinary use for the analysis of stability and change at all levels – micro-, meso- and macroscopic – of the social order. It should not be held to be a ‘theory’ for it does not purport to explain anything.2 Instead, it is meant to be of assistance to those who do have a his chapter is an updated version of Margaret S. Archer, 2007, ‘The Trajectory of T the Morphogenetic Approach: An Account in the First-Person’, Sociologia: Problemas e Práticas, 54, pp. 35–47. 1 W. Buckley, 1967, Sociology and Modern Systems Theory, Englewood Cliffs, N.J., Prentice Hall, pp. 58–9. 2 Douglas V. Porpora, 2013, ‘Morphogenesis and Social Change’, in Margaret S. Archer (ed.), Social Morphogenesis, Dordrecht, Springer, p. 26: ‘the morphogenetic approach does not explain anything in particular, [it] identifies the ingredients of any explanation of social change, namely structure, culture and agency and the generic form of their interrelation … as a meta-theory the morphogenetic approach explains nothing. On the

1

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The Morphogenetic Approach and Its Trajectory

clear research question by helping them to go about answering it. Therefore, I have no objection to it being assigned to ‘methodology’. Half a century ago, ‘theory and methods’ went together and were the mainstay of undergraduate social science degrees and doctoral courses. Indeed, their linkage was important in underwriting the hegemony of empiricism. Interestingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it still dominates in the public presentation of medical research findings across the media and in discussions of public policies (as distinct from how the research itself was conceptualized, which necessarily was not based upon constant conjunctions). Depressingly, many of the field trials (as reported) relied upon correlation coefficients in their many variants. More generally, young academic contributors to The Conversation have been drilled into adding the mantra ‘but a correlation is not a statement of causality’. However, it takes more than a slogan to displace an ingrained social ontology because replacing it is immediately at issue. This is relevant because it was precisely the position I found myself in when writing Social Origins of Educational Systems in the late 1960s.3 In 2012, after the Centre for Critical Realism had generously recommended its re-publication as a ‘Realist Classic’, I was mentally resistant to retaining the original introductory chapter replete with its ontological half-insights (e.g. on emergent properties and powers but also on institutional contradictions and complementarities). Thanks to an overall reliance on the generosity of various ‘methodological collectivists’, including David Lockwood, Ernest Gellner,4 Walter Buckley, Alvin Gouldner and Shumel Eisenstadt, I did keep it, just as a public reminder of how hard theoretical work was when the two dominant forms of social ontology were methodological individualism and holism. All the same, I wrote a second Introduction to the new edition, specifying the difference a Critical Realist ontology had made. Nevertheless, there are two sentences I particularly like from the original: ‘however complex our final formulations turn out to be, education is fundamentally about what people have wanted of it and have been able to do to it’; and ‘Secondly, and for the present purposes much more importantly, our theories will be about the educational activities of people even through they will not explain educational development strictly in terms of people alone.’5 other hand, I will argue, the morphogenetic approach identifies the inescapable form that every effective account of social change must take when fully explicated.’ 3 Margaret S. Archer, 1979, Social Origins of Educational Systems, London, Sage. 4 Times have changed. Even then, I was amazed to receive seventeen single-spaced typed pages of a legal pad from Professor Gellner (yes, that was how I addressed and thought of him, whilst I was ‘Miss Archer’) to an early draft of the first chapters. 5 Archer, Social Origins of Educational Systems, p. 2.

The Morphogenetic Approach and Its Trajectory

3

However, in the last two decades of the twentieth century and most markedly in the humanities, the balance shifted dramatically from assigning excessive authority to the author to according the reader exclusive interpretative authority. This can be epitomized as placing the author in the Derridian hors-texte which, for all his later equivocations, never involved a restoration of authorial privileges. From this perspective, authors were seen as loosing texts on the public and, in so doing, their personal intentionality was transformed into a conduit for social forces: that is, subordinate to expressions of their class position, symptomatic of their engendered standpoint, or subsumed into that ill-defined but capacious portmanteau, the hegemonic discourse. With the author now ‘shut up’ and ‘shut out’, the text itself supposedly became the property of the demos (let a thousand interpretations bloom without questions about their legitimacy because ‘correctness’, ‘accuracy’ and ‘substantiation’ were the tainted currency of modernity). Yet, as we well know, proceedings were far from being democratic, let alone approaching the Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation’ or the Gadamerian ‘fusion of horizons’. Instead, rhetorical persuasion ruled, where the rules of the game were Feyerabend’s ‘anything goes’. Undoubtedly, excessive claims had been made in the past for firstperson epistemic authority, including that of the author – infallibility (Descartes), omniscience (Hume), indubitability (Hamilton) and incorrigibility (Ayer). Nevertheless, it is possible to defend authorial authority without making any such claims and thus to preclude textual understanding from becoming an exercise conducted wholly in the third-person. The defence is a matter of ontology, which is prior to any epistemological question of sharing or of third-person interpretation. Conscious states, such as those involved in an author developing a theory, can only exist from the point of view of the subject who is experiencing those thoughts. In other words, the intention in writing a book has what John Searle6 terms a first-person ontology. This means intentions have a subjective mode of existence, which is also the case for desires, feelings, fantasies etc. That is, only as experienced by a particular subject does a particular thought exist. Just as there are no such things as disembodied pains, there are no such things as thoughts that are independent of subjectivity. Both pains and thoughts are first-person-dependent for their existence. However, you might object that, whilst I cannot share my toothache with you, what am I currently doing (in writing) but sharing my thoughts with you? In fact, I do not agree that it is possible to share my thoughts 6

John Searle, 1999, Mind, Language and Society, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, pp. 43f.

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The Morphogenetic Approach and Its Trajectory

with you. Instead, what I am doing is sharing my ideas with you, as Popperian World 3 objects,7 ones that will become even more permanently part of World 3 once they are published. What I cannot share with you is something William James captured very well, the reflexive monitoring that is going on here and now as my thoughts are turned into the complete sentences that you will read several months hence. Internally, I am engaged in self-monitoring activities, which are an inextricable part of my thoughts, such as mundanely checking that a singular subject is accompanied by a singular verb or distilling an insight into words that seem to capture it adequately. This ontological point has far-reaching implications. Quite simply and very radically, it means that we cannot have a sociology exclusively in the third-person; one in which the subject’s first-person subjectivity is ignored. That is as true for any author as it is for any respondent in a sociological inquiry. The subjective ontology of thought(s) has epistemological consequences, one of which concerns the nature of epistemic sharing possible between an author and his or her readers. Without making any of the excessive claims mentioned above, I can still claim self-warranted authority in the firstperson because my thoughts are known directly to me and only indirectly, through fallible interpretation, to a third-person commentator. Following Patrick Alston, ‘I enjoy self-warrant whenever I truly believe I am thinking x; ipso facto, I am justified in claiming to know my state of belief, even if that state of belief turns out to be untrue.’8 Thus, I may be wrong in my beliefs concerning my authorial intentions but not about them. Moreover, those are the beliefs upon which I acted in conceiving of the Morphogenetic Approach, reflexively deliberating on how best to explore it, and determining the form and sequence of books in which to present it. Being human – and therefore fallible – I admit to irritation when reviewers exercise a dictatorship of the third-person. In the first-person I have warrant to know and say what I was trying to do in proceeding from (a) to (b) to (c) and only I can know that I still have (d) in mind. Of course, that trajectory (sequence of books) may be ill-conceived or even misguided, as each and every reader has the right to judge it, but that is not the same thing as claiming to know my thoughts better than I do or substituting their interpretations for my intentions. Since self-warrant is something I claim and defend for every (normal) human subject in his or her intentional acts, it is ‘only human’ that I do object when a 7

Karl Popper, 1972, ‘On the Theory of the Objective Mind’, in Popper, Objective Knowledge, Clarendon Press, Oxford, pp. 153–90. 8 Patrick Alston, 1971, ‘Varieties of Privileged Access’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 8:3, 236.

The Morphogenetic Approach and Its Trajectory

5

reviewer asserts that I have ‘been blind to the interpersonal’ (in early works), have ‘forgotten about structure and culture’ (in later works) or have now ‘become absorbed in the intrapersonal’ (as if this will be the case in future works). However, none of the above deprives (third-person) critics and commentators of a generous role within the context of discovery and not merely one confined to the context of justification. For example, they may know more about the formation of my intentions (and particularly their context) than I was aware of myself; they might accurately fault the (sociological) beliefs that grounded my project; and it is highly probable that they would be able to design a more economical trajectory for its development. That is one of the points and benefits of third-person critique. All I am seeking is acceptance of my self-warrant to explain the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of the actual trajectory taken. This, the author alone can give because in reality and in real time the development of an explanatory programme is not pre-defined from the start. Rather, each book sets the problems to be tackled in its successor(s) and thus inscribes the next section of the pathway, without one having any clear idea about how many more sections will be required before reaching that rather indefinite goal, the ‘finished project’. Of course, the account furnished is a reflexive personal judgement, which is necessarily fallible. All social theorizing takes off from a springboard that is itself theoretical. That springboard is akin to what Gouldner called the ‘domain assumptions’ we make and to Merton’s image of our clambering on the shoulders of giants. Rather than labouring all of this in personal terms, I think it suffices to say that the philosophical under-labouring supplied by Critical Realism provides the backcloth for all my works, except for the first – whose aporias the realist philosophy of social science filled in. These commonalities between Critical Realism and the Morphogenetic Approach can be summarized as (i) promoting relationality (namely that sociology’s very claim to existence derives from the fact that its key concepts are relational in kind, often referring to emergent yet irreducible properties capable of exercising causal powers); (ii) that the historical configurations and courses taken by social structures are morphogenetic in nature (conforming to none of the traditional analogies – mechanical, organic, linguistic or cybernetic – but being shaped and re-shaped by the interplay between their constituents, parts and persons, thus meaning that society is open-ended and not ‘finalistic’ in its elaboration); (iii) that the Wertrationalität is crucial to the sociological enterprise if it is to serve a humanizing cause. This exceeds an abstracted defence of humanism (which reduces to ideology) and advances an image of the social commensurate with human thriving. It is central to society’s members, who

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The Morphogenetic Approach and Its Trajectory

should never be seen as mere exponents of instrumental rationality, as is the case for homo sociologicus and his siblings; to social institutions, which are both sources and bearers of value orientations; and to social theorists themselves who, far from celebrating the death of man, the de-centring of the subject or the dissolution of the human person into uncommitted and socially non-committal acts of self-reinvention, should uphold the needs and potentials of human beings. Indeed, such human concerns define value relevance for sociology itself.

At the Start

From the start, each book set the problems to be tackled by its successor and thus defined the next section of the pathway without my having any clear idea about how many more sections would be required before reaching that rather indefinite goal, the ‘completed project’. Of course, the account furnished is a reflexive personal judgement, which is necessarily fallible. Re-reading its 800-plus pages9 I realized that every key element of the M/M approach was already there and replete with practical illustrations that have been used ever since. Please have a glance at Figure 1.1, which appeared in the first edition of the book and already depicts two full morphogenetic cycles. All social theorizing takes off from a springboard that is itself theoretical. That springboard is what Gouldner called one’s ‘domain assumptions’. It also entails what Merton termed ‘clambering on the shoulders of giants’. Rather than labouring all of this in personal terms, I think it suffices to say that Critical Realism provided the philosophical backcloth for all my works except this first one. In a nutshell, the commonalities between Critical Realism, as a philosophy of science, and the Morphogenetic Approach, as a theoretical approach within sociology, can be summarized in the following three points: (i) that relationality is central (sociology’s very claim to existence derives from the fact that its key concepts are relational in kind, often referring to emergent yet irreducible properties and powers); (ii) that the configurations and courses taken by social structures are morphogenetic in nature, being shaped and re-shaped by the interplay between their constituent parts and persons. Thus the social order is open-ended and not ‘finalistic’ in its elaboration over time; (iii) that the sociological enterprise is evaluative (emancipatory) if it is to serve a humanizing cause. It follows that society’s members should 9

For the purpose of undergraduate study, an abridged version was published as a University Edition by Sage in 1984.

The Morphogenetic Approach and Its Trajectory GENERAL CHANGES

Private Enterprise

Competitive Conflict

Emergence of Educational Systems

Substitution COMPARATIVE CHANGES

Ownership Mono-Intergration and Subordination

Multiply Integrated State Systems Restriction

THEORETICAL PHASES

Structural Conditioning

Educational Interaction

Structural Elaboration

Public Systems

Processes of Negotiation

Decentralized Systems

External Transactions Incremental Internal Initiation Pattern Political Manipulation

Centralized Systems

Political Manipulation

Stop– Go Pattern

Structural Conditioning

Educational Interaction

Structural Elaboration

CYCLE I

CHAPTER NUMBERS

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

7 Patterns of Change

CYCLE 2

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapters 6 and 7

Chapter 8

Figure 1.1.  Illustrative use of the Morphogenetic Approach in the book

never be seen as mere exponents of instrumental rationality, as is the case for homo economicus and his siblings; it applies to social institutions, which are both sources and bearers of value orientations; it requires of social theorists themselves that they should uphold the needs and potentials of human beings, rather than celebrating the death of man, the de-centring of the subject or the dissolution of the human person into uncommitted acts of self-reinvention. In Social Origins of Educational Systems (1979), the Morphogenetic Approach can be found not only outlined but already put to work. That is, working at disengaging where State Educational Systems came from and what new causal powers they exerted after their elaboration. Crucially, the emergent systems differed according to their centralized or decentralized organizational structures. This raised a major philosophical problem. It was being claimed that educational systems possessed properties emergent from the relations between their parts – summarized as centralization and decentralization – that exercised causal powers. However, these two properties could not be attributes of people, who cannot be centralized or decentralized, just as no system can possess the reflexivity, intentionality and commitment of the agents whose actions first produced and then continuously sustained these forms of state education.

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The Morphogenetic Approach and Its Trajectory

The issue was immediately assimilated by leading social theorists to ‘the problem of structure and agency’, although this is only part of a broader problem about whether or not sociology needs to endorse a stratified social ontology. This kind of ontology entails that the properties and powers pertaining to a ‘higher’ stratum are dependent upon relations at a ‘lower’ stratum, whilst the former are irreducible to the latter. Its direct implication is that the ‘problem of structure and agency’ cannot be solved (or, as some put it, ‘be transcended’) by eliding the two into an amalgam, through holding them to be mutually constitutive.10 It is also why the ‘problem of structure and agency’, as part of a broader ontological issue, cannot be dismissed as ‘tiresome’ or ‘old fashioned’. This problem consists in what Dahrendorf rightly called ‘the vexatious fact of society’: we the people shape it, whilst it re-shapes us as we go about changing it, individually and collectively, a process I term the ‘Double Morphogenesis’. The problem does not vanish because we become vexed by it and tried to turn our backs upon it. Yet, its intransigence does explain why many social theorists were indeed experiencing vexation, at the end of the 1970s. They did so precisely because existing philosophies of social science could not articulate a stratified ontology of society. Instead, they proffered only reductionist approaches – methodological individualism and methodological holism/collectivism – as unsatisfactory in principle as they were unhelpful in practice. Hence my next pair of books, on culture and structure respectively – Culture and Agency (1988)11 and Realist Social Theory (1995)12 – had two aims: to develop a stratified social ontology along the lines of transcendental realism (Bhaskar’s seminal Possibility of Naturalism was also published in 1979)13 and then to advance this in the form of a framework that was of practical use to those working on substantive sociological problems. Hence, the Morphogenetic Approach acquired its full philosophical underpinnings. These account for the mature morphogenetic framework standing in contradistinction to any form of social theory that endorsed the conflation of structure and agency or, more properly structure, culture and agency: ‘upward conflation’ (methodological

10

Margaret S. Archer, 1982, ‘Morphogenesis versus Structuration: On Combining Structure and Action’, British Journal of Sociology, 33:4, 456–83 (reprinted in British Journal of Sociology, 2010, 61 (special issue), 225–52). 11 Margaret S. Archer, 1988, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; translated into Spanish, Italian and Polish. 12 Margaret S. Archer, 1995, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; also published as 1997, La morfogenesi della società, Milan, FrancoAngeli. There are also Japanese and Spanish translations. 13 Roy Bhaskar, 1989 [1979], 2nd ed., The Possibility of Naturalism, London, Routledge.

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individualism), ‘downward conflation’ (methodological holism, whether Marxist or functionalist in orientation) and ‘central conflation’ (the then fashionable structuration theory of Giddens).

Resisting the Three Forms of Conflation

In their introductory chapters, both books announced their principled resistance to conflationary theorizing. Yet why promote the term ‘conflation’ rather than adhering to the old terminology of ‘determinism’? Had I been writing a little earlier when the problem was conceived in terms of ‘the individual versus society’ this would not have been necessary. Sociological theorists then divided quite neatly into those subscribing to ‘downward reduction’ in which social structure basically worked ‘down’ to shape the individuals falling within its ambit; as in vulgar Marxist accounts based on materialism or Parsonian normative functionalism grounded in the idealism of the central value system. Conversely, methodological individualists endorsed a social ontology in which the ultimate constituents of society were individual people and the task was to explain how their combinations (generally meaning no more than aggregation) worked ‘upwards’ to shape the contours of the social order. Therefore, both these types of conflation also entailed epiphenomenalism; the determined element was fundamentally held to be passive (being formed rather than in any way being formative) and lacking in any causal powers to make a difference, being ‘dependent variables’. However, the problem was that there were not just two but three ways of endorsing conflation – not merely upwards or downwards but in the middle. For decades epiphenomenalism had exercised some of the best philosophers of social science because the supposedly inert and determined element repeatedly gave testimony of not merely being interconnected with the independent variable, the determining side of the divide (this was after all what they were maintaining), but rather that there was an interplay between them, impossible unless causal properties and powers were granted to both.14 What I called ‘central conflation’, namely Giddens’s ‘third way’, claimed to transcend the dualism between structure and agency by replacing it with duality in which the two were considered mutually constitutive and thus necessarily linked. The core notion that agents could not act without drawing on structural properties whose own existence depended upon their instantiation by agents  – structure being presented as the ‘medium and outcome of practices’ – proved 14

This problem is discussed in detail in Archer, Realist Social Theory, ch. 2.

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extremely popular amongst social scientists in the 1980s and 1990s, but I think I have written enough against this approach to avoid repetition here.15 My attraction to Critical Realism was for its advocacy of a stratified social ontology that eschewed conflation by accentuating the importance of emergent properties at the levels of both structure and agency, but held these causal powers to be distinct from and irreducible to one another. Thus, please forget all those invented biographies according to which I ‘fell under the influence’ of Roy Bhaskar, who always detested being portrayed as a ‘guru’. On the contrary, I read a lot of CR publications in the 1980s and finally met and became friends with Roy in the early 1990s, a friendship that continued until his death.16 What made this an egalitarian relationship was that Roy fully embraced the role of being the ‘philosophical under-labourer’ for CR, despite many rebuffs from Britain’s more stolid Departments of Philosophy. Reciprocally, my own interests were in developing useful and useable social theory, where there was plenty to do. In formal terms, the traction provided by the stratified social ontology and its recognition of emergent properties was the following: Properties and powers of some strata are anterior to those of others precisely because the latter emerge from the former over time, for emergence takes time since it derives from interaction and its consequences which necessarily occur in time [my italics].17

Nevertheless, as I had realized in the 1980s, Critical Realism had as yet no conception of culture and was also simply better at conceptualizing ‘structure’ than ‘agency’. Nonetheless, it saluted the existence of both. To me, the supreme theoretical contribution of CR was the insistence that all social action took place in a structural context (it was structurally dependent) as there is no such thing as contextless action, 15

Against Giddens’s structuration Archer, Culture and Agency, ch. 4; Archer, Realist Social Theory, chs. 3 and 4. 16 What is relevant here is that he did thank me for saving him from the seductions of structuration theory, maintaining that social processes are indeed ‘phasic to the core. This is a feature which, as Margaret Archer has convincingly demonstrated, distinguishes it from structuration, or more generally from any “central conflation”, theory’: Roy Bhaskar, 1993, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, London and New York, Verso, p. 160. See also Roy Bhaskar, 2020, ‘Critical Realism and the Ontology of Persons’, Journal of Critical Realism, 19:2, 116: ‘as my critical realist colleague, Margaret Archer ([Realist Social Theory] 1995), pointed out time and tense are intrinsic to the TMSA, but not to structuration theory. Thus, structure always pre-exists any round of human agency and the heavy weight of the presence of the past precludes any voluntarism.’ 17 Archer, Realist Social Theory, p. 14.

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in which actors and agents needed some idea of what they were doing (concept-dependence), and intentional agents (agential-dependence) without whom nothing would happen. However, this very welcome social ontology set as many problems as it solved for the working social scientist.18 Specifically, ‘culture’ remained the poor relation in terms of its conceptualization. Yet culture is structured too and to incorporate it into the M/M approach required that it be viewed as articulated in different ways rather than accepting the homogeneous notion inherited from anthropology that it consisted of shared beliefs, norms and practices common to all members of any ‘society’ from the tribe onwards.19 That was the main theoretical challenge of Culture and Agency: to remove it from Cinderella status by working on the distinction between the ‘Cultural System’ level at any given place and period (distinguishing its internal contradictions and complementarities) and the ‘Socio-Cultural’ level (where different groups drew upon components of the CS to advance or defend their objective interests against others pursuing incompatible ends). What this announced – though not too many appreciated its implications, the exception being Doug Porpora – was that time was up for the binary ‘structure and agency problem’. The problematic theoretical issue had become triadic. This derives directly from taking the three points of the CR manifesto seriously: that for any process to capture the generative process of social stability and change it needs to include structured social relations (context-dependence), human ideas (concept-dependence) and human actions (activity-dependence). Thus, I coined an acronym in 2013, namely that any adequate theory about the social order has to come in a SAC, incorporating structure, agency and culture.20 ‘The problem in hand will govern which of the three is accorded most attention and the acronym SAC is thus not a rank ordering of priority between the three elements. This is a logical point; if some things are deemed indispensable to something else, it makes no sense to ask if one is more indispensable than the other(s).’21 Nevertheless, to conflate culture and structure is no solution to theorizing the interplay among the triadic elements. 18

The Morphogenetic Approach was such a mouthful that many colleagues began using the abbreviation, the M/M framework (morphogenetic/morphostatic), which I have employed in this book. 19 Margaret S. Archer, 1985, ‘The Myth of Cultural Integration’, British Journal of Sociology, 36:3, 333–53. 20 Margaret S. Archer (ed.), 2013, Social Morphogenesis, Dordrecht, Springer, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. 21 Archer, Culture and Agency, pp. 4–5.

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Continuing the theme of what the realist social ontology leaves social scientists to fill in, we come to the constitution of agency itself. CR concentrated upon agents mainly as responsible for introducing social transformation or perpetuating social reproduction, all structures being continuously activity-dependent. Realism had too little to say about ‘persons’: about who they were in their rich but concrete singularity and about what moved them to act, be this individual or collective action. This aporia in realism proved particularly dangerous at a time when social theory welcomed that vacuum. Sociological imperialism had gathered strength and, especially in the form of Social Constructionism, presented the ‘person’ exclusively as society’s gift: in Rom Harré’s words, persons were ‘cultural artefacts’.22 Hence, Being Human (2000)23 was not a turn away from structure and culture. It was a turn towards the reconceptualization of human beings, people who were inescapably born into a social context ‘not of their making or choosing’ and ineluctably confronted cultural structures in most of their doings – two different kinds of structures that Culture and Agency argued should not be taken to be homologous, much less homogeneous, throughout the course of history. Being Human could fairly be called a polemical book. It sought to resist sociological imperialism and its representation of persons as remorselessly and exhaustively social. Instead, it began by emphasizing that constituted as human beings are and the world being the way it is, interaction between the two is a matter of necessity. This means that each and every one of us has to develop a (working) relationship with every order of natural reality: nature, practice and the social. Distinctions between the Natural, Practical and Social Orders are real, although it is usually the case that they can only be grasped analytically because they are subject to considerable empirical superimposition (as with the artificial swimming pool, its instructor and the swimmer-to-be with his/her hopes and fears). Nevertheless, that does not preclude the fact that human subjects confront dilemmas, which are different in kind, when encountering each of the three orders. Neither does it diminish the imperative for human survival to establish sustainable and sustaining relations with each. Nor is it incompatible with the fact that human beings, characterized by what Charles Taylor24 calls the ‘significance feature’, invest more 22

Rom Harré, 1982, Personal Being, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, p. 20. 23 Margaret S. Archer, 2000, Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; also available in Italian: Essere umani. Il problema dell’agire, 2007, Genoa and Milan, Marietti. 24 Charles Taylor, 1982, ‘Consciousness’, in Paul F. Secord (ed.), Explaining Human Behaviour: Consciousness, Human Action and Social Structure, London, Sage, pp. 35–51.

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of themselves in one order than in others – even though this must mean the subordination rather than the exclusion of other orders. In other words, we all have concerns in every sphere of natural reality but we prioritize our concerns – loving ‘in due order’, to use St Augustine’s words.25 Indeed, it is precisely our particular constellation of concerns that defines each of us as a particular person, with strict personal identity. In short, ‘who we are is what we care about’.26 And the greatest of these concerns, in relation to our personal thriving and for explaining in which social roles we invest ourselves (thus acquiring social identities), are our ‘ultimate concerns’. However, even our ‘ultimate concerns’, those which we care about most, do not automatically define courses of action for us. Each person has to engage in practical reasoning about ‘what is to be done’ in order that his or her life promotes their ‘ultimate concern’ but also accommodates their other concerns, which cannot be repudiated. In short, they have to work out a modus vivendi, commensurate with their values but also sustainable as a lived reality. As social beings we have to find a place for ourselves in society – ideally, one which is expressive of who we are by virtue of the roles we actively personify27 rather than executing their requirements robotically. In trying to find such a place, persons necessarily confront structural and cultural properties as constraints and enablements, as vested or objective interests, as motivating or discouraging influences – ‘thrown’ as they are into their natal contexts and venturing as they do (and have to) into further contexts beyond family bounds.

Reflexivity as Mediating Social Forms

That is the link between Being Human and the following book, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (2003).28 Being Human is the pivotal work. It ‘descends’ to the personal level in order to conceptualize unique human persons – the ultimate moving agents of all that is social, though not the only ‘powerful particulars’ constituting society. Thereafter, the theoretical trajectory begins its re-ascent into the social world of positions, roles, organizations, institutions and, eventually, the global social system. 25

See Andrew Collier, 1999, Being and Worth, London, Routledge, ch. 5. 26 Harry Frankfurt, 1988, The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ch. 7, ‘The Importance of What We Care About’. 27 This concept was developed by Martin Hollis, 1977, Models of Man: Philosophical Thoughts on Social Action, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 28 Margaret S. Archer, 2003, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; also available in Italian: 2006, La conversazione interiore, Gardolo, Erickson.

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The social order is different in kind from its component members. On that we can all agree, even if it is conceptualized by some as being no more than the aggregate effect of people’s conceptions and doings. The crucial difference is that no social system or social organization truly possesses self-awareness, whereas every single (normal) member of society is a self-conscious being. Thus, however differently the social maybe be conceptualized in various schools of thought – from an objective and emergent stratum of reality to a negotiated and objectified social construct – the social remains different from its component members in this crucial respect of lacking self-consciousness. It follows that a central problem for social theorists must be to provide an answer to the question ‘What difference does the self-awareness of its members make to the nature of the social?’ Historically, the answers given have varied from ‘all the difference’, as the response shared by idealists, to ‘no difference at all’, as the reply of hard-line materialists. Today, although the variety of answers has increased, the question remains intransigent but cannot be evaded. For example, Social Constructionists cannot dodge the issue by regarding all societal features as products of ‘objectification’ by its members. This is because each and every person can mentally deliberate about what is currently objectified in relation to himself or herself (in principle they can ask the reflexive question, ‘Should I take this for granted?’). Conversely, no objectified ‘entity’ can be reflexive about itself in relation to individuals (it can never, as it were, ask ‘Could this construct be presented more convincingly?’). The unavoidability of this issue means that the argument about ‘objectivity and subjectivity’ is as fundamental as the argument about ‘collectivism and individualism’. Not only are these two issues of equal importance but also they are closely intertwined. The ‘problem of structure and agency’ has a great deal in common with the ‘problem of objectivity and subjectivity’. Both raise the same issue about the relationship between their component terms, which entails questioning their respective causal powers. Once we have started to talk about causal powers, it is impossible to avoid talking about the ontological status of those things to which causal powers are attributed or from which they are withheld. However, again a popular response to these two recalcitrant problems was the (conflationary) suggestion that we should transcend both of them by the simple manoeuvre of treating them as the two faces of a single coin. Transcending the divide rests upon conceptualizing ‘cultures’ and ‘agents’ as ontologically inseparable because each enters into the other’s constitution. Therefore, they should be conceptualized as one mutually constitutive amalgam. In a single leap-frog move, all the previous

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difficulties can be left behind. This manoeuvre has direct implications for the question of ‘objectivity and subjectivity’. If ‘agency’ and ‘culture’ are conceptualized as being inseparable because they are held to be mutually constitutive, then this blurring of subject and object necessarily challenges the very possibility of reflexivity itself. If the two are an amalgam, it is difficult to see how a person or a group is able to reflect critically or creatively upon their social conditions or context. Conversely, by upholding the distinction between objectivism and subjectivism we can acknowledge that agents do indeed reflexively examine their personal concerns in the light of their social circumstances and evaluate their circumstances in the light of their concerns. Only if agents are sufficiently distinct from their social contexts can they reflect upon them as subject to object. They do so by deliberating subjectively, under their own descriptions, about what courses of action to take in the face of constraints and enablements; about the value to them of defending or promoting vested interests; about their willingness to pay the opportunity costs entailed in aspiring to various goals; and about whether or not circumstances allow them to become more ambitious in their life-politics or induce them to be more circumspect. This is what Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation is about, namely conceptualizing the interplay between personal subjective properties and powers, and objective social properties and powers. Specifically, it is argued that personal reflexivity mediates the effects of objective social forms upon us. It gives an answer to the question ‘How does structure influence agency?’ Bhaskar had rightly insisted that ‘the causal power of social forms is mediated through human agency’,29 although he did not unpack what constituted mediation. My contribution was to propose that reflexivity performs this mediatory role by virtue of the fact that we deliberate about ourselves in relation to the social situations that we confront, certainly fallibly, certainly incompletely and necessarily under our own descriptions, because that is the only way we can know anything. To consider human reflexivity playing that role of mediation also means entertaining the fact that we are dealing with two ontologies: the objective pertaining to social emergent properties and the subjective pertaining to agential emergent properties. What is entailed by the above is that subjectivity is not only (a) real, but also (b) irreducible, and (c) that it possesses causal efficacy.30 29

Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, p. 26. 30 Margaret S. Archer, 2007, ‘The Ontological Status of Subjectivity: The Missing Link between Structure and Agency’, in Clive Lawson, John Latsis and Nuno Martins (eds.), Contributions to Social Ontology, Abingdon, Routledge, pp. 17–31.

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However, some have contested ‘mediation’ itself and the role assigned to it in agents’ variable responses to their cultural and structural contexts. Yet without allowing for the personal powers of actors and agents, it is impossible to explain the variability of their action in the same circumstances. Nevertheless, Manicas asks ‘Why postulate the existence of structure or culture as causally relevant if, to be causally effective, these must be mediated by social actors?’31 Since he leaves the question there, it can be presumed that he holds it to be unanswerable. However, culture and structure could only be held causally irrelevant if what was being mediated was held to be invented then and there by actors whose personal powers were entirely responsible for it. This ‘ban’ upon ‘mediation’ is just as untenable as holding that the outside wires bringing electricity to my house are entirely responsible for the working of my electrical appliances and that the existence of the national grid is causally irrelevant. This reflects a Giddensian instantiation of cultural properties by agents before they are allowed any place in explanation; far from impinging upon agents, it is human subjects who bring them into play. Much the same can be said of John Searle’s notion of ‘the Background’ which agents voluntaristically draw into an account to disambiguate statements that require contextualization. Similarly, Manicas relegates cultural and structural properties to being ‘materials at hand’, without the capacity to exert causal powers, but also without any explanation of why some of these are within easy reach of certain actors but out of reach for others.32 It is probably helpful to specify what kinds of subjective properties and powers are presented as constitutive of the internal conversation as a mediatory process. I have termed it this way (like Peirce) to designate the manner in which we reflexively make our way through the world. This inner dialogue about ourselves in relation to society and vice versa is what makes (most of us) ‘active agents’, people who can exercise some governance in their own lives, as opposed to ‘passive agents’ to whom things merely happen. Being an ‘active agent’ hinges on the fact that individuals develop and define their ‘ultimate concerns’ – those that matter to them most – and whose precise constellation makes for their concrete singularity as persons. No one can have an ultimate concern without doing something about it. Instead, each subject seeks to develop a course (or courses) of 31

Peter T. Manicas, 2006, A Realist Philosophy of Social Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 72. 32 Ibid., p. 75. I first advanced this argument in Margaret S. Archer, 2011, ‘Morphogenesis: Realism’s Explanatory Framework’, in Andrea M. Maccarini, Emmamuele Morandi and Ricardo Prandini (eds.), Sociological Realism, Abingdon, Routledge, pp. 59–94.

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action to realize that concern by elaborating a ‘project’, in the (fallible) belief that to accomplish the project is to realize one’s concern. If such courses of action are successful, which can never be taken for granted, each person’s constellation of concerns, when dovetailed together, becomes translated into a set of established practices. This constitutes their personal modus vivendi. Through this modus vivendi, subjects live out their personal concerns within society as best they can. In shorthand, these components can be summarized in the formula . There is nothing idealistic here, because ‘concerns’ can be ignoble, ‘projects’ illegal and ‘practices’ illegitimate. These are the kinds of mental activity that make up the strange reality of reflexivity, as part of broader human subjectivity. To accept reflexive activities as real and influential entails the endorsement of plural ontologies. In principle, this should not be a problem. The reality of what I have called the ‘internal conversation’ (also known as ‘self-talk’, ‘rumination’, ‘musement’, ‘inner dialogue’, ‘internal speech’, ‘intrapersonal communication’ etc.) does not mean that when we deliberate, when we formulate our intentions, when we design our courses of action or when we dedicate ourselves to concerns, such mental activities are like chairs or trees. Yet, this has nothing to do with whether or not they are real because reality itself is not homogeneous. The whole of natural reality cannot be confined to and defined in terms of the Enlightenment notion of ‘matter in motion’. Indeed, in post-positivistic science, physical reality is made up as much by quarks and genomes as it is by magnetism and gravity or by rocks and plants. Abandonment of that Enlightenment assumption paves the way to the acceptance of plural ontologies. It is now more than fifty years since Popper distinguished his Three Worlds as ontologically distinct subworlds: the world of physical states, the world of mental states and the world of objective ideas. What is important about this for the present argument is that Popper put his finger on the genuine oddity about World 2, the world of mental states, namely that it is objectively real and yet it has a subjective ontology, as John Searle was later to agree. What the internal conversation describes is how and why each and every person deliberates reflexively, in their own fallible terms, about their personal concerns in relation to their social context and about their contexts in the light of their concerns.33 In the process, they are shaping 33

I define reflexivity as ‘the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their [social] context and vice versa’: Margaret S. Archer, 2007, Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 4.

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themselves and contributing to (re-)shaping the social world. The process of reflexivity is not seen as one homogeneous mode of inner deliberation but as exercised through different modalities – ‘Communicative’, ‘Autonomous’ and ‘Meta-Reflexivity’ – whose dominance for particular persons derives from their relationship to their natal context in conjunction with their personal concerns. The above exploratory notions were ventured in Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation on the basis of interviewing a mere twenty subjects picked only for their social diversity. A larger sample (of 174) was then traced systematically in the book Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility (2007). As generative mechanisms, different dominant modes of reflexivity have internal consequences for their practitioners and distinctive external consequences for the social order. Internally, the connections were traced between practice of the different modalities and individual patterns of social mobility by interviewing subjects about their life histories: Communicative Reflexivity is associated with maintaining social immobility, Autonomous reflexivity with pursuing upward social mobility, and Meta-Reflexivity with a restless social volatility. Externally, the effects are that the Communicatives make a huge contribution to social stability and integration by their evasion of constraints and enablements, through endorsing their natal contexts, seeking to replicate them, and through actively constituting a dense micro-world that reconstitutes their ‘contextual continuity’ and projects it forward in time. Overall, that makes their contribution to the social order one of morphostasis. Conversely, Autonomous subjects act strategically, seeking to avoid society’s ‘snakes’ and to ride up its ‘ladders’, thus augmenting the ‘contextual discontinuity’ which went into their own making and increasing social productivity through their energetic exertions. Meta-reflexives are society’s subversive agents, immune to both the bonuses associated with social ‘enablements’ and the penalties linked to ‘constraints’, thus resisting the main engines of social guidance/control through their willingness to pay the price of subversion themselves. In turn, through living out the ‘contextual incongruity’ that formed them, their consistent endorsement of a ‘vocation’ meant that their main contribution was to ensure that counter-cultural values retained their salience in the social order, at precisely the time when the global hegemony of capitalism seemed unassailable. In brief, the practitioners of Autonomous and Meta-Reflexivity as their dominant mode are the agents promoting morphogenesis, as opposed to endorsing ‘business as usual’. We should, however, resist treating this as a typology. It is not because we all employ all modes, probably every day, depending upon the skills

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we command and the situational demands we confront. To stress this I gave an invented example of someone unused to toothache and unacquainted with dentistry who practised all four reflexive modes before agreeing to the extraction of the tooth.34 One of my fears when working on this trilogy was that I would open an in-flight magazine at a page titled ‘Discover your own mentality’. The Reflexive Imperative (2012) goes further, to maintain that millennial change is increasingly re-shaping and distancing the social order from the parameters of modernity. The global creation and geographical redistribution of new opportunities (almost occluded by the then current, unilateral preoccupation with risk in society), coupled with migration, increasing education, and the proliferation of novel skills, re-bound upon the nature of reflexivity itself. These prompt a shift away from the ‘Communicative’ mode, buttressing the aspirations and practices of times past, because social reproduction becomes just as reflexive an enterprise as those that promote yet further transformations – and one that is harder to realize. Together these changes swell the ranks of those practising the ‘autonomous’ mode, propitious to the new global Leviathans: transnational bureaucracy and multinational enterprises. Most important of all, nascent globalization disproportionately increases ‘Meta-Reflexivity’, practitioners of which can also be seen as patrons of a new civil society expressive of humanistic values. However, the shift towards the ‘socio-logic of opportunity’, which prompts this intensification of reflexivity and change in its dominant modes, also claims an increased proportion of victims: those experiencing the distress and disorientation of ‘Fractured’ reflexivity. This is because the new logic of opportunity demands the continuous revision of personal projects, involving the successful monitoring of self, society and relations between them, and denies the establishment of an unchanging modus vivendi. In other words, the imperative to be reflexive intensifies with the demise of routine action35 – a decline that becomes precipitous once (partial) morphostasis gives way to the untramelled morphogenesis characterizing the shift towards one global system in the new ­millennium – or so it was argued in The Reflexive Imperative.36 However, this trio of books on intrapersonal deliberations about society will still leave the morphogenetic project unfinished. They will have dealt with the aggregate effects of the dialectic between changing human 34

Margaret S. Archer, 2012, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 12. 35 Margaret S. Archer, 2010, ‘Routine, Reflexivity and Realism’, Sociological Theory, 28:3, 272–303. 36 See also Margaret S. Archer (ed.), 2010, Conversations about Reflexivity, London, Routledge.

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subjectivity and the objective transformation of society alone – if ­modernity gives way to untrammelled morphogenesis and its generative mechanism, namely for variety to produce yet more variety. Yet, it is imperative that such aggregate effects be connected to the collective action of groups and their consequences as Corporate agents. The two need to be interlinked, precisely because, unlike Ulrich Beck, I do not consider that the social structure of the future diminishes to ‘institutionalized individualism’ and neither do I accept, as Zygmunt Bauman argues, that ‘liquidity’ is displacing structuring – much less that it can pretend to represent the form of trans-modern society. There never is an unstructured social world and there never is a (normal) human person without reflexively defined projects. Even that is not quite ‘The End’. Globalization undoubtedly accompanies the millennial transformation of the social order, but it is not its generative mechanism. The leitmotif of contemporary commentators is to accentuate that ‘flows’ have replaced ‘structures’. In so doing, Critical Realists would regard this as an observation (and extrapolation) confined to the empirical level. What it crucially omits are the new structures generating the detectable flows at a deeper ontological level. If the new millennium has truly begun to sever its links with modernity, including all those adjectives (post-, late, high, second-wave, as well as the ubiquitous ‘beyond’) that merely signal adhesion to it, then we need to identify what is generating a true disjunction. This was explicitly examined in the research project From Modernity to the Morphogenetic Society?, as an historically unique époque in which morphostatic and morphogenetic cycles no longer circulate simultaneously, with the former restraining the latter and protracting variants upon the themes of modernity. It is the project for which I was appointed to found the Centre for Social Ontology (CSO) at the Swiss Federal University in Lausanne (EPFL) in 2010. Since then, our group of collaborators37 have produced a book-a-year on ‘Social Morphogenesis’ addressing the above question mark. But still, five volumes later,38 we did not feel justified in 37

These have included, in addition to myself, Ismael Al-Amoudi (Grenoble, Ecole de Management; organizational theory); Mark Carrigan (Cambridge; digital sociology); Pierpaolo Donati (Bologna; sociology); Philip Gorski (Yale; sociology); Gazi Islam (Grenoble, Ecole de Management; business ethics); Tony Lawson (Cambridge; economics and philosophy); Emmanuel Lazega (Paris, SciencesPo; organizational sociology/network theory); Andrea Maccarini (Padua; sociology and education); Jamie Morgan (Leeds Beckett; economics); Doug Porpora (Philadelphia, Drexel; anthropology and communication); and Colin Wight (Sydney; international relations). 38 Margaret S. Archer (ed.), 2017, Social Morphogenesis and Human Flourishing, Dordrecht, Springer; Archer (ed.), 2016, Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity, Dordrecht, Springer; Archer (ed.), 2015, Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order, Dordrecht, Springer; Archer (ed.), 2014, Late Modernity: Trajectories towards Morphogenic Society, Dordrecht, Springer; Archer (ed.), Social Morphogenesis.

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21

announcing the advent of a new social formation – three years before the contingent occurrence of the current pandemic. Had we concluded otherwise, that could indeed have been ventured as the end of the trajectory whose course I have been describing here. The CSO moved to the Université de Grenoble Alpes in 2018, where Ismael Al-Amoudi took over as Director. Our writers’ collective wanted to stay together because of our enjoyable productivity (which continued with four books on human essentialism and artificial intelligence). However, we are all currently in our internationally varied versions of lockdown. The likelihood is that, rather than adding to the expected avalanche of books on the pandemic, we will seek to theorize the various manifestations and impacts of a concept that Critical Realism has always acknowledged, but said very little about, namely the unpredictable interventions of contingency in the historical panorama of societal change. And if we do go down this road, it may only be to anticipate Armageddon a little ahead of our fellow global citizens. Then we would not be confronting morphostasis or morphogenesis but facing morphonecrosis.39

39

Ismael Al-Amoudi and John Latsis, 2015, ‘Death Contested: Morphonecrosis and Conflicts of Interpretation’, in Archer (ed.), Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order, pp. 231–48.

Part I

Culture

To those undergraduates studying the social sciences in the 1960s, ‘culture’  and ‘society’ were used interchangeably, especially in American textbooks. Effectively, the view that ‘culture was everything social’ constituted a heritage from anthropology and was therefore the obverse of its elimination. The former lingers on in reduced form in frequent references to ‘the ­culture of the firm’ or to ‘that of the family’ and any association in between. Only social theorists who reject this synonym confront the need to define the concept and that means most schools of thought these days (though very few journalists). Apart from agreement that ‘culture’ and ‘society’ are not interchangeable terms, there is no consensus. Although many would agree that the three SAC elements are interdependent and interrelated, they differ about how closely ‘culture’ should be conceptualized as associated with ‘structure’ or with ‘agency’. Obviously, this in turn affects how social change and stability (morphogenesis and morphostasis) are theorized and the relative importance assigned to culture. From my own stance all three elements have specific properties and powers and thus, on the Critical Realist criterion, are ontologically real and cannot be conflated with the other two elements without distortion. The fact that all three interpenetrate and are mutually influential (though not in any fixed proportions) has nothing to do with the legitimacy of conflation.1 As Douglas Porpora puts it, ‘for two things to interrelate causally, they must be ontologically distinct. It is that ontological distinctness of culture and agency that first marks Archer’s CR view.’2 In the rest of his excellent chapter 6, titled ‘What and Where

1

See Margaret S. Archer, 1988, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ‘Part I: Rejecting Culture Conflation’, chs. 2, 3 and 4, pp. 25–100. 2 Douglas V. Porpora, 2015, Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 159.

23

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Part I  Culture

Is Culture?’, he underlines that realists cannot evade the need to conceptualize ‘culture’ clearly and as distinct from the older battle lines between interpretation and explanation championed by Isaac Reed.3

3

Isaac Reed, 2008, ‘Justifying Sociological Knowledge: From Realism to Interpretation’, Sociological Theory, 26:2, 101–29; Reed, 2011, Interpretation and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the Social Sciences, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

2

When Culture Is Marginalized Featuring Geoffrey M. Hodgson, 1999, ‘Structures and Institutions: Reflections on Institutionalism, Structuration Theory and Critical Realism’, unpublished article1

ARTICLE ABSTRACT

This essay compares the structuration of Anthony Giddens, the Critical Realism of Roy Bhaskar and the ‘old’ institutional economics (or institutionalism) of Thorstein Veblen and John Commons. Structuration theory does not share with institutionalism and Critical Realism the notion of the temporal priority of structure over an individual. It is accepted here that institutionalism does not have a sufficiently elaborated concept of social structure. However, a specific concept of social structure, described as an institution, does indeed pervade the writings of Veblen and Commons. An institution is best understood as a special type of social structure with the potential to change agents, including changes to their purposes or preferences. This notion of reconstitutive downward causation pervades institutionalism but it is not developed within Critical Realism or structuration theory. Consequently, although it is not elaborated adequately, institutionalism involves an even stronger implicit conception of social structure than Critical Realism. Furthermore, Critical Realism involves an untenable causal dualism that is inconsistent with modern psychology and evolutionary biology. Institutionalism can benefit from its engagement with Critical Realism, just as the reverse is also held to be true. However, apart from agreement that ‘culture’ and ‘society’ are not interchangeable terms, there is no consensus amongst social theorists. Although many would agree that the three SAC elements are interdependent and interrelated, they differ about how closely ‘culture’ should be conceptualized as associated with ‘structure’ or with ‘agency’. ­Obviously, this in turn affects how social change and 1

Page numbers given in parentheses in this chapter refer to this unpublished article. Much of the material from this article was later incorporated in Geoffrey M. Hodgson, 2004, The Evolution of Institutional Economics: Agency, Structure and Darwinism in American Institutionalism, London and New York, Routledge.

25

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stability (morphogenesis and morphostasis) are theorized and the ­relative ­importance assigned to culture. Finding social theorists who abrogate SAC is not difficult. This extended paper by Geoffrey Hodgson represents a counter-manifesto written when John Searle and I were invited to debate at the University of Hertfordshire the following year. Hodgson not only focuses on my explanatory M/M approach but also links this to his general critique of Critical Realism’s social ontology. However, it is a considerate article in not seeking to entangle us overmuch in economic theory. All the same it is polemical in constantly counterposing Thorstein Veblen and John Commons, held to be superior in all respects to CR theorists. Although I am grateful to the attention given to us, his opponents, it should be mentioned that Hodgson addresses only one of my books (Realist Social Theory).2 As a final introductory comment, Hodgson regularly uses the concept of ‘institutions’ in the plural and holds them to be the ‘highest’ form of societal organization. Thus, it is curious that inter-institutional relations never feature in his work. For example, how could any command economy even be described without reference to the interlinkage between the central polity and the economy? I will return to this issue but will begin by focusing upon three main points in Hodgson’s paper that specifically concern culture. First, he downplays culture as a social phenomenon, which is always structured and in constant interplay with the other key elements constitutive of SAC. As such, culture cannot be reduced to ‘everyday’ beliefs and behaviour, of ourselves, our parents or their predecessors in an inversion of Habermas’s ‘lifeworld’ and ‘system’. Secondly, since culture is devalued, then by corollary the conceptualization of the other two constituents s(tructure) and a(gency) are inflated in importance as they have to take up the (ideational) slack. This accounts for why M/M theorists would also find that it is not only culture but also structure and agency that are deficient in conceptualization and why the discussion of Critical Realism is basically distorted. Thirdly, the end result is to preclude any account of macroscopic social change, which is effectively taken out of the domain of the social sciences and handed over to evolutionary biology (assisted by psychiatry). 2

Margaret S. Archer, 1995, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

When Culture Is Marginalized

27

Given that in American theorizing the terms ‘culture’ and ‘society’ continued to be used interchangeably until the last decades of the twentieth century, thanks to the heritage of anthropology,3 one cannot help but ask from what source Hodgson derived such confidence in his derogation of culture. The answer was Latin American in the form of the philosopher of science, Mario Bunge, who is cited favourably throughout his text. In his well-known book Causality (1963), Bunge produced two statements excluding culture and promoting technological determinism. On the one hand, he refers to historical invariants in the social order, asserting that ‘one such invariant is the ultimate or long-run predominance of material (biological and economic) conditions over spiritual culture’.4 (It seems clear that the adjective ‘spiritual’ merely registers his consistent opposition to Platonic idealism.) Immediately following this, he claims that a ‘by now quite obvious, sociohistorical law statement is the one according to which deep changes in the mode of production, such as the renewal or reorganization of technical equipment, in the long run elicit the renewal of the social structure – or at least render such an adjustment of social relations desirable to a section of society, which accordingly attempts to modify the prevailing social organization’.5 Such marxisante economism is hard to reconcile with his proposition, a few pages later, that ‘the main source of social change is the (pacific or warlike) clash of material and cultural interests’.6 What can ‘cultural interests’ be if they are given the capacity to clash with material ones, despite their subordination above? In subsequent articles Bunge maintains both his economism and his derogation of culture which are significant in his definition of generative mechanisms, namely ‘mechanisms are processes in concrete (material) systems’.7 In other words, they have nothing to do with culture. Colin Wight called this ‘materialism gone too far’.8 However, Bunge held to his materialism, adding Popper’s World 3 to his resolute opposition to Platonic idealism, whose ghostly notions populate the world

3

Margaret S. Archer, 1985, ‘The Myth of Cultural Integration’, British Journal of Sociology, 36:3, 333–53. 4 Mario Bunge, 1963, Causality, Cleveland and New York, Meridian Books, p. 269. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid., p. 275. 7 M. Bunge, 2004, ‘How Does It Work: The Search for Explanatory Mechanisms’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34:3, 191. 8 Colin Wight, ‘Theorizing the Mechanisms of Conceptual and Semiotic Space’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34:2, 283–299.

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and social ontology with ‘ideas as well as concrete things – without explaining, though, how immaterial items could possibly interact with material ones’.9 Such an ‘impossibility’ is hard to understand given that social theorists (and their users) often discuss the interaction between theory and practice, and any engagement with social policy requires this of them. They disagree about how this interlinkage takes place, but not that it occurs. However, from this argument, Hodgson seems to have concluded with Bunge that ‘there are no such things as ‘cultural mechanisms’.10 Why is this persuasive to both theorists? Bunge agrees that any social system is a complex object whose parts and components are held together by bonds of some kind. These bonds ‘are logical in the case of a conceptual system, such as a theory, and they are material in the case of a concrete system, such as a family or a hospital’.11 Hence, a belief, theory or ideology can be bonded to another ideationally, but not help to bond a social organization. Why do the logical relations between ideas (say, ones of contradiction and complementarity) not constitute ‘cultural mechanisms’ (for example, when two sets of opposed ideas are advanced to legitimate or challenge the same social form)? Because, he claims, ‘there are no mechanisms in the signs considered in themselves, apart from their users’ (my italics).12 Yet, do logical relations not have a causal role in social bonding (for what Church or research centre could be without a credo of cultural convictions)? In which case what prevents these from operating as mechanisms? Seemingly, the answer lies in the phrase ‘apart from their users’, which conflates culture’s meanings with agency’s interpretations, and the latter exist only in people’s heads. In themselves wouldn’t the same caveat to attach to material resources: land, minerals, plants and animals? (A cultivated field could not become wasteland or ‘common’ ground just by a community thinking of it as such. They would have to do something and that would likely meet with opposition from the current cultivator, who usually would justify his practice and thus meet with the ideas of those intent on undermining it.) Yet, Bunge approvingly cites Merlin Donald who deems ideational texts to be the ‘external storage system’ of every literate culture, and Bunge states ‘[w]e make use of this storage every time we read a text 9 M. Bunge, 2004, ‘Clarifying Some Misunderstandings about Social Systems and Their Mechanisms’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 34:3, 378. 10 Bunge, ‘How Does It Work’, 191–2. 11 Ibid., 188. 12 Ibid.

When Culture Is Marginalized

29

or listen to a radio programme’.13 I agree. Unless people resort to the Universal Digital Archive (as I term it), books etc. simply gather dust. That is very different, however, from denying that when agents do resort to them and use them, agential assent or assertion plunge them into the contradictions and complementarities that logically exist between different corpuses of ideas. Durkheim gave an important example of the causal power exercised by a cultural contradiction when discussing Christianity and classicism ‘in the development of the peoples of Europe’;14 the root of this constraining contradiction was that Christianity’s ‘origins were Graeco-Latin and it could not but remain more or less faithful to its origins. It had acquired its form and organization in the Roman world, the Latin language was its language, it was thoroughly impregnated with Roman civilization.’15 In turn this confronted the Church with ‘a contradiction against which it has fought for centuries without ever achieving a resolution’.16 This quotation illustrates my main point, which is not that ‘ideas exist on their own’ in Plato’s mythical domain, but that human artefacts such as books, unlike marks left on stone by weather or erosion, retain their humanly inscribed intelligibility regardless of whether any contemporary knowing subject consults them or is even aware of their existence. Instead, Bunge maintains that in society ‘it is only through their materiality that they [ideas] can have an effect on concrete systems such as schools and armies’,17 presumably through books and manuals. However, it is not the physical object (binding and pages) that exerts this influence; qua material book it could have an effect only if thrown at the pupil or tripped over by a cadet, but not culturally. Bunge maintains that ‘conceptual and semiotic systems have compositions, environments and structures but no mechanisms. The reason is that changeability (or energy) is the defining property of matter.’18 13 M. Donald, 1991, ‘Precis of Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition’, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16:4, 737–48; Bunge, ‘Clarifying Some Misunderstandings’, 372. 14 Maurice Halbwach’s ‘Introduction’ in Emile Durkheim, 1977, The Evolution of Educational Thought, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. xiii and 278. See also Archer, Culture and Agency, ‘Contradictions and Complementarities in the Cultural System’. 15 Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought, p. 21. 16 This citation continues that ‘in the literary and artistic monuments of Antiquity there lived and breathed the very same pagan spirit which the Church had set itself the task of destroying’: ibid., p. 22. 17 Bunge, ‘Clarifying Some Misunderstandings’, 374. 18 Bunge, ‘How Does It Work’, 191–2 (my italics).

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However, difficulties arise when Hodgson then turns to his heritage in economic theory, where his leading lights are Thorstein Veblen and John Commons. Both of these ‘old’ institutionalists advance accounts of social change, which admittedly make infrequent reference to ‘culture’ but nonetheless incorporate it prominently under concepts that usually are regarded as components of it rather than synonyms for it. But the original stress placed by these two economic theorists upon ‘habits’, ‘routine’ and ‘routinization’ are hard to separate from it and the roles assigned to them in the processes of macroscopic social change. ‘Habit’ is the sole guise in which culture is allowed to play any part in social theorizing. In turn, Hodgson drifts close to the central conflation of Giddens, Bourdieu and neo-pragmatism. The tug of central conflation seems particularly evident in the quotations he has selected to introduce his two ‘heroic’ economic theorists. However, note also how ‘social structure’ is burdened with much that Critical Realists and certainly the M/M explanatory framework would separate out as cultural phenomena. This burden is heavy, and this bundling of culture-intostructure is not a matter of nominalism but of the unavoidability of making reference to the cultural domain for all processes of both morphogenesis and morphostasis:19 To Veblen, Social structure, changes, develops, adapts itself to an altered situation, only through a change in habits of thought of the several classes of the community; or in the last analysis, through a change in the habits of thought of the individuals which make up the community.20

Central conflationism pervades the following citation from Veblen and the second from Commons, both of which are addressing macroscopic social change over time. Veblen again: The growth and mutations of the institutional fabric are an outcome of the conduct of the individual members of the group, since it is out of the experience of the individuals, through the habituation of individuals, that institutions arise; and it is in this same experience that these institutions act to direct and define the aims and end of conduct.21

In a similar vein, again conflating culture, structure and agency, Commons wrote: 19

All citations are taken from Hodgson’s ‘Structures and Institutions’, 13. 20 T. Veblen, 1899, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions, New York, Macmillan, p. 192 (my italics). 21 T. Veblen, 1919, The Place of Science in Modern Civilization and Other Essays, New York, Huebsch, p. 243 (my italics).

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Social beliefs … furnish the basis in the affections of each person which alone makes possible his responsiveness to the appeals of those with whom he must cooperate. The institution in which he finds himself is both the cause and effects of his beliefs … Common beliefs and desires are the vitalizing, active force within the institution.22

Hodgson denies that neither economist endorses ‘downward conflation’ to the individual, with which they have been charged, but since he has eschewed my 1988 Culture and Agency this does not clear them of ‘central conflation’, with which he seems unfamiliar. In fact, it might have served him quite well because his dilemma is how to allow a place for ideas in shaping people’s actions without granting them autonomous causal powers, and also without collapsing into Methodological Individualism by crediting agents with too much ideational ingenuity that would have resulted in a cultural diversity too great (he believes) to have shaped institutions like schools and hospitals. Consequently, Hodgson’s resolution of this dilemma is to allow ‘culture’ to creep back in the restricted form of ‘habitual action’ in the context of the dynamics of social evolution. As Veblen puts this succinctly, ‘The evolution of social structure has been a process of natural selection of institutions. The progress which has been and is being made in human institutions and in human character may be set down, broadly, to a natural selection of the fittest habits of thought and to a process of enforced adaptation of individuals to an environment which has progressively changed with the growth of community and with the changing institutions under which men have lived.’23 I think this does solve two of his problems, exculpating him from charges of Methodological Individualism and from the complete exclusion of ‘culture’ (under his own restrictive definition), but it comes at the price of his endorsing of ‘downward conflation’. Moreover, it does not tell anything about the processes by which institutions are built. This is undoubtedly the road he has chosen as he names his approach ‘reconstitutive downward causation’, which is held to be superior to Critical Realism (in his own Abstract, cited at the beginning of this chapter). The price is a heavy one because it comes up against two major objections. The first is Tony Lawson’s detailed critique of downward causation in social institutionalization,24 and the second is that I find the

22

John Commons 1965 [1899], pp. 6–8 as cited in Hodgson, ‘Structures and Institutions’. 23 Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, p. 188. 24 Tony Lawson, 2013, ‘Emergence and Morphogenesis: Causal Reduction and Downward Causation’, in Margaret S. Archer (ed.), Social Morphogenesis, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 61–84.

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continuation of Veblen’s above statement a case of having one’s cake and eating it. Veblen’s text continues: Institutions are not only themselves the result of a selective and adaptive process which shapes the prevailing or dominant types of spiritual attitude and aptitudes; they are at the same time special methods of life and human relations, and are therefore in their turn efficient factors of selection. So that the changing institutions in their turn make for a further selection of individuals endowed with the fittest temperament, and a further adaptation of individual temperaments and habits to the changing environment through the formation of new institutions.25

Here, there are five time periods involved: (i) past time in which both institutions and attitudes evolved (upward movement); (ii) at the same time (presumably the present), they involve particular human relations which become factors of further selection; (iii) ‘in turn’ (more time passes) this engenders ‘changing institutions’; (iv) still later in time, these induce a further selection of those now with the fittest temperaments in the changed environment; (v) and, later still, in the formation of new institutions. This does feel rather like watching a transparent lift shaft with cabins coming up and going down. Although it would be unfair to expect a single paragraph to answer all one’s questions, nevertheless it can serve to raise some. In my opinion, the greatest of these concern ‘how’ problems: by what processes do attitudes ‘evolve’, how do relational changes among people become candidates for ‘further selection’ and how does such selectivity take place? Even if it does, how does it ‘engender’ institutional change; how does the ‘changed environment’ perform acts of selectivity; finally, how do the new recruits bring about ‘new institutions’? Using a non-evolutionary approach, in which it is never assumed that change is adaptive to anything but the designs of those who win out at any time, my Social Origins of Educational Systems,26 addressing the same problems empirically, had to give much more causal power to divergent beliefs grounding the educational changes sought, more to the resources competing groups could command and more to the forms of organization taken by these oppositional groups to institutionalize their conflicting definitions of instruction as the result of competitive conflict. In Hodgson’s case all of these queries are answered by ‘reconstitutive downward causation’, but I will place primary emphasis here upon 25

Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, p. 188. 26 Margaret S. Archer, 1979, Social Origins of Educational Systems, London, Sage.

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the reduction of ‘culture’ to habit alone. I have argued that today, in a period dominated by morphogenesis in so many areas of life, habit becomes decreasingly appropriate as a guide to action27 and reflexivity about ourselves in relation to our circumstances intensifies. In fact, I would doubt that habits are ever all-sufficient. As intelligent beings we constantly come up with new ideas and are always prone to being challenged by contingency. This is not to concur with neo-pragmatists that only when confronted by ‘problem situations’ do we exercise our minds and produce original solutions.28 Interestingly, Peirce agreed and rightly credited our imaginations with mentally devising suitable actions for unusual contexts. He gives the nice example of his brother’s prompt and effective action during an accident at table when he extinguished a fire from a spirit burner. The brother then told how he had run over (musement) what to do in such an emergency. Peirce then introduces his well-known court room analogy in which the (mental) Counsel for the Prosecution of Change appeals against the (mental) Counsel for the Defence of habitual action.29 If in doubt, monitor yourself when you change house and acquire a different kitchen, because its new layout will mean that things can’t be placed where they used to be, and thinking about that will not help you to find the nut-crackers. If early man and woman had been governed by habit alone rather than alert to new ways of doing things, we would never have had fire or cooked food. We learn by trial and error, such as tapping and testing before walking on ice to cross the lake,30 and far from exclusively through Veblen’s ‘legacy of habits of thought accumulated through the experience of past generations’.31 Hodgson again comments approvingly on Veblen for regarding an ­institution as ‘an historical “time capsule” for the habits of thought of past generations. Albeit imperfectly, institutions provide the framework in which those habits and practices are reproduced’ 27

Margaret S. Archer, 2012, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ch. 2, ‘The Reflexive Imperative versus Habits and Habitus’. 28 See Margaret S. Archer, 2010, ‘Routine, Reflexivity and Realism’, Sociological Theory, 28:3, 272–303. 29 Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, 1931–5, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, vol. V, p. 421. 30 Margaret S. Archer, 2000, Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 31 T. Veblen, 1914, The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts, New York, Macmillan, pp. 6–7.

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(17). Realists would crucially add ‘or transformed’. Yet, to explain transformations we require a concept of culture vastly more diverse, capable of significant contradictions and complementarities between its constituent parts (theories, beliefs, ideologies, utopias and dystopias, etc.), with the capacity also to elaborate upon these in relation to the hostility they encounter from other interested parties and their ideas. Above all, we need to examine the relation between the ideas promoted by any given group and their interests and do the same for their opponents before understanding what is at issue between them and gain some notion of how far they will go to obtain it. Thus, the outcome of relational contestation over the type of institutionalization is at issue. Yet, in asking such questions as far as ‘culture’ is concerned, Hodgson’s reaction would likely be to deny their validity and maintain that I am simply revealing the difference between my own and his generic conceptions of processes of social change and our divergent views about the place and powers that should be assigned to ‘culture’ in such changes. True, but this draws Hodgson much closer to Parsons’s normative functionalism than to Giddens’s structuration theory, which he clearly wants to avoid. Ironically, he sees the threat of methodological individualism looming here whilst succumbing without protest to the holism transmitted to him by his two ‘heroes’ (the reason for quoting them here). Thus, institutions are presented in Veblen’s terms as ‘the apparatus of ways and means available for the pursuit of whatever maybe worth seeking, is substantially, all a matter of tradition out of the past, a legacy of habits of thought accumulated through the experience of past generations’,32 described as ‘settled habits of thought common to the generality of men’.33 Instead, Gellner seriously questioned the very notions of norms common to the generality of the Berber population, noting that certain positions entailed contradictory demands (such as to entertain lavishly and simultaneously to present their incumbents as indifferent to material concerns).34 Such, I go on to argue, had to be confronted rather than just internalized and thus the overall process of cultural transmission could not be interpreted as one of accumulation of sharedness – there has to be room for cultural innovation and diversification because some lack the resources to share the practices of the elite or even the ‘generality’, whilst some of 32

Ibid., pp. 6–7. 33 Veblen, The Place of Science in Modern Civilization, p. 239. 34 Ernest Gellner, 1979, ‘Concepts and Society’, in Bryan R. Wilson (ed.), Rationality, Oxford, Blackwell, p. 45.

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the former have the ‘gumption’ to deviate successfully. After decades of debate amongst twentieth-century social theorists, enthusiasm for the Parsonian ‘central value system’ as engineering both ‘system’ and ‘social’ integration decisively lost this ideational battle (can one find a committed normative functionalist today?). But Hodgson is a deviant deserter. On the one hand he maintains that ‘the institution of language is not simply the medium by which ideas are represented and communicated: it is also a means of shaping individual attitudes and ways of thought. Likewise, the institution of the family, and its associated practices and ideologies, can help to inculcate particular values and purposes’ (38). On the other hand, this is where institutions perform their ‘reconstitutive’ work, by their downward causal influence to ‘affect and alter fundamental properties, powers and propensities of individuals’ – in short to realign their normativity in the case of deviants or dissidents (26). There are two major problems with this: (a) the assumption that normative consensus rather than a continuing conflict of elaborated values will prevail on both sides, and (b) the implied influence of institutions on people’s normative attitudes etc. assumes their structural powers have not merely the power of persuasion as ‘synthesized by advertising, catalysed by salesmanship, and shaped by the discreet manipulations of the persuaders’ (26, based on J. K. Galbraith), but that structural properties themselves have the capacity not only to mould agents but also to re-mould them, which is the process Hodgson calls ‘reconstitution’. As concerns (a), from my study of educational systems, it appears false. Conflict can be protracted, as in France from the first Empire onwards, because (temporary) losers do not withdraw but battle on, elaborating their ideational claims to dominate the new educational system in a protracted ideational conflict between Church and State over laïcité. Two centuries later this conflict still animated hostility over Muslim women’s right to wear the veil in school. As concerns (b), this seems to elide culture and structure and agency, in the form of central conflation that will be examined in the next section.

Structure in Relation to Culture

Hodgson’s approach to ‘structure’ begins more benignantly towards the M/M approach, largely because he appreciates its critique of structuration theory and that it also incorporates time.35 However, this mellowness 35

Margaret S. Archer, 1982, ‘Morphogenesis versus Structuration: On Combining Structure and Action’, British Journal of Sociology, 33:4, 456–83 (reprinted in British Journal of Sociology, 2010, 61 (special issue), 225–52).

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fades as he first dubs me a ‘follower’ of Bhaskar (10), secondly advances a false proposition that Critical Realists regard structures as exerting only constraints upon agency (and never enablements), and thirdly never referring to the substantive works in which M/M has been used precisely in order to explain institutional emergence and emergent properties and causal powers. However, I will begin with one of the important virtues that Hodgson does acknowledge concerning the treatment of time intrinsic to the M/M approach and of no import to structuration theory. ‘For Archer, the concept of emergence itself connotes extension in time and sustains the temporal priority of structure over the individual’ (10). This is undoubtedly the case as chapter 3 of Realist Social Theory is titled ‘Taking Time to Link Structure and Agency’.36 ‘Archer does not conflate individual into structure and give the latter the sole burden of explanation. Indeed, the reproduction of social structure depends upon the actions of the individuals involved. Her approach is based upon two basic propositions: “That structure necessarily pre-dates the action(s) leading to its reproduction or transformation; (ii) That structural elaboration necessarily post-dates the action sequences which give rise to it”’ (10). It should be added that when one arrives at the point of institutional elaboration (M/M at T4) what will have been explained are how different forms of interaction resulted in the emergence of (State Educational) systems that also display important differences from one another (by crucially being either ‘decentralized’ or ‘centralized’) in their organizational structuring. My whole point was to account for who was enabled to get a good education or constrained to accept an inferior one, how curricula could be wildly different geographically or uniform throughout a country, which occupations were prepared for and which neglected etc. To be able to do that, the researcher needs not only to be conversant with a nation’s political, economic and social history but also to have clearly specified what structural features constitute the new institution such that one can justifiably compare and contrast their outcomes in these and other respects in different countries.37 This specification is not provided by Hodgson; indeed it is difficult to find a clear definition what an ‘institution’ is to him. Instead, he furnishes a clear example of how an underdeveloped conceptualization of culture leads to a conflation of

36

Archer, Realist Social Theory, pp. 65–93. 37 In my Social Origins of Educational Systems, pp. 19–20, I define a State System as ‘a nationwide and differentiated collection of institutions devoted to formal education, whose overall control and supervision is at least partly governmental, and whose component parts and processes are related to one another’.

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culture and structure that, ironically, results in an overvaluation of culture’s role in morphogenesis and morphostasis. In short, I fully agree that Tony Lawson is correct in noting that a basic problem in institutionalist writings is ‘a failure to elaborate the notion of social structure, i.e. a level of social reality which, though dependent upon, is irreducible to human thought and practice’.38 Earlier we saw that Hodgson viewed institutions as being ‘materially’ based; now they are presented as ‘ideational’ expressions and his argument becomes completely circular. How then can he maintain that ‘institutions represent a dependent but distinct level of social reality’ (19)? Consisting of what? Answering via Veblen, Hodgson approvingly cites that ‘institutions – that is to say the habits of thought – under the guidance of which men live … are the products of past processes, are adapted to past circumstances, and are therefore never in full accord with the requirements of the present’.39 The circularity is completed by Commons in his statement that ‘an institution seems analogous to a building, a sort of framework of laws and regulations, within which individuals act like inmates’.40 However, laws and regulations are rules, and rules are cultural in content and thus the circularity is complete. It is based upon completely conflating structure and culture, for we are given no other properties defining an institution as a structure. That laws enshrine past ‘habits of thought’ tells nothing about which groups go about ‘updating’ them, how they go about it or how they deal with different groupings wanting different changes. Its ability to deal with such elements of an adequate explanation of institutional change is what I hold to be the strength and utility of the M/M approach. For it to be effective in any institutional case depends upon prior historical explanation of how, for example, different State Educational Systems acquired particular organizational structures in the course of their formation and how, in turn, these affected the specific processes through which different social collectivities received them or could hope to introduce the educational changes they sought. I will briefly illustrate this with two diagrams showing how the centralized and the decentralized systems emerged, enabling some groups to do so, whilst constraining others. Let me underline that Figures 2.1 and 2.2 jump over the crucial stage of how a State Educational System developed through group interaction and acquired these distinctive organizational structures, each of which required a lengthy ‘analytical history of emergence’ to account for them. 38 Tony Lawson, 1997, Economics and Reality, London, Routledge, p. 317. 39 Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, p. 191. 40 Commons 1934, p. 69, cited in Hodgson, ‘Structures and Institutions’.

38

Part I  Culture Central Government Political Manipulation

Teaching Profession

Political Manipulation Polity Directed

External Interest Groups

Educational Change

Aggregation of Demands

Figure 2.1.  Educational interaction in the centralized system

Political Manipulation

Central Government

Political Manipulation

Polity Directed Teaching Profession

Internal Initiation

External Interest Groups

Educational Change

External Transactions

Figure 2.2.  Educational interaction in decentralized systems

For illustration alone, I focus on processes of further interaction between groups (some of them not involved in the system’s formation) that then seek reproduction or more likely transformation to their advantage. In centralized systems, such as in France or Russia, the key point is that all groups have to work through the political centre to promote or resist educational change. Outsider groups have little chance of success

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unless they can aggregate their demands, but that may well be impossible if they have divergent interests and ideals. Teachers/academics are insiders but cannot introduce change directly and the same goes for external interest groups (such as entrepreneurs) who are often denied access even to the frail private sector. In short, change will be a hard-won and usually protracted process in which significant changes in education often have to await political change – of elites or of their circumstances. Conversely, in decentralized educational systems, such as those that emerged in England and Denmark, there are three processes available for introducing change, although they are far from being equally accessible to those seeking to advance their interests or promote their ideals through formal state education. However, unlike the cases above, no bonus automatically attaches to working with others as this generally spells a dilution of both sets of educational demands. Secondly, teachers have much greater freedom to initiate change within their classrooms (‘internal initiation’) in the absence of a National Curriculum or, at least, until one is instated. Thirdly, external interest groups (such as religious denominations, corporate economic elites, or associations of workers) can set up independent schools and institutes, provided only that they can afford to found and staff them. If they can and do gain this foothold in the private sector, such collective agents acquire an additional vested interest in protecting their foundations against State incursion. I trust these illustrations have shown how the organizational structure at a higher level of stratified institutional reality impacts upon those at lower levels. Social groups require three properties if they are to make any educational impact: an inner grouping of active educational agents, vested interests (material or ideational) in changing education, and articulated ideals concerning the alternative definition of instruction sought. To fulfil them all does not guarantee even a degree of success, but failure is assured without them. I hope it will be clear that any such analysis would be in conformity with SAC and that its component elements would be real and not merely analytical. On the contrary, Hodgson claims that it is through his ‘reconstitutive downward causation’ that the social scientist ‘can begin to identify the special features of some social structures that make them also institutions’ (24). These involve being ‘(a) explicitly recognized and part of social discourse, and (b) … tied up with habits of thought and behaviour that may help to change and reconstitute the capacities of human agents  … Institutions are the kind of structures that matter most in the social realm and make up the stuff of social life. They matter most because of their capacity to form and mould the behaviour of agents in fundamental ways’ (25). This is the reason Hodgson ignores the 800-plus

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pages of Social Origins but keeps referring to a half-page e­ xample I give to ‘demographic structures’ in Realist Social Theory. This is questionable, but more interesting are the reasons he gives for ­refusing demographic structures institutional status: ‘without conceptions, habits and behaviours the demographic structure would not be an institution. Although, for example, there were real demographic structures in (say) the Middle Ages, the concept itself had yet to appear and be reflected upon. Hence it was not then an institution’ (25). This is pure nominalism and it is also incorrect. In realist causal terms the Bubonic Plague – from the Dark Ages and recurring up to the fourteenth century – enabled many serfs to become free tenant farmers because of labour shortages and constrained many monarchs in their recruitment of sufficient fighting men to match their military ambitions. Thus, through denying the defining features of an institution as advanced by Hodgson, namely semantic recognition and the ability to form and mould the behaviour of agents, I arrive at the last section where he asserts the superiority of his approach to Critical Realism through finally supporting his own ‘institutional approach’ by conflating structure with agency and considering this to be a virtue. It is when addressing agency that the full force of Hodgson’s antipathy towards the M/M approach and to the stratified social ontology of Critical Realism becomes apparent. This is the most radical of his three sections, involving Hodgson’s almost complete evacuation of agential powers41 and their conflation with structure and culture. In short, it seeks to collapse all three elements of SAC into one another, but the ultimate cost of this is to strip human agents of anything that would justify calling them ‘active’. Instead, and as Martin Hollis once said, they become people to whom things happen, not those who make things happen. Hodgson focuses his opposition to Bhaskar and to me on the claim that for both of us ‘the causal efficacy and “free will” of the agent [are] enhanced to the point that human agency becomes undetermined by any physical or materialist cause’ (29, italics in the original). Since neither of us has ever been a protagonist of ‘free will’, I will concentrate upon the absence of material causes of which the physical is a sub-category. Bhaskar is basically taken to task for maintaining that ‘intentional human behaviour is caused’ but ‘it is always caused by reasons and that it is only because it is caused by reasons that it is properly characterized as intentional’.42 I agree, but that is another debate. 41

I called these PEPs (People’s Emergent Properties) in Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge University Presss, Cambridge, pp. 184f. 42 Roy Bhaskar, 1989 [1979], 2nd ed., The Possibility of Naturalism, London, Routledge, p. 96.

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However, immediately, Douglas Porpora is in trouble for sensibly insisting that our position in the social structure not only furnishes agents with interests but also motivates their action,43 as I have endorsed many times. Similarly, I am upbraided for holding that all structural influences are mediated to people by shaping the situations in which they find themselves and that is just another way of saying the same thing. To Porpora and me, interests are objective; we will pay a price in some currency for going against them and maybe gain a premium for pursuing them, but agents are not determined by them and, indeed, are fallible about them. Some are willing to pay the price. I often cite the English politician Tony Benn, who renounced his title so as to sit in the House of Commons, in line with his ideal interests, rather than being placed in a situation (the House of Lords) from which he could not advance them. It is repeated here because structure and culture shape situations in a similar fashion, but the agent is the ultimate arbiter. This is simply not strong enough for Hodgson who wants ‘downward causation’ to be credited with producing ‘an alteration of the essence of the individual’ (28), that is, eradicating all Personal Emergent Properties. On the contrary, it is far too strong, for all (five types of) human essentialists,44 because what would be left of a continuous identity or continuity in a sense of self? (Nevertheless, the statement itself is an equivocation as it talks only of ‘an alteration’, not a transformation, thus opening a different debate about ‘how much’ and ‘what kind of alterations’ could have such an effect.) I will not enter this here because for any human essentialist an adequate answer would be more than ‘a change of habit’. In any case, neither Critical Realism nor the M/M approach are about changing individuals per se. As social theories, they are primarily concerned with how our social circumstances and relations affect what we do and seek to do and have done. Hodgson does not accuse us of changing the subject because he believes he has a response, namely that realists cannot give a satisfactory answer explaining the reasons why agents act in any circumstances. Bhaskar had argued that ‘It is analytic to the concept of action that the agent could have acted otherwise’,45 and Hodgson claims this to be tantamount to advocating ‘free will’ and therefore ‘nothing can be predicted from human agency itself’, thus ‘placing it beyond 43 First stated by Douglas V. Porpora in 1989, ‘Four Concepts of Social Structure’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 19:2, 208, and repeated in Porpora, Reconstructing Sociology. 44 Margaret S. Archer and Andrea M. Maccarini, 2021, ‘Introduction’, in Margaret S. Archer and Andrea M. Maccarini (eds.), What Is Essential to Be Human? Can AI Robots Not Share It?, Abingdon, Routledge, pp. 1–25. 45 Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, p. 114.

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the explanatory powers of social theory’ (30). The only ‘­concession’ he will make is that if realists cannot account for what agents (an aggregate of individuals to Hodgson) do or will do, they thus concentrate ­exclusively upon what they don’t do. In short, realist theorists regard structure as being constraining but never enabling.46 Realists are held to be bearers of ‘uncaused reasons [that] fuel ­intentions’ but this is to disregard the ‘beliefs’ informing people’s reasons and, though people are fallible in what they believe to be the case, this does not mean reasons can be disregarded as prompting their actions – and often reasons can be shown to derive from past culture (for example, the long-lasting classical belief that blood-letting would restore the balance of the ‘humours’ and remedy many illnesses and diseases). Culture cannot be eliminated, and neither can the importance of its interlinkage with structure be ignored. In the instance of leeching, the practice was enabled by its being the preserve of physicians (university men) and their patronage by the aristocracy; it never became routine practice amongst humbler apothecaries. In the long path to explaining why education, which in Europe historically was integrated with the national Church (various), I began my account of how the novelty of State Educational Systems came into being by asking about institutional interconnections. Which were the beneficiaries of the educational status quo, which found their institutional activities obstructed by it, and which were indifferent because it did not impinge upon them? Obviously, the first were facilitated, the second constrained and for the third it exerted neither of these effects. My point is not to vaunt this 1979 account, which Hodgson never mentions, but to dismiss his assertion that realists, even tyro realists, do not deal in terms of structural and cultural facilitations but only with constraints. Moreover, they tackle inter-institutional relations, whose absence is a major gap in Hodgson’s ‘institutionalism’. Since he wishes to bring everything down to the individual level, although I find this unnecessarily reductionist, the M/M approach is far from averse to this level of stratified social reality. It would be unfair to point to applications and publications posterior to his paper – such as my trilogy on reflexivity47 which indeed treats of individual cases and makes 46

Ibid., p. 31: ‘The explanatory burden of the situation is placed upon structure acting as constraint. Within these constraints the individual may do as she will. The picture of the human agent vis-à-vis structure is to some extent like flies moving randomly in a closed but otherwise empty jar.’ 47 Reflexivity trilogy: Margaret S. Archer, 2003, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Archer, 2007, Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Archer, The Reflexive Imperative.

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some interesting findings there. For example, see ‘Joan’s story’48 where a woman who had wanted to become a nurse, but had been prevented by her father’s opposition from doing so, did not abandon her reasons for wanting this career, but reflexively designed her ‘second best’ as a foster carer (with her husband facilitating what her father had constrained). Several of my PhD students49 have been interested in ‘Personal Morphogenesis’ and produced fascinating and fine-grained insights into agents’ reasoning and evaluative processes, some of which cannot be assimilated to ‘habitual behaviour’ because they deal with new structural and cultural instances, such as the advent of social media. That is the first reason why, for all its richness, we should not remain at the level of Personal Morphogenesis, namely because social reality does not; macroscopic changes are not the result of microscopic accumulations. Indeed, by conflating culture and agency, by making agents and actors ‘creatures of habit’, Hodgson impoverishes the individual agent. Some of the most influential cultural sources today did not exist yesterday (such as social media: Facebook was founded only in 2004) so there was nothing ‘habitual’ in their daily usage, no longer confined to the young adult. Also, the point of my emphasizing the omnium gatherum of the global cultural heritage as being the Universal Archive (digital, necessarily, for storage and accessibility) is that it can constantly be raided for ideas to reinforce an individual’s hunch or to back up a collectivity’s claims to legitimacy. Just as important, given the unmanageable mastery of the whole Archive, individuals must choose what to pursue. They do so following the scheme I advanced in Being Human,50 of which is unmentioned by Hodgson because it credits all normal people with reflexivity51 and thus counters Commons’s view that agents’ reasons for action are ‘capricious and undetermined’.52 Any agent may be wrong in their reasoning but that (often) corrigible conclusion does not make ‘caprice’ the opposite of ‘habit’. The second reason concerns a higher level than the individual in Hodgson’s treatment of structure, namely that he ignores the ‘Double Morphogenesis’ altogether. Yet, this is particularly important in linking 48

‘Joan’s story’ in Archer, Making Our Way through the World, pp. 104–13. 49 Notably John Alford and Mark Carrigan plus numbers from my Masterclasses in Norway and Poland. 50 Archer, Being Human, ch. 7, published in 2000, and thus available in advance of Hodgson’s critique. 51 I define reflexivity as ‘the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa’ (Making Our Way through the World, p. 4), and I use this is all subsequent works. 52 Commons, cited by Hodgson, ‘Structures and Institutions’, 34.

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structure and agency in the M/M approach.53 If institutional change is introduced successfully by a collective agent54 (such as a State Educational System, a National Health System, a new law or constitution), then the group responsible does not remain unchanged; new positions have been created (e.g. Minister of Education) and even if nominally a doctor remains a doctor, it is not in the same role as previously, and may involve different qualifications and responsibilities and a change in working practices, accountability and status. As I put this in Being Human, ‘the re-grouping of Social Agents through the double morphogenesis provides the motor which generates new role–rule sets … Corporate agency invents new rules for new games in which Social Actors can be themselves. Another way of putting it is that Agency makes more room for the Actor, who is not condemned to a static array of available positions.’55 The storyline is one of pre-grouping and re-grouping during morphogenesis where structure facilitates some and constrains others in a conflictual process in which the lineaments of micro-level agents undergo simultaneous change in composition. How can an ‘institutionalist’ remain oblivious to such processes of structural elaboration? ­Fundamentally, because he has a good deal more respect for psychology than for sociology. The fulcrum of Hodgson’s view is that ‘reasons or beliefs may be tacit or unconscious’ (38). In fact Bhaskar was more sympathetic here than I am (being unconvinced about unconscious motivation), but the point is not that an ‘important feature of evolutionary psychology is its recognition of the essential role of instinct and habit, alongside conscious reasoning, in human behaviour’ (41). It is about where ‘reason’ came from; that is the same question that can be posed (or used to be) about the ‘soul’. Hodgson’s answer is ‘from less deliberative organisms[;] many of our evolved cognitive processes must be unconscious and able to function independently of our conscious reasoning’ (41). That includes or rather eliminates our intentionality, meaning that ‘reasoning itself is based on habits and instincts, and it cannot be sustained without them’ (42). However, there is much more to realism’s ‘naturalism’ than arguments about parallelism with natural science. In Being Human I discussed at 53

Introduced in my Realist Social Theory, pp. 190–1/247–8, and thus readily available in his ‘target’ book. 54 Corporate agents are those who have developed promotive organizations to advance their interests and have publicly articulated these. Primary agents, those sharing the same life chances, have done neither, which is not to maintain they are of no consequence in processes of change simply by being there (too many to feed and too few to fight). 55 Archer, Being Human, p. 287.

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length our ineluctable human interaction with the three orders of natural reality. One simple example, independent of evolution or habitual action, is our aversion to icy water, which is registered physiologically and rediscovered phylogenetically by every child coming into contact with it. The same goes – following Merleau-Ponty and Piaget – for learning in the Practical Order by doing (for example, the conservation of matter) and in the Social Order by a different form of doing (for instance, breaking a social convention).56 Certainly human aversive behaviour can be taught but, for the recalcitrant child, the corrective is two seconds of being plunged into icy water or its equivalent. These examples, picked only for ease of communication, could be challenged as having no contemporary equivalents, but what would or could Hodgson say if faced with them that means past habits (let’s forget instincts) are not necessarily their building blocks? Our human responses to climate change are varied; and, either way, they depend on new knowledge: those who repudiate it and continue to manufacture/buy new petrol-driven vehicles discard it; those who lobby for electric charging points heed it; but neither is a habitual action based upon tradition.

56

Archer, Being Human, chs. 4 and 5.

3

Critical Realists Do Debate Culture Featuring Margaret S. Archer and Dave Elder-Vass, 2012, ‘Cultural System or Norm Circles? An Exchange’, European Journal of Social Theory, 15:1, 93–115

ARTICLE ABSTRACT

It is a common misperception that Critical Realists are a tightly drilled militia sharing much more than a basic meta-ontology. What follows is an example of how two theorists who share the same ontological convictions nevertheless differ considerably in how they define culture and its social dynamics. Elder-Vass (2010b) outlines an ontology of culture that differs significantly from that developed at length by Archer in her Culture and Agency (1988). There is agreement between them on the need for a realist ontology in relation to culture, but disagreement on how a realist perspective might translate into a more specific understanding of the origins, nature and influences of cultural factors that contribute to shaping the social world. Both authors see the reproduction and transformation of culture as occurring through morphogenetic cycles in which there is an iteration of what may be called subjective and objective moments. In each cycle, subjects are influenced by existing culture, which is not of their making, and through their subsequent actions they help to reconstitute or elaborate the objective features of culture. For Archer, however, those objective features take the form of a ‘Cultural System’ composed of ideas, whereas for Elder-Vass they take the form of ‘norm circles’ composed primarily of people.1 Introduction To those undergraduates studying the social sciences in the 1960s, ‘culture’ and ‘society’ were used interchangeably, especially in American textbooks. Effectively, the view that ‘culture was everything social’ 1

Dave Elder-Vass, 2010, ‘The Emergence of Culture’, in G. Albert and S. Sigmund (eds.), Soziologische Theorie kontrovers, Wiesbaden, VS Verlag, pp. 351–63 (referred to in the Article Abstract as 2010b); Margaret S. Archer, 1988, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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constituted a heritage from anthropology and was therefore the obverse of its elimination as examined in Chapter 2. The former lingers on in reduced form in frequent references to ‘the culture of the firm’ or to ‘that of the family’ and any association in between. Only social theorists who reject this synonym confront the need to define the concept, and that means most schools of thought these days. However, apart from agreement that ‘culture’ and ‘society’ are not interchangeable terms, there is no consensus. Although many would agree that the three SAC elements are interdependent and interrelated, they differ about how closely ‘culture’ should be conceptualized as associated with ‘structure’ or with ‘agency’. Obviously, this in turn affects how social change and stability (morphogenesis and morphostasis) are theorized and the relative importance assigned to culture. Granted this exchange does not cover all aspects of importance, it will be necessary to enlarge on two aspects in conclusion, namely: ‘What and where is culture?’ Broadly speaking, one might say that Archer and ElderVass are theorists seeking to develop a realist social approach to culture that is both philosophically coherent and sociologically ­plausible – a realistic social realism – but disagreeing over important aspects of how to achieve this. The present debate carries their differences into new territory. It began as an exchange of emails over a draft paper, since published as ‘The Emergence of Culture’, in which Elder-Vass outlined an ontology of culture that differs significantly from that developed at length by Archer in her Culture and Agency. There is agreement on the need for a realist ontology in relation to culture, but disagreement on how a realist approach might translate into a more specific understanding of the origins, nature and influences of cultural factors that contribute to shaping the social world. Both authors see the reproduction and transformation of culture as occurring through morphogenetic cycles in which there is an iteration of what may be called subjective and objective moments. In each cycle, subjects are influenced by existing culture, which is not of their making, and through their subsequent actions they help to reconstitute or elaborate the objective features of culture. For Archer, however, those objective features take the form of a ‘Cultural System’ composed of ideas, whereas for Elder-Vass they take the form of ‘norm circles’ composed primarily of people. At stake here are the answers to a series of fundamental questions concerning the ontology of the social world. How should we understand the nature of culture? Can culture exist in the form of ideas that are autonomous of human individuals once developed, while being

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activity-dependent upon human subjects for their formation? What form could such an existence take? What role do the material carriers of culture play in its ontology and its reproduction? And if we doubt the existence of autonomous ideas, can we still justify the claim that culture is something real, something that is causally effective in its own right? These are questions that have exercised not only realists but also thinkers in a variety of other traditions. The exchange that follows should be of interest to all those who find the nature of culture problematic. Archer When I first began to theorize culture,2 there was no approach that could properly be called ‘cultural realism’. Equally, at that time it was canonical to view culture as ‘a community of shared meanings’. It seemed to me then and still does that this wrongly and unhelpfully elides the ‘meanings’ with their being ‘shared’. The roots of this conflation can be traced back to early anthropology and gained philosophical reinforcement when Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’ were imported into social theory. This approach holds culture to be both shared and coherent. It thus rules out one or both opposite states of cultural affairs: cultural divisions within a ‘community’ and cultural contradictions within a conspectus of ideas. Since the latter two are ubiquitous, this tradition that denied them seemed overdue for revision. In the Morphogenetic Approach to culture,3 I attempted to develop a realist cultural approach based on the following three propositions, none of which meets with Elder-Vass’s agreement. (1) Ideas are sui generis real. Where propositions are concerned, these are human products that are either true or false. At any given time, the stock of knowledge contains both, although we are epistemically incapable of knowing which is which for many ideas. The full corpus of ideas, known or available to be known at any time, is termed the ‘Cultural System’ (CS). To refer to the CS is to say nothing about the consistency or contradiction of its components. 2

Margaret S. Archer, 1985, ‘The Myth of Cultural Integration’, British Journal of Sociology, 36, 333–53. 3 Content reprinted from Margaret S. Archer and Dave Elder-Vass, 2012, ‘Cultural System or Norm Circles? An Exchange’, European Journal of Social Theory, 15:1, 93–115. The arguments in this article are based upon Archer, Culture and Agency. A very abridged version is found in Archer, 2005, ‘Structure, Culture and Agency’, in M. Jacobs and N. Hanrahan (eds.), The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, Oxford, Blackwell, pp. 17–34.

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(2) The sharing of ideas is contingent. So too is whether or not a given idea has salience in the social order – or part of it – at any given time. This contingency depends upon who is promoting (upholding, diffusing, imposing etc.) particular ideas at any given time, how well they do it, and what opposition they encounter or stimulate. These are Socio-Cultural (S-C) matters. Culture cannot be confined to ideas that are currently endorsed by social groups (at any T1) because these are always a selective portion of the ideas available for endorsement. Usually, S-C conflict leads to the activation of some of that non-salient portion, specifically those ideas which challenge whatever is or bids to be hegemonic. Thus, unfashionable ideas can be revived, as appears to be the case for ‘paganism’ today. Yet, how can ideas be revived, rediscovered, retrieved or re-activated unless they are credited with ontological status? (3) The interplay between ‘ideas’ (CS) and ‘groups’ (S-C) is dynamic and accounts for cultural elaboration. An adequate theoretical approach to culture (just like structure) requires both diachronic analysis (of how certain ideas came to be in social currency at any time, of which groups supported them and why they did and may still do so, and against what past or ongoing opposition) as well as synchronic analysis (of what maintains cultural morphostasis for as long as it lasts).

Although Elder-Vass accepted this for structure and also allowed that the Morphogenetic Approach usefully contributes to it,4 I feel that his cultural theory shows a bias towards ‘presentism’ in consistently focusing upon the synchronic alone. The implicit assumption is that synchronic accounts can somehow be conducted without serious reference to diachronic processes: who won out and who lost out badly in the previous S-C round and how that advantages some groups and disadvantages others (by privileging certain tracts of the CS) in the current round of cultural interaction. Thus, although I see considerable merits in his ‘norm circle’ approach, summarized in this discussion, these would be strengthened if the norm circles had a history and a biography that determined their ‘starting positions’ at the beginning of any analysis of a particular episode of cultural interaction. As realists, we both endorse a stratified social ontology, with different emergent properties and powers pertaining to different levels of cultural reality in this case. Therefore, the fact that I distinguish the Cultural System from Socio-Cultural interaction – which empirically are encountered conjointly though ontologically they constitute different strata – should not in principle be a bone of contention between us. Of course, it remains open to him to maintain that: (a) this ontological distinction is not warranted or (b) the distinction is not theoretically (or practically) useful. 4

Dave Elder-Vass, 2007, ‘For Emergence: Refining Archer’s Account of Social Structure’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 37, 25–44.

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His main objection seems to be (a). I am saying that ontologically it is not on because he rejects my proposition above, that ideas are real and separable from knowing subjects. He also endorses (b), but in direct consequence of subscribing to (a). I justify the distinction as follows and it turns out to be familiarly quotidian. Culture as a whole is defined as referring to all intelligibilia, that is to any item having the dispositional ability to be understood by someone – whether or not anyone does so at a given time. Within this corpus, the CS is that sub-set of items to which the law of contradiction can be applied – i.e. society’s propositional register at any given time. Contradictions and complementarities are logical properties of the world of ideas, of World 3 as Popper termed it,5 or, if preferred, of the contents of the Universal Digital Archive today. We use this concept 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.6 In so doing, we grant that a CS has an objective existence because of the autonomous logical relations among its component ideas (doctrines, theories, beliefs and individual propositions). These 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 – like any unread book. However, the above is quite different from another kind of everyday statement, namely that the ideas of X were influenced by those of Y, where we refer to the influence of people on one another – such as teachers on pupils, television on its audience, or earlier thinkers on later ones. These depend upon causal relations, that is, the degree of cultural uniformity produced by the imposition of ideas by one group of people on another through the whole gamut of familiar techniques – exhortation, argument, persuasion, manipulation and mystification – which often entail the use of power. At any moment, the contents of the CS are the product of historical S-C interaction, but having emerged (cultural elaboration being a continuous process) then qua product, the CS has properties and powers of its own kind. As with structure, some of its most important causal powers are those of constraints and enablements. In the cultural domain 5 Karl Popper, 1979, Objective Knowledge, Oxford, Clarendon Press, pp. 298f. 6 Whether or not they are shared by someone or some group is irrelevant to the existence of a contradiction. Of course, if they are, then how their holders cope is an interesting question, which Kuhn, for example, regards as important when ‘anomalies’ to a paradigm begin to accumulate.

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Cultural level

Dependent upon

Type of relations

CULTURAL SYSTEM SOCIO-CULTURAL

Other ideas Other people

Logical Causal

Figure 3.1.  Relationships between the Cultural System and the Socio-​ Cultural

these stem from contradictions and complementarities. 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 be able to deem valid, and the counter-ideas or ideologies they seek to promote.7 In other words, the exercise of CS causal powers is dependent upon their activation from the S-C level. What ideas are entertained SocioCulturally at any given time result from the properties and powers belonging to that level. It is interaction at the S-C level that explains why particular groups wish to uphold a particular idea – or to undermine one held by another group. However, once they do, then their ideational projects will confront CS properties (not of their own making) and unleash these systemic powers upon themselves, which other groups may seek to realize or to contain. The Socio-Cultural level possesses causal powers of its own kind in relation to the CS; it can resolve apparent contradictions and respond adaptively to real ones, or explore and exploit the complementarities it confronts, thus modifying the Cultural System in the process. SocioCultural relations can set their own cultural agenda, often prompted by a group’s structurally based interests, through creatively adding new items to the systemic register. In these ways, the S-C level is responsible for elaborating upon the composition of the CS level morphogenetically. Relationships between the two levels are summarized in Figure 3.1. Even when Socio-Cultural integration is found to be high, this says nothing whatsoever about whether the corpus of ideas endorsed are logically consistent (i.e. that idea X is compatible with idea Y). They may 7

For a theory of the formation of agents’ ‘projects’ in the light of their personal concerns and consideration of their social contexts, see Margaret S. Archer, 2003, Structure, Agency, and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, and Archer, 2007, Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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well not be, in which case the contradiction remains (at the level of the Cultural System) as a permanent fault line that can be split open if and when (some of) the population in question develop articulated interests and an organization for doing so. Equally, the components of the CS making up its corpus of ideas may have high logical consistency and yet Socio-Cultural dissent and actual antagonism may be profound. As Gouldner pointed out, no normative corpus is proof against groups with divergent interests differentially accentuating particular elements and according them particularistic interpretations to promote the concerns of one group against others.8 In other words, Socio-Cultural and Cultural System integration can vary independently from one another: ‘sharedness’ is variable rather than definitional. The Morphogenetic Approach to culture – its relative stability versus its transformation; the substantive form taken by the development of any corpus of beliefs, theories or propositions; and whether or not such ideational changes can be made to stick Socio-Culturally – all of these depend upon sustaining and utilizing the distinction between the CS and the S-C levels and on not conflating them.9 Both Kuhn’s ‘normalization’ of scientific paradigms and Bourdieu’s ‘naturalization’ of ‘cultural arbitraries’ should be seen as attempts at ideational unification but ones whose success is never a foregone conclusion. By maintaining the distinction, it becomes possible to theorize about variations in cultural integration and their relationship to variations in social integration. In other words, the interplay between culture and agency can be examined in the same way as between structure and agency. When the two levels vary independently of one another, their different combinations can be hypothesized to generate cultural reproduction or transformation. Without this, we have no theory about when one or the other will result ceteris paribus. I think that this is the consequence of your flattened ontology in which different ‘norm circles’ intersect and sometimes conflict but on an implicitly level playing field. In each instance, the outcome is a purely empirical one. In turn, the relations between the CS and the S-C form the three phases of an analytical cycle made up of (see Figure 3.2): . In fact, the final phase may culminate at T4 in either morphogenesis 8

A. Gouldner, 1971, The Coming Crisis of Western Sociology, London, Heinemann, pp. 241f. 9 On the three forms of conflation – upward, downward and central – see Archer, Culture and Agency, chs. 2, 3 and 4.

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Cultural Conditioning T1

Socio-Cultural Interaction T2

T3 Cultural Elaboration T4

Figure 3.2.  Cultural Morphogenesis

(transformation) or morphostasis (reproduction). In both cases, T4 constitutes the new T1, the conditional influences affecting subsequent interaction. This explanatory framework, employing analytical dualism when undertaking practical cultural investigations, depends upon two simple propositions: that cultural structure necessarily pre-dates the actions which transform it; and that cultural elaboration necessarily post-dates those actions. It follows that I have three disagreements with you: (1) over your ontological dismissal of the objective Cultural System; (2) about your definition of culture(s) – ‘culture is a shared set of practices and understandings’;10 and (3) concerning what you sacrifice by not being able to differentiate between the CS and the S-C levels in terms of accounting for cultural stability or change. Elder-Vass The concept of culture, as I understand it, refers primarily to our institutionalized practices: ways of living (though not usually allencompassing or uncontested ‘forms of life’) that are shared by groups of people, and enacted by individuals because they are so shared.11 For Critical Realists, however, such definitions are at best a preliminary to understanding what something is and how it works. In the spirit of Bhaskar’s early work, we must ask what sort of things exerting what sorts of causal powers are responsible for the phenomena we are investigating.12 Your books Culture and Agency and Realist Social Theory13 10 Elder-Vass, ‘The Emergence of Culture’. 11 This section draws on ibid. 12 Roy Bhaskar, 1975, A Realist Theory of Science, Leeds, Leeds Books; Dave Elder-Vass, 2005, ‘Emergence and the Realist Account of Cause’, Journal of Critical Realism, 4, 315–38. 13 Margaret S. Archer, 1995, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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make an important beginning by framing culture as a morphogenetic cycle including both subjective and objective moments. In the first phase of this cycle, the agent is conditioned by the prevailing objective culture; in the second, the agent acts, or rather interacts with others; and in the third the actions of the agent contribute to the reproduction and/or elaboration of the culture, thus providing the input of phase one to subsequent cycles. In the objective moment of the cycle, individuals are influenced by the existing cultural context, the Cultural System; in the subjective moment, as knowing subjects they choose to act, producing Socio-Cultural interaction that is influenced by the Cultural System, but which in turn reproduces or transforms that system, providing as it does input into the future understandings of the Cultural System by other individuals.14 The subjective moment of this cycle is primarily a matter of human agency, and depends upon the possibility that our beliefs (or sometimes our subconscious dispositions), having been influenced externally in the objective moment, can then have an impact on our subsequent enactment of practices.15 In ontological terms, the entity with causal power here is the person, a human individual who has the causal power to act, under the influence of their own mental properties – those dispositions or beliefs that comprise culture in its subjective form. The difficulties in explaining the ontology of culture arise primarily when we turn to the objective moment of the cycle. To be specific, the problem is this: what form can culture take that is external to individuals and also able to influence their beliefs? Durkheim, for example, offers collective representations or collective consciousness as the answer to this question, but it has never been clear where such representations or consciousness could exist, if not in the minds of individuals.16 In your work you offer a different answer, by invoking a version of Karl Popper’s concept of objective World 3 knowledge. The Cultural System, you argue, ‘is constituted by the corpus of existing intelligibilia – by all things capable of being grasped, deciphered, understood or known by someone’.17 These ‘intelligibilia’ are 14

Ibid., pp. 179–83, 193. 15 For a more detailed discussion of the process by which our beliefs and dispositions affect our actions, see Dave Elder-Vass, 2007, ‘Reconciling Archer and Bourdieu in an Emergentist Theory of Action’, Sociological Theory, 25, 325–46. For a response to this, see Margaret S. Archer, 2010, ‘Can Reflexivity and Habitus Work in Tandem?’, in Margaret S. Archer (ed.), Conversations about Reflexivity, London, Routledge, pp. 123–43, and Archer, 2010, ‘Routine, Reflexivity and Realism’, Sociological Theory, 28, 272–303. 16 Elder-Vass, ‘The Emergence of Culture’. 17 Archer, Culture and Agency, p. 104.

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concrete material things – books, films, documents, musical scores and the like  – from which we can extract cultural meaning. But the Cultural System itself consists not of the material objects themselves (which exist in Popper’s World 1 of material objects), but rather of the ideas that are expressed in them. Hence its components may be logically related to each other, in particular through relations of consistency or contradiction.18 The components of World 3 are distinct from what Popper calls ‘knowledge in the subjective sense, which consists of dispositions and expectations’ of individual human beings, and which constitutes the contents of his World 2. World 3, by contrast, contains ‘knowledge without a knowing subject’, ‘knowledge in the objective sense, which consists of the logical content of our theories, conjectures, guesses’.19 In the account you draw from Popper, then, the objective moment of culture is embedded not in a collective consciousness but in the ideational contents of a collective archive. This has the advantage that the physical material of the archive clearly exists externally to human beings and so its contents are in a synchronic sense autonomous of them and capable of acting back upon them. But this physical material itself is still only part of Popper’s World 1; what the argument requires is that World 3 is autonomous of human beings and capable of acting back upon them. This is much more problematic. As Bloor argued in his early review of Popper’s theory, it is far from clear what ‘mode of being’ the ideational content of the archive could have.20 To put it differently, if World 3 knowledge exists and can influence us, it must exist in some concrete form beyond World 1 artefacts, and Popper fails to identify any such form. We can be reasonably confident that knowledge or ideas can exist as mental properties and that as such they can participate in logical relations. But outside the brain, I would argue, there is no way for ideas to be thought or to participate in logical relations. Popper is in danger of adopting the idealist view that ideas ‘as such’ can be autonomous of people, can influence action and can enter into relations, independently of being mental properties. Popper’s identification of World 3 knowledge with the logical contents of the physical archive is perhaps intended to avoid such charges, but this argument can succeed only if books and other intelligibilia contain ideas as such. But as a material resource the archive contains only marks 18 Popper, Objective Knowledge, pp. 298–9; Archer, Culture and Agency, p. 105. 19 Popper, Objective Knowledge, pp. 66, 109, 73. 20 D. Bloor, 1974, ‘Popper’s Mystification of Objective Knowledge’, Science Studies, 4, 75.

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on paper (or some other medium). Such marks do have what you call a ‘dispositional ability to be understood’ (this chapter, p. 50) but I am concerned about the move from this to the claim that they contain ideas. Books and the like, in conjunction with linguistic systems, can certainly be used to communicate ideas, but it seems to me that what they contain is only a potential to be understood by a skilled reader, and not ideas as such. They contain, I would say, physical representations of ideas. It is only in the reader’s head that these are translated into ideas as such, as a result of a causal process in which the potential of the book interacts with the capabilities of the reader. Within books, then, there is no actual knowledge or culture, only marks that may be used to communicate them; and when that communication is completed successfully, what is produced is subjective (World 2) and not objective (World 3) knowledge or culture. If this is so, then the objective moment of the morphogenetic cycle of culture must take some form other than Popper’s objective knowledge. Instead, I suggest, the objective moment is produced by a collective social entity, a group of human beings. To be more specific, it is a causal effect of the social groups that I have called norm circles.21 A norm circle is the group of people that is committed to endorsing and enforcing a particular norm. To return to the ontological question with which I started, then, my argument is that norm circles are the entities at work in the objective moment of the morphogenetic cycle of culture. In this moment a norm circle can exercise an emergent causal power to increase the tendency of individuals to conform to the norm that it endorses. In the simplest version of the norm circle model, the parts of this entity are the individual human agents who are committed to endorsing and enforcing the norm in their personal relationships with others. But this is more than just a personal commitment: members of a norm circle are aware that other members of the circle share their commitment, they feel an obligation to them to endorse and enforce the norm concerned, and they have an expectation of others that they will support them in that endorsement and enforcement. In other words, the members of a norm circle share a collective intention to support the norm, and as a result they each tend to support it more actively than they would if they 21

Dave Elder-Vass, 2008, ‘Integrating Institutional, Relational, and Embodied Structure: An Emergentist Perspective’, British Journal of Sociology, 59, 281–99, and Elder-Vass, 2010, The Causal Power of Social Structures, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Again this echoes an argument of Bloor’s in ‘Popper’s Mystification of Objective Knowledge’, 76.

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did not share that collective intention.22 Hence, although these social pressures are exercised by individuals, in acting to endorse and enforce a particular norm, an individual acts as the representative of the norm circle for that norm. The consequence is that those individuals who experience the endorsing and enforcing behaviour of the members of a norm circle come to recognize that they face a normative environment in which failure to observe the norm concerned will tend to prompt negative sanctions, whereas observing the norm will tend to elicit a positive response.23 This understanding of the normative environment in turn leads the individuals concerned to tend to internalize a tendency to conform to the norm concerned. Norm circles, then, produce a tendency among individuals to conform to the norms that they espouse; and it is this tendency that is the causal power responsible for normative social institutions. Culture, I suggest, is indistinguishable from such institutions. Whether we are talking about styles of music, food or painting, about how we use language to communicate or about the ways in which we regulate our social relations with each other, to list just a few examples, all of these are normgoverned elements of culture. From this perspective, then, it is a mistake to believe that the ideas that form the content of our culture exist as ideas in some objective form externally to individual human belief. Ideas, as such, exist only as the mental properties of individuals, and it is not some external objective existence but rather their endorsement by a collective that makes them culture. Only individuals have the power to hold beliefs; but only groups have the power to designate those beliefs as elements of shared culture. Culture is not simply belief, but socially endorsed belief, and that social endorsement can only be brought about by the group. Archer You are arguing that ‘books’ – standing for the multi-media archive – do not contain ideas but only representations of them, that is, a potential for being understood by a skilled reader, which puts them inside our heads. Frankly, I don’t follow your distinction between ideas and representations. It is not what William James meant when he discussed the difference between our mental ‘premonitionary tendency’ and the words we then select to 22

For a very clear introduction to the concept of collective intentionality, see M. Gilbert, 1990, ‘Walking Together’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 15, 1–14. 23 There are many complications that I have ignored here; these are discussed in much more depth in Elder-Vass, The Causal Power of Social Structures.

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express a thought.24 Nor is it similar to Charles Taylor’s argument that by repeated ‘articulations’ we refine our own ideas.25 In both of these cases we have ideas in our heads, but they remain locked there – inaccessible to others and influencing no one but their originator – unless they are represented vocally or on paper. It follows that representations are our only public access to ideas as we cannot get inside the heads of their progenitors. And there is no other entrée to any idea, given it is first- person in kind.26 Moreover, I have a further doubt, namely that it is necessary that an idea has to be in someone’s head for it to have legitimate ontological status. Sometimes in everyday life an idea migrates from head to paper and back again. Suppose I make a shopping list, then it is misplaced, and I do the shop without it. I will forget some items that I do need. In that case, my full shopping needs were not in my head but on the list. Similarly, many of us keep the instructions to domestic appliances, accepting that these are more accurate guides to making them work properly than the rather vague ideas retained in our heads, which we do not trust as being correct. Then again, if uncertain about our mental recall, we re-read Durkheim’s Rules, and I would say we are consulting his ideas. Certainly, you agree that we are not consulting Durkheim himself, are not capable of gaining access to his mind by occult means, and neither do we take our colleagues’ views on Durkheim as being authoritative. Yet, you doubt that Rules can ‘contain ideas as such’ because the book is only ‘marks on paper’. However, when we ‘look something up’, we are no longer a ‘knowing subject’ but a subject knowingly in search of knowledge. Thus, I stand by my claim that a book has ‘the dispositional capacity to be understood’. It follows that I think it mistaken to construe books simply as World 1 physical artefacts. As Bhaskar maintains, ‘books are social forms’27 and thus have the same ontological status as ‘structures’, ‘organizations’, ‘roles’ etc. In order to avoid reification he insists that ‘the causal power of social forms is mediated through social agency’.28 Thus, a book requires not only a mind to create it but also another mind to understand it. Mediation is always required;29 24

William James, 1890, The Principles of Psychology, vol. I, London, Macmillan, p. 254. 25 Charles Taylor, 1985, Human Agency and Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 64. 26 Margaret S. Archer, 2007, ‘The Ontological Status of Subjectivity’, in C. Lawson, J. Latsis and N. Martins (eds.), Contributions to Social Ontology, London, Routledge, pp. 17–31. 27 Roy Bhaskar, 1989 [1979], 2nd ed., The Possibility of Naturalism, London, Routledge, p. 40. 28 Ibid., p. 26. 29 Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation; Archer, ‘Can Reflexivity and Habitus Work in Tandem?’

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otherwise both structural and cultural properties are held to operate mysteriously but as hydraulic forces. It also follows that unread books, while retaining their dispositional ability to be understood, can exert no causal powers on anyone. This is another reason why ‘properties’ and causal ‘powers’ should not be run together; many properties exist unexercised. Thus, I think you are wrongly eliding ‘properties’ and ‘powers’ when maintaining that what books and the like ‘contain is only a potential to be understood by a skilled reader, and not ideas as such’ (this chapter, p. 56). Your fundamental objection is that ‘the archive contains not knowledge as such but only potential knowledge: that as a material resource it contains only marks on paper (or some other medium) and that there is no informational content to such marks in the absence of a reader or other interpreter’.30 This denial of ‘informational content’ to our diachronically established archive and its reductive dependency for meaning upon ‘knowing subjects’ can, I think, be shown to unravel. First, I have insisted that the items lodged in the ‘library’ must have the ‘dispositional capacity to be understood’. This is what makes them intelligibilia rather than mere markings, such as those made by the legendary monkeys-at-the-keyboard or, in the case of stones, by natural geo-physical processes. How, at first, do we know that the marks are intelligible? We don’t. But, initially, neither do we know that an unknown language is indeed a language rather than randomly produced sounds. Lack of human recognition at a given time is no guide to intelligibility. What then distinguishes between intelligible and random markings? Ultimately, it is their decipherability. Certainly, the jury may not be convened for centuries (as with the Rosetta Stone while it was hidden under the sands), its members may disagree for a time (as with the Dead Sea Scrolls), and they may fail as decoders (which is why museum exhibits are often re-labelled). In addition, although there is certainly a need for ‘mediation’, there is no a priori reason why the intelligible content requires a ‘mind’ to understand it  – this task could be done by a computer and then put to use by mediating agents. You do concede that what the archive contains is ‘a potential to be understood’ but in my view, the ‘potential’ of a book – that is, the ideas it contains – may or may not be recognized or realized, but that potential is real. Ontologically, that property cannot depend upon ‘the capabilities of the reader’ (this chapter, p. 56). If ideas are made to depend upon our 30

Elder-Vass, ‘The Emergence of Culture’, p. 256.

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human abilities to understand them, this entails a form of the epistemic fallacy: what is becomes reduced to what ‘we’ can grasp, at any given time. Not to be understood at first has been the fate of many scientific theories and novel artistic forms. Undoubtedly, for any ‘intelligible’ to become causally efficacious, someone does have to grasp it, but what they are grasping is something real. These are ideas, culturally deposited by previous thinkers, and cannot be reduced to their subjective apprehension and appropriation and thus transferred to World 2. As Popper himself pointed out, since the full implications of a single hypothesis cannot be comprehended, so knowledge cannot be restricted to the known or to the knower at any point in time. Hence, it cannot be the case that ‘cultural content only exists in people’s heads’. By recording ideas we pass their ‘potential’ along the timeline, and they retain their dispositional ability to be understood, activated, used and abused. Thus, in my view, it is quite legitimate to conceive of contradictions or complementarities existing between two intelligibles, independently of anyone knowing or caring. Idea X is incompatible with idea Y, whether or not any of us yet understand this – just as the contents of the next two books we read may turn out to be. To maintain otherwise is again to commit the epistemic fallacy by making their ability to be understood depend upon our current understanding, which is both anthropocentric and relativistic. Why is this important? I have fully agreed that someone/some group needs to ‘activate’ an idea before it becomes socially salient and influential. The point is that in so doing the group also becomes embroiled in that idea’s logical connections with others. Durkheim gave a splendid example of how early Christian thinking was dogged by its inescapable connections with incompatible Greek eudemonistic thought.31 Because Scripture was written in Greek, it entailed further forays into pagan classical philosophy in order for its concepts to be understood. In other words, the ideas endorsed by a group have to be upheld within an ideational environment established prior to them, one that may be ‘hostile’ (expose the holders to logical contradictions) or ‘friendly’ (introducing them to unsuspected compatibilities) – as Weber described respectively for ancient Judaism compared with Confucianism and Hinduism. In turn, this environment profoundly affects how the ideas held by a group develop: through corrective ‘syncretism’ when confronted by ‘constraining contradictions’ (as with Christianity) versus elaborative ‘systematization’ where ‘concomitant complementarities’32 31

Emile Durkheim, 1977, The Evolution of Educational Thought, London, Routledge. 32 Archer, Culture and Agency, pp. 227–73.

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are encountered (as with Hinduism). These divergent ideational developments remain inexplicable without reference to the logical properties of the field of ideas into which a group has plunged itself by embracing a particular belief, theory or set of propositions. The Morphogenetic Approach to culture was advanced precisely to give a handle to this. Elder-Vass Perhaps the central question on which we disagree is the nature and implications of the ‘dispositional capacity to be understood’ or the ‘potential to be understood by a skilled reader’ which we would both attribute to intelligibilia. As you say, if a book has such a potential, then the potential is real independently of whether it is recognized or realized; its realization depends upon the capabilities of the reader but the potential does not. On my understanding, we may call this potential a property of the book, or a power, and this argument applies equally to properties or powers. The potential to be understood, then, is a causal power of a book, which may or may not be realized depending upon whether or not the book is actually read by a skilled reader. But we need to be still more careful, I think, about what we mean by ‘understood’ in this sentence. In one usage (typified by the phrase ‘on my understanding’ as used above), to understand something is to impose a meaning on it or to extract a meaning from it. In another, to understand something is to extract the right meaning from it. For many of our day-to-day communications, this distinction is unproblematic. If I say ‘my car is blue’ then no one with any significant grasp of English will have difficulty in extracting the right meaning from this. Technically, all such attributions of meaning are f­allible but much of our communication is clear and unambiguous enough that we can rely on obtaining practically adequate understandings of it. If this were not so, we could not even begin to conduct a debate like this one. Still, a great deal of culture – and for academics often the most interesting part of it – is far from unambiguous. Many of our books can be understood in more than one way, and it is not even conceptually clear what the right way would be. One reading of the right way to understand something is to understand it as the author intended it to be understood. But what of the Freudian slip? If I say one thing while meaning another, perhaps the right way to understand what I say is to understand the words that are actually said, as they would generally be understood by members of our presumptively shared linguistic culture, rather than what I intend. More significantly for scholars, perhaps, we must consider the questions raised by hermeneutics. When the author

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is from a different culture from our own, we may bring different connotations to the words in use and thus come to a different understanding than that intended. At some level of precision, it may be impossible for us to arrive at an accurate understanding of what the author intended since the nuances of her use of language may be lost to history. Many texts may also have contemporary significance that depends upon interpreting them from within the linguistic or other cultural assumptions of some period other than that in which they were written. Religious texts such as the Bible and the Qur’an are perhaps the most obvious cases. The implication is that, even if we confine our sense of ‘understanding’ to the concept of understanding that depends on attributing the right meaning, a book may have the potential to be understood in a number of different ways. But we also need to consider the looser sense of understanding. To forestall some possible objections and confusions let me use a different term here: we may say that a book has the potential to stimulate a sense of its meaning in a reader, where the term sense is used to indicate that no judgement is implicit in whether this sense is a right understanding or not. In the process of reading, a causal interaction occurs between book and reader, in which the reader interprets the text in the light of their linguistic and cultural dispositions or beliefs. The outcome is to generate a sense of meaning in the reader. The book, it seems to me, has the potential to stimulate many different senses of meaning in different readers. To return to Durkheim’s Rules, for example, it is abundantly clear that this book generates a wide variety of senses of meaning, particularly if we include undergraduate students in our population of readers. If we are treating the ideational potential of a book in purely causal terms, then we cannot restrict it simply to the potential to stimulate the right meaning, or the author’s intended meaning if that is the variety of right meaning that is implicit in the concept of a Cultural System. This is not to say, of course, that we cannot make rational judgements or rational arguments about which of these senses is the most valuable or accurate way of representing the meaning of a text. Many possible readings of a text are simply wrong because they are based on failures to understand the language used; and others are highly implausible because they are not coherent with other parts of the same text or with other texts that we have good reason to think of as closely related. But such judgements always rest on a social process: the social process by which we acquire our language, for example, or those in which we discuss meanings of texts with teachers or colleagues. This in itself, of course, is not in conflict with your argument: these are varieties of Socio-Cultural interaction that, in your terms, contribute to the elaboration of a Cultural

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System (or, I might say, something that is in some senses functionally equivalent to a Cultural System). In strictly causal terms, then, we could argue that a book (or other intelligible) has the causal power to stimulate a range of possible senses of its meaning, that the realization of such meaning always occurs in a process of interaction between the book and the linguistic/cultural preconceptions of the reader, and that, given the book and the cultural context, some of the possible meanings are more likely to be realized than others. In interpretive terms, the realized meaning, or the most likely meaning to be realized, may or may not be an accurate representation of the author’s intended meaning. What can it mean, then, to say that a book’s potential is that it contains ‘ideas-yet-to-be-understood’? In the strictly causal account offered above, there is a coherent but metaphorical way of making sense of this: that physical books (in Popper’s World 1), in interaction with readers, produce ideas in those readers’ heads (ideas, that is, in Popper’s World 2). Within the book itself, however, those actual ideas do not exist; the book merely possesses a range of potentials, a range of different ways in which it might be read. At best we may say that its text produces a tendency for it to be understood in some ways rather than others. But it is only in our heads that each book assumes a determinate set of meanings. It would therefore be, I think, a mistake to conclude that intelligibilia contain a strictly determinate set of ideas that constitutes a Cultural System independently of human interpretations of it: there is no World 3. Despite these sceptical reservations, we must recognize that contemporary societies have developed a set of linguistic/communicative practices that are extremely effective in ensuring that intelligibilia often can be understood: understood in the strong sense that their consumers often obtain a practically adequate understanding of the author’s intended meaning. As a result, books and other intelligibilia are enormously important resources in these societies, and I admit that I have neglected their cultural significance in most of my work to date, which has focused more on the cultural consequences of spoken and physical interactions between people. Your comments here have stimulated me to think a little more about the role of intelligibilia, or what we might call the archive of cultural products. In my account of culture we do face an ‘ideational environment’ of sorts, but one that consists not of ideas but of a set of norm circles, and the awareness they create of ideas that those around us share and endorse (or reject). So far I have tended to think of these norm circles as composed of people, but our discussion has prompted the thought that these norm circles may be hybrid entities, complexes of both people and intelligibilia;

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that the combination of these two produces a tendency for individuals to live according to particular cultural standards (i.e. Socio-Cultural interaction). The ideas that people extract from their interactions with intelligibilia may influence them, just as those that are communicated to them verbally may do. Again the Bible and the Qur’an are striking examples. Norm circles in pre-literate societies could perhaps operate without intelligibilia (and, if so, the implication is that we can have culture without intelligibilia) but with the advent of writing we start to acquire documents that take on an important role in shaping and stabilizing cultures. Intelligibilia, as you say, provide a means for passing cultural influences ‘along the timeline’, by virtue of being (fallibly) understandable in the strong sense. The ideational environment, on this view, is a complex of norm circles, each of which is a contextually variable mix of people and intelligibilia, which combine to create a sense in each of us of our culture, a sense that influences our action. While I’m unconvinced by the argument that they contain ideas as such, then, my understanding of intelligibilia allows that people may decipher potential ideas from them and subsequently make use of them. In many respects this operates ‘as if’ there were actually a stock of ideas in the archive. But what’s missing so far from this kind of model of Cultural Systems is that the material we tend to draw on from the vast array available in the archive is almost always material that has preferential credibility because we understand it to be endorsed in some way by some group – what I will call an epistemic norm circle.33 In education, for example, students are guided by an epistemic norm circle composed mainly of teachers and curriculum designers to think of some written sources as worthwhile, or as more reliable than others, and hence the claims represented in them are attributed the status of knowledge. For claims to be socially endorsed in this way, it is not necessary for them to exist in World 3. All that is necessary is that we can communicate them in practically adequate fashion using World 1 intelligibilia and linguistic systems as a bridge between the islands of individual World 2 consciousness. This preferential endorsement of some ideas and sources over others is a fundamental element of the ideational environment that each of us faces. If we were to compare the Cultural Systems, for example, of the UK and the USA in the area of their understandings of the origins of humanity, then we would find that essentially the same set of intelligibilia is available in both (at least if we define intelligibilia in terms of their ideational ‘content’ – there is no doubt a radical difference in the 33

Dave Elder-Vass, 2009, ‘Towards a Social Ontology of Knowledge’, paper presented at BSA Theory Study Group conference, Warwick.

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quantities of certain books between the two). But in the USA creationism is taken extremely seriously whereas in the UK it is generally considered to be not only false but also based on a misguided conception of scientific knowledge. Now, as I’m sure you’d insist, this difference requires a morphogenetic explanation, but there is also a synchronic difference between these two Cultural Systems, and I don’t see how the concept of the Cultural System as a stock of ideas can make sense of this difference. What is needed here is a recognition that not all ideas within a Cultural System are equal, and I suggest that this is explained by the differences in their tendency to be normatively endorsed. In this case there are radical differences in the degree of endorsement of creationist and evolutionist texts in the two countries. While these different patterns of endorsement may be reflected within, for example, the writings of educationalists, and thus available in the archive, it is not their recognition in the archive that makes the difference; it is the commitment that actual teachers have to endorse them in their interactions with students. And this commitment is distinct from those actual Socio-Cultural interactions themselves; it is a normative commitment that is itself the product of a wider social group, and that affects those Socio-Cultural interactions. Still, you might reply, this is all a matter of Socio-Cultural interaction, and I am ignoring one of the central characteristics of the Cultural System as you understand it: the claim that the Cultural System has ‘autonomous logical relations among its component ideas’ (this chapter, p. 50). In particular, you argue that ideas may stand in relations of consistency or contradiction with each other, independently of what goes on in Socio-Cultural interaction, and that such logical relations between ideas have a social impact. Evolutionism and creationism, for example, seem to be downright contradictory of each other. You want to distinguish between the social significance of Socio-Cultural conflict or consensus, on the one hand, and ideational contradiction or consistency, on the other. One might say, for example, that the consensus over evolutionism has been disrupted in the USA because of the logical contradiction between these two perspectives that remained despite an earlier socially imposed consensus. Creationism as an active creed could even have died out entirely but been revived on the basis of readings of Genesis. Logical relations, I would say in response, exist in our heads. We share similar understandings of logical relations because we share similar cognitive capacities and we are taught to use them – to reason – in similar ways. Logical relations are themselves ideas, ideas about the relations between other ideas. Some such ideas may refer to actual relations that hold autonomously of us. For example, if it is true, as I take it that it is, that it is impossible for two different non-nested material objects to fully

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occupy the same volume of space at the same time, then the suggestion that material object A can be in location X at the same time as the different non-nested material object B is a logical contradiction that refers to a fact that is autonomous of our beliefs about it. The logical relation itself, however, still only exists in our heads. Furthermore, the truth of real impossibilities does not in itself entail that a corresponding contradiction will be represented or even implicit in intelligibilia, or vice versa. I argue, then, that outside our brains or minds there is no way for ideas to participate in logical relations. Relations such as contradiction cannot exist within the intelligibilia (between their contents), though they can of course be represented in them, just as any other idea can. This, however, need not deprive them of socio-historical significance. To see why this is so, let us consider the process of Cultural Morphogenesis documented in your T1–T4 model above. As I understand it, in the first phase of this cycle, the cultural conditioning phase, individual actors are influenced by the Cultural System, that is by the ideational contents of intelligibilia. This then affects their Socio-Cultural interactions in the second phase, but they learn from these interactions and reflect upon them, leading to the third phase in which cultural elaboration occurs through their production of new intelligibilia. This phase may result in cultural reproduction, if the new intelligibilia add nothing to the ideational content of the old ones, or cultural transformation, if they add new content. Now, I suggest, there is no need for World 3 in this model. Cultural conditioning can still occur through interaction with intelligibilia even if intelligibilia contain only representations of ideas, even if those representations can only be apprehended fallibly, and even if there is no definite truth of the right way to apprehend them. And cultural elaboration can still occur in these same circumstances. What is being elaborated, however, is not a determinate autonomous Cultural System composed of ideas, but a stock of intelligibilia with a contingent and variable impact on our understandings. The Morphogenetic Approach can dispense with World 3. This does not deprive it of the ability to recognize the detection of contradiction as an element in the causal process, but it does enable us to become more flexible about the way individuals come to terms with the archive. In particular, it enables us to recognize that the influence on us of intelligibilia is not a direct and unmediated transmission of belief, but rather a process in which our reading of the source is influenced by our previous Socio-Cultural interactions (as when, for example, we are reading something recommended by a teacher and therefore are disposed to believe it) and modified by our subsequent interactions (as when, for example, we discuss what we have read in class and realize that others interpret it differently).

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Archer It seems to me that one reason we cannot reach agreement on the Cultural System hinges on other debates, particularly about the ontological status of logic, that we do not have the space to discuss here. Hence, I will simply signal what I see as being the crux of that issue. This concerns your view that people’s similar understandings – presumably local ones for you – of ‘logical relations’ depend on our similar cognitive capacities but also on the fact that ‘we are taught to use them – to reason – in similar ways’ (this chapter, p. 65). On the contrary, I maintain that logic – the principles of identity and non-contradiction – is acquired in natural practice and is a predicate of being able to think at all and thus also of verbal communication.34 The understanding of logical relations is therefore prior to any teaching act and primitive to the expression of logic as ideas. Consequently, logical relations are not themselves ideas, only formulations of logic are such. I would like now to move over and discuss the Socio-Cultural level, where our debate continues. You hold that the objective aspects of culture are exclusively the property of a social group, specifically a ‘norm circle’, which ‘is an entity with the emergent causal power to increase the dispositions of individuals to conform to the norm endorsed and enforced by the norm circle concerned’.35 I have no quarrel with this at all because it is exactly what I hold that social groups try to do through Socio-Cultural interaction, in which they indeed exercise causal powers of their own kind, thus (potentially) increasing normative conformity.36 However, actions that attempt to produce cultural unification through, for example, censorship, containment strategies or ideological manipulation pertain to the S-C level alone. In addition, the emergent causal powers of intelligibilia are needed to explain why any group would try to restrict access to the archive in the above ways. In so doing, these actors themselves acknowledge the objective (CS) capacity of ideas contrary to their own to threaten what they hold ideationally – hence the largely symbolic act of publicly burning books. Given the ubiquity of social conflict over ideas, we also have a disagreement about the S-C level. For you, ‘the most fundamental feature of cultures’ is that ‘culture is a shared set of practices and u ­ nderstandings’.37 To me, such sharing is always an aim on the part of a particular group and 34

Margaret S. Archer, 2000, Being Human, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 145–52. 35 Elder-Vass, ‘The Emergence of Culture’, p. 359. 36 Archer, Culture and Agency, pp. 185–226. 37 Elder-Vass, ‘The Emergence of Culture’, p. 352.

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never a definition,38 much less a state of affairs ‘that tends to produce and sustain shared ways of living’.39 In order to discuss sharedness, I need to introduce an example of a ‘norm circle’ and will use the Roman Catholic Church because the existence of its Magisterium (which includes the Catechism and Social Doctrine) shows that it clearly intends its norms to be shared by all members of the ‘one holy, catholic and apostolic church’. However, in terms of your two criteria of normative sharedness, namely, common ‘practices’ and common ‘understandings’, neither is met. ‘Practices’ as diverse as the sexual norms advocated in the encyclical Humanae Vitae and the liturgical norms endorsed by the Second Vatican Council are, in the first case, widely ignored and, in the second case, hotly contested (by those seeking to re-universalize the Roman Rite).40 Certainly, many Catholics do share other beliefs (although most of these have been contentious at one time or another), so how much has to be shared? Equally, they draw upon different strands from the long history of Catholic thinking, ones which are not fully ideationally compatible, so how consensual does a norm group have to be? ‘Understandings’ are equally problematic: here I agree with you. Every Sunday it is the duty of the faithful to say the Creed but, were it broken down into its component propositions, the most diverse array of understood meanings would result. Rather differently, since the Church’s Social Doctrine is frequently called its ‘best-kept secret’, what ‘proportion’ of group norms has to be Socio-Culturally shared for a group to constitute a ‘norm group’? Your response to this problem is to argue that it is not the case that ‘the group as such can only endorse beliefs if the group as such ‘‘knows’’ them’. Instead, ‘All that is necessary is: (i) that the members of a group are able to recognise whether any given action conforms to their understanding of the norm; and (ii) that their understandings of the norm are reasonably closely consistent with each other’ (my italics).41 Yet, my above examples of ‘practices’ (actions) show condition (i) not to be met (Catholics practising contraception know they are flouting the norm) and the examples of ‘understandings’ show that condition (ii) is not met either (when norms are overtly contested or many members have no knowledge of them, the norms, as understood, cannot be ‘closely consistent’). What are we to make of the Catholic Church (the Anglican Church is even more problematic) since it does seem to be a ‘norm circle’ in the 38

Elder Vass states ‘culture by definition is shared by a group’ (ibid., p. 354) and ‘culture is inherently shared’ (ibid., p. 359). 39 Ibid., p. 359. 40 I do not have space to go into the details, but both instances are well documented. 41 Elder-Vass, ‘The Emergence of Culture’, p. 360.

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general meaning of the term? Here, I think you are caught on the horns of a dilemma. Either you can respond that the Catholic Church is not what it seems to be because it lacks the sharedness of practices and understandings definitive of a norm group. However, if the sharing has to be reasonably high and consensual for a group to count as a norm group, then you will end up endorsing the Myth of Cultural I­ ntegration,42 which you rightly want to avoid. The alternative response could be for you to maintain that the Catholic Church is a case where there are ‘many and conflicting norm circles in any given social space’ rather than a ‘heavy clustering of norm circles around a broad cultural consensus’.43 If so, the fact that most of the sub-groups mentioned above remain in the Church raises the question of what holds them together, despite their ideational differences (often drawn from distinct parts of the CS and pulling in contrary directions)? It will hardly do to say that they must have sufficient in common because ‘the group’ does not fall apart. Furthermore, the requirement of a ‘reasonably closely consistent set of understandings’ poses another problem, one encountered in discussions of Wittgenstein’s notion of a ‘form of life’. If the demand for cultural consensus is stringent, then ‘the group’ meeting it becomes diminishingly small,44 perhaps reducing to two people. Yet the normative dyad hardly qualifies as an ‘epistemic community’ or constitutes a useful building block for sociology. Yet, if the demand is not fairly stringent, in what sense can we fairly talk about a collectivity being a norm group, rather than several, as delineated by their differences? Nevertheless, the two of us are equally concerned to uphold the existence of ideational groups, that is, to resist ideal interests and groupings being presented as epiphenomena of material interests and groupings. However, at the Socio-Cultural level, it is important that all who manifestly adhere to some theory or cluster of beliefs are not automatically assumed to be ‘true believers’. To slide from observing an overt ‘sharing’ of ideas into the assumption that this represents a genuine ‘community’ is always a mistake. In the attempt to mobilize support for a cause, some will be culturally bamboozled and others will be calculative in deploying ideas to resist or undermine those of their opponents. Still others will become disillusioned and be preparing a bid for normative breakaway. To do so, their leaders will scrutinize the supposed conspectus for loose ends and contradictory threads. 42

Archer, ‘The Myth of Cultural Integration’. 43 Elder-Vass, ‘The Emergence of Culture’, p. 357. 44 R. Trigg, 1973, Reason and Commitment, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 70–1.

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They will also do as we do when stuck over an idea – go and raid the library for some new material. The archive that is the Cultural System is also their reclamation yard from which inert ideas can be given new social salience, be re-tooled into sources of critique, of self-legitimation or of counter-ideologies. Since their S-C opponents do not usually feel secure enough to remain speechless, they will do likewise. From their subsequent clash, the elaboration of ideas develops. Thus, it is rarely adequate to explain the outcome of S-C conflict (or quiescence) as remaining at the level of group hostility or hegemony; cultural dynamics also involved the CS and how agents actively mediate the ideational resources deposited there. Elder-Vass Although we clearly disagree on the nature of the Cultural System, I am not convinced that there are substantial underlying disagreements between us on the nature of Socio-Cultural interaction. Certainly, the account you offer of the Roman Catholic Church above is much more complex than the simple picture of a single norm circle. But here I have offered only a brief and very abstract discussion of norm circles. There is much more to be said about them, and in saying that elsewhere I have elaborated the application of the concept in ways that converge with your comments above.45 Let me just make two brief points on norm circles here. First, in describing norm circles, I am seeking to identify the mechanism behind normativity and for that purpose I abstract from a vast range of complexities that must subsequently be reintroduced into the analysis. Secondly, actual social institutions or organizations do not map neatly onto norm circles; they are far more complex normative structures, and indeed they do more than enforce normative standards. These two points may be brought together by theorizing actual organizations, from the normative perspective, as complexes of partly clustered and partly diverse (non-congruent) norm circles. Hence, for example, the Roman Catholic Church may ‘officially’ endorse a single set of norms but in practice different (and sometimes conflicting) norms are endorsed and enforced by different sub-sets of its membership. If we were to conduct an applied analysis of its normative structure, we would need to explore these diverse norm circles and their relations with each other, from both a synchronic and a morphogenetic perspective. This would be a massive undertaking, and it would need to address all the complexities you quite rightly highlight here. 45

Elder-Vass, The Causal Power of Social Structures, chs. 6–8.

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In the end, it seems to me, our disagreement over the nature of culture reflects well on Critical Realism. It demonstrates that there are different ways to be realist about the social world that may be equally compatible with a realist philosophical ontology. That ontology informs but does not determine how we think of the social world. How we do think of the social must be sensitive not only to realism’s philosophical ontology but also to the need for coherence with a plausible body of more specifically social theory and with our empirical experience of the social world. Furthermore, we may disagree on some questions – here, the existence or not of something like Popper’s World 3 – while continuing to agree on others – such as the value of analytical dualism and the morphogenetic cycle as frameworks for theorizing the relationships between structure, culture and agency. Above all, the very possibility of such a debate demonstrates a lack of dogmatism and an openness to debate that is of fundamental importance to the long-term health of any research tradition. Archer I accept that we will have to settle for an amicable disagreement between us. However, in concluding, it seems worthwhile taking a step back in order to diagnose the source of our differences. These, I suggest, are twofold: (a) the first concerns the kind of contribution that we are respectively trying to make in the cultural field, while (b) the second relates to our sociological interpretations and applications of realism as a meta-theory of social science. (a) My own concern as a working sociologist is to develop and refine an analytical framework that is useful for conducting substantive analyses of why the cultural order – or part of it – is, in Max Weber’s words, ‘so rather than otherwise’. That is why I call the Morphogenetic Approach an ‘explanatory framework’, in other words, a practical toolkit.46 This means attempting to provide guidelines to produce particular explanations of cultural phenomena in different times and places, the most important being: • How the prior context in which cultural interaction develops influences the form it takes. • Which relations between agents respond most closely to these influences and which tend to cross-cut or nullify them. • Most generally, under what conditions cultural interaction results in morphostasis rather than morphogenesis. 46

J. Parker, 2000, Structuration, Buckingham, Open University Press, pp. 69–85.

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On the other hand, I think you are more concerned with the philosophy of social science and with clarifying the ‘domain assumptions’ appropriate to undertaking any analysis of cultural phenomena. As it were, your self-imposed task is to vet which tools can legitimately be put into the toolbox, rather than to provide instructions about how to use its contents as a toolkit. This is a useful job but it is a different role. Yours remains closer to Bhaskar’s own designation of himself as a ‘philosophical under-labourer’; mine is more that of a theoretical face-worker. Obviously, there is significant overlap between these roles or we could not have had this debate. That we have done so means we are both committed to sustaining the connection between meta-theory and substantive analysis, without which the former risks becoming entirely abstract and the latter unduly instrumentalist. (b) While I fully agree that realism is a broad church, like all such, it is susceptible to the development of ‘parties’ within it. Increasingly over recent years, you are advancing a ‘softer version’, one almost impregnable to the traditional changes of reification made against realism and also to criticisms of the misattribution of causal powers to entities that cannot be powerful particulars.47 This invulnerability is because you now make a more minimalist claim that – in both the structural and the cultural domains – seeks to vindicate only that ‘groups influence their members’, an effect you rightly call an emergent property and power. In turn, such minimalism enables your ‘softer realism’ to collaborate ecumenically with many more sociological approaches, even with the ‘strong programme’ in the sociology of knowledge, as seen in this discussion. However, it seems to me that there is both a price to such openness and a question about its sustainability. The price is a slide towards ‘central conflation’. Few will balk at ‘group influence’48 and, though you rightly insist on deeming it emergent, others will have little difficulty in incorporating it into the agenda of structuration theory, under their own descriptions. The way to avoid this happening links directly to the issue I have called sustainability. It seems insufficient to remain content with the designation of ‘norm circles’ (a more complex sociological task than it appears at first glance, as we have seen when discussing the 47

P. T. Manicas, 2006, A Realist Philosophy of Social Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; C. R. Varela, 2007, ‘Elder-Vass’s Move and Giddens’s Call’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 37, 201–10. 48 Indeed, it is even quite compatible with Watkins’s canonical statement of methodological individualism, where acceptable predicates can include ‘statements about the dispositions, beliefs, resources and inter-relations of individuals’ (J. W. N. Watkins, 1968, ‘Methodological Individualism and Social Tendencies’, in M. Brodbeck (ed.), Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, New York, Macmillan, pp. 270–1; my italics).

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case of the Roman Catholic Church) and their potential effect upon their ­members. The exercise of this influence is a matter of relations within the group and its relationality with other groupings (or relations between relations). I am non-minimalist because I am seeking to defend a wider range of emergent properties whose effect is to give more purchase on the analysis of substantive sociological issues. The justification is that this yields a richer explanatory programme, but it does also attract greater costs. ‘High Realism’ is not highly ecumenical, it creates more opponents than collaborators, and it remains vulnerable to antiquated critiques that have been rebutted. Since it is crucial to get both tasks right – a warranted philosophy of social science and a justifiable explanatory programme – discussions like this one are the best way forward. Archer

Postscript: Analysing Culture and Its Relations to SAC

This dialogue has not disposed of two generic questions about culture and ones that raise issues found challenging beyond the social sciences. The first is the ontological question about what culture is if it can exert causal powers. I think we need to examine further the ontology underpinning the answers given in this debate. To recap, for me any Cultural System (certainly not Socio-Cultural interaction) is made up of intelligibilia (Popper’s World 3), constituted ‘by all things capable of being grasped, deciphered, understood or known by someone’ – whether anyone does so or not at a given time. All such ideas, including discredited ones, together form the Universal Digital Archive. Conversely, ElderVass quintessentially maintains that ‘it is a mistake to believe that the ideas that form the content of our culture exist as ideas in some objective form externally to individual human belief. Ideas, as such, exist only as the mental properties of individuals, and it is not some external objective existence but rather their endorsement by a collective that makes them culture’ (this chapter, p. 57). As has been seen, this collective is the ‘norm circle(s)’ and thus culture. ‘World 3’ becomes reduced to ‘World 2’ and necessarily culture is reduced to agency, thus abrogating SAC. This dispute turns upon whether ideas (possessing causal powers) need to be based upon some substantive referent whose existence is indisputable. It is the same debate that preoccupied mathematicians about the reality of numbers and the theories built upon them. I accept that these are ‘abstract entities’ whose causal powers justify according them ontological status and thus one that is different in kind from World 2.

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Porpora uses the persuasive example of chess and asks if it exists only when it is played. He counters that the first problem would be that ‘a single thing, chess, has, simultaneously, multiple locations. The second problem is that if at some moment in time no one in the world is playing chess, then it sounds like chess at that moment does not exist.’49 But its existence does not depend upon agents here present. We interact with it, as we do intermittently with many ideas, but just because my garden needs watering, the idea that plants cannot flourish without it does not vanish when, as now, I am otherwise preoccupied with the ontology of chess. In a strange but not ghostly sense, ideas have eternal life in the CS even if not invoked or actively suppressed (through the burning of books, censorship etc.) because the Universal Digital Archive also houses erroneous ‘abstract ideas’ (such as the ‘humours’ of classical medicine) that may Socio-Culturally discourage repetition of what have long been deemed dead ends through the CR process of Judgemental Rationality. Secondly there is the question of scope. Whilst SAC is usable for any scale of analysis from the dyadic micro level to macroscopic civilizations, can that be the case for ‘norm circles’? In Culture and Agency I presented two scenarios in which the dominant CS ideas were respectively (i) broadly compatible and fostered growing density of this conspectus and (ii) harboured significant contradictions that could not simply be jettisoned but instead constituted an objective fault line running through and between its constitutive ‘abstract entities’ and threatening the counter-actualization of one or the other and hence the fragmentation of the existing corpus as a whole. In any historical case, including yesterday, this was only a starting point because what eventuated depended upon what groups of agents then did – in organizing themselves into collectives and in articulating their strategic objectives. The full use of SAC is needed to supply adequate explanations of why and how (i) and (ii) above generated differences not just in terms of morphostasis versus morphogenesis but as precise and variable forms of both. The big difference is that it is hard to see how the norm circle approach can aspire to the same task. It seems that there are difficulties in its furnishing adequate descriptions and thus identifications. Readers are given few practical and current examples. Did all of those seeking ‘Leave’ in relation to Brexit do so for the same reasons and did they pursue it with the same intensity? In other words, did they constitute a single norm circle? We know that the ‘Remainers’ in Scotland were at least partially

49

Porpora, Reconstructing Sociology, pp. 174–5.

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motivated by the hope of gaining national independence, but was that the case for all? I am not saying that empirically this would be impossible to ascertain, but I am asking how such a study would differ significantly from the standard survey of attitudes. In short, how does one define the members of such a circle, because without such a definition of ‘membership’ it is hard to assign increased support for any cause to the pressures they are held to exert? This raises a much more important question, namely how could the effective influence of a norm circle be attributed historically? I see no way in which this could be accomplished given that those who fight for any cause are its vanguard and thus its minority of supporters. Elder-Vass has nowhere shown how the participants/membership of any historical circle could be identified. Without this being possible (through some sort of membership list for the dead, and historically usually the long dead), it cannot be done. This is how ‘presentism’ wreaks its own revenge; it deprives this approach from supplying generative mechanisms for macroscopic social dynamics in the past. Much as I respect my interlocutor, I cannot help agreeing with Jamie Morgan50 that the norm circle approach is more about shoring up the social ontology of CR than it is about providing a framework for explaining the dynamics of social change over time.

50

Jamie Morgan, 2015, ‘What Is Progress in Realism? An Issue Illustrated Using Norm Circles’, Journal of Critical Realism, 13:2, 115–38.

4

Should Concepts of Culture Give More Prominence to Critical Discourse Analysis? Featuring Jack Newman, 2020, ‘Critical Realism, Critical Discourse Analysis and the Morphogenetic Approach’, Journal of Critical Realism, 20:5, 433–55

ARTICLE ABSTRACT

This paper contributes to the development of a critical realist approach to discourse analysis by combining aspects of ‘critical discourse analysis’ (CDA) and ‘the morphogenetic/morphostatic approach’ (M/M). Unlike poststructuralist discourse theory, CDA insists on the maintenance of two distinctions: (i) between discourse and other aspects of social reality; (ii) between structure and agency. However, CDA lacks clarity on these distinctions. M/M, on the other hand, offers a coherent modelling of them that can underpin the application of CDA. The paper begins by introducing CDA, M/M and the existing literature on critical realist discourse analysis. It then establishes the M/M model of social change within CDA’s existing social theory by focusing on ‘analytical dualism’ and ‘social practice’. Finally, the paper locates the concept of discourse within M/M’s model of social change by theorising discourse as one of four objective structures of meaning. Introduction In rounding off Part I, I want to underline the significance of the ‘structure–agency problem’ coming to dominate social theory in the postwar twentieth century. This dyadic thinking marginalized ‘culture’ as a component with its own distinct properties and causal powers through endorsing central conflation. However, it was never entirely expelled given the need to refer to legitimation and ideologies in the delineation of collective agents and their mutual contestation. Even where it played a vital role (e.g. for Foucault and Bourdieu) it never constituted a full ‘sociology of normativity’. Chapter 3 was significant because Elder-Vass concentrated upon the role of ‘norm circles’ but focused much more upon influential agential groupings than upon the origins, contents and development of their normativity. This ‘agential bias’ is not the case here, but perhaps it goes too far in the opposite direction. 76

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Jack Newman’s contribution is refreshing both in avoiding the extremism of the Linguistic Turn (ignored here because its advocates simply shunned the M/M approach) and in his willingness to explore the relations between language, discourse (CDA) and Critical Realism, specifically with the M/M approach itself. I have sympathy with his CDA commitment because inter alia my own work on reflexivity1 was completely dependent upon conversational exchanges with subjects whose linguistic content remained unexamined as such. However, as with all SAC combinations of the elements involved, none can be presumed to enjoy hegemony over or equality with one another. Thus, a major question throughout this chapter is: which can be deemed the Senior Partner or is this a variable matter? This chapter leads on from the previous because Dave Elder-Vass has answered the same question but not in the same way. We will come to this. Jack Newman is the reverse of those who deploy a critique of the Morphogenetic Approach as a way in which to air their opposition to Critical Realism. On the contrary, he ‘seeks to contribute to the ongoing project of developing a specifically critical realist approach to discourse analysis’ (2).2 He is not alone in this enterprise; Ismael Al-Amoudi, Norman Fairclough, Alistair Mutch and Andrew Sayer among other realists have already worked on these lines. I, too, welcome this project because there must be a good deal more to the conceptualization of culture within social theory than I have put forward. However, I do have an initial problem with the definition above of Newman’s project, for it refers to three different objectives in the text. (i) The argument (he calls ‘crucial’) that ‘discourse can be thought of as a constituent of “culture”’, such that the ‘notion of “discourse” is specifically located within the M/M notion of “culture” (12; see also 8). In fact I argue that it plays a much broader role in what I term ‘Socio-Cultural level’. (ii) Later, the statement is the reverse: ‘morphogenetic cultural theory [sic]3 can be imported into CDA as a tool for the analysis of contradictions in discourse’ (24). It is indeed a tool but it plays a much more 1 Margaret S. Archer, 2003, Structure, Agency, and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Archer, 2007, Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Archer, 2012, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 2 Jack Newman, 2020, ‘Critical Realism, Critical Discourse Analysis and the Morphogenetic Approach’, Journal of Critical Realism, 20:5, 433–55. In this chapter, page references in parentheses refer to the online version of this article. 3 The Morphogenetic Approach is not a theory but a meta-theory because it explains nothing; it is a framework used by specialists to marshal their findings into a ‘Practical Social Theory’ of whatever they choose.

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important theoretical role than this. (iii) Elsewhere, the two (M/M and CDA) are talked about as existing (usefully) ‘alongside’ one another, so that ‘practitioners of CDA might analyse discourse alongside a clear and coherent model of social change’ (4), referring to M/M. Here I question if ‘alongside’ is not an unduly passive notion of their relationship. Whilst (i) and (ii) designate a different Senior Partner, (iii) does not and instead accentuates their partnership. This seems basically correct, although like any human partners their relative importance is variable. The third (iii) is also the most important because positions (i) and (ii) are nothing new. In the Introduction I reminded the reader about the twentieth-century tendency in the USA to treat ‘culture’ and ‘society’ as interchangeable terms, meaning that ‘discourse’ was already included – regardless of this term being a late-comer. Its arrival signalled an epistemological change, not an ontological one, despite the fact that some sociologists found it more acceptable to think in such terms. The second (ii) characterized some strands of neo-Marxism, such as the ‘dominant ideology’ thesis,4 where its role – what it added – was to buttress the domination of the ruling class by ideational legitimation. Obviously, this meant that the ideology and the material basis of social domination needed to be compatible – or given that appearance – for the former to perform a legitimatory function. But the quotation indicates the subordination of the ideational discourse to the material base if its internal contradictions were to be identified (by social scientists) and overcome by protagonists of the dominant mode of production. Very significant too is the absence of any mention of ‘complementarities’ between the material base and the prevailing ideology, yet their accentuation or development could be important for subsequent social developments. In other words, discourses could harbour real unrecognized possibilities at any time, even if for some indeterminate period they fall on deaf epistemological ears.5 Newman employs ‘discourse’ as a cultural catch-all – hence his adoption of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in his title and arguments. He remarks quite correctly that ‘M/M offers very little engagement with the concept of discourse and is notably silent on discourse analysis’ (4). It does because I have reservations about the Foucauldian uses of the term in his early work. These I share with Elder-Vass:

4

Nicholas Abercrombie, Stephen Hill and Bryan Turner, 1980, The Dominant Ideology Thesis, London, Allen & Unwin. 5 Margaret S. Archer, 1988, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ch. 6, ‘Contradictions and Complementarities in the Cultural System’.

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The most striking of these, for a realist, relate to the ontology of discursive formations and two connected questions: how could discourse possibly have a causal effect, and how could this be reconciled with the causal roles of individual human agents or subjects? In the absence of adequate answers to these questions, there is a suspicion that Foucault’s argument depends on reifying discourse; on treating it as having power without any explanation of how this could be so. Such suspicions are amplified when it becomes clear that in his archaeological phase, he treats discourse as more or less autonomous of other social practices, while nevertheless exercising a more or less determinative influence on those practices.6

However, since Foucault himself later used the concept differently, in a less than clear conflation with power, I have no objections to Newman’s own definition of discourse as ‘A relatively stable way of using language to represent reality’ (30). Clearly, this definition promotes stability over change, but we will come to its consequences later. More to the point right now is that he is more concerned with social practices than with definitional debates and with what Flatschart criticized as CDA failing to explain how structure, practice and agency were related.7 Even more seriously, I do object to M/M being held to deal with the ‘Cultural System’ (alone) since the ‘CS level’ is only half of my concept of culture-in-general, the missing part being the SocioCultural (S-C level) where the ideational cut-and-thrust between different groups is of considerable importance in the dynamics of social change and stability. If Newman’s aim is to develop ‘Archer’s concept of “the cultural system” into the broader concept of “cultural structure”, as the objective structuring of languages, propositions, discourses and texts’ (4), then he should simply have chosen a different term, one that has no technical meaning within the M/M approach, unlike the S-C level. Since I regularly state that culture is or has a structure, differing with time and place, there is no quibble over this itself. To me, it is the interplay between the CS and the S-C levels that is responsible for morphogenesis or morphostasis prevailing in any society or section of it of interest to any given investigator. However, after the brutal amputation of the S-C level from consideration (basically how different groups of actors and agents seek to undermine the control of others in some area by culturally assaulting their ideational claims to legitimacy and attempting to replace them with their 6

Dave Elder-Vass, 2011, ‘The Causal Power of Discourse’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 41:2, 2. See also H. L. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, 1983, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, pp. xii, xxiv. 7 E. Flatschart, 2016, ‘Critical Realist Critical Discourse Analysis: A Necessary Alternative to Post-Marxist Discourse Theory’, Journal of Critical Realism, 15:1, 21–52.

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own counterposing ideas) there is plenty of space for ‘discourse’ to be inserted. But, not as Newman puts it, namely being ‘achieved by positioning “social practices”, the central concept of CDA’s social theory, within the M/M’ (12). In his view, this is a desirable theoretical development because ‘three elements can be added to Archer’s propositional system in order to form a broader notion of cultural structure. In summary, the conditioning ideational context within which agents act can be termed “cultural structure” and to Newman this ‘can be thought to comprise at least four elements: the propositional system, language systems, intertextual networks, and orders of discourse’ (22). Here it is incontestable that the Socio-Cultural level has been eliminated altogether. Obviously, if my approach is cut in half and one of the halves is simply eradicated this may seem like an advance to my supporters. That is neither here nor there. Furthermore, I have no difficulty in contemplating the incorporation of discursive elements (such as novels and poetry) into the CS or the S-C levels, depending upon their contents. By this there is no sleight of hand, for I do not mean explicitly ‘political works’ – either the bourgeois equivalents of the Little Red Book or the dissident versions of novelistic outrage. Nor do I do anything other than welcome intertextual network studies, for Emmanuel Lazega’s work8 has been invaluable to our Centre for Social Ontology’s two-book series. The caveat, however, is this must not be at the expense of eliminating the S-C level of analysis. To justify this it is first necessary to question the central role assigned above to the ‘positioning’ of ‘social practices’ as the central concept of CDA ‘theory’ ‘in order to undergird the compact he proposes with the M/M approach. First, the very notion of ‘positioning’ is fundamentally passive and escapes the need to examine the prior morphogenetic cycle(s) in which there may have been blood spilt as well as a clash of ideas to secure some practice (for example, orders of succession to the throne, obtaining enfranchisement, or the legalization of inheritance rights). In other cases, such as the French suppression of the monarchy, the spillage of blood was copious thanks to use of the guillotine. There was no passive positioning of imperial rule. Instead, ‘social practices’, whether buttressing stability or instigating changed practices, are what require explanation. In CDA, the explanans and the explanandum have changed places.

8

See Emmanuel Lazega, 2013, ‘Network Analysis and Morphogenesis: A Neo-Structural Exploration and Illustration’, in Margaret S. Archer (ed.), Social Morphogenesis, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 167–85.

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Collaboration at the Micro, Meso and Macro Levels



The Micro Level

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Rather than distorting the M/M framework, there are other ways of incorporating semiosis into explanation. Take the following scenario: boy meets girl in a university seminar group and suggests they ‘grab a coffee together’ in the cafeteria; at the end of their degree course they marry. Even this compressed account allows space for (potentially) important contributions from semiosis. First, the boy’s use of language when making his approach may be decisive for the rest of the hypothetical scenario. In speaking of ‘grabbing a coffee’ he implies this will be quick and noninvolving. If the girl is uncertain, she is presented with a situation in which she has little to lose and in agreeing she might be more attracted to the coffee than to the boy’s company. Once in the cafeteria let’s assume they start by talking about the one thing they know they share, the seminar and its module. Suppose either of them initiates the conversation by negative comments on the lecturer’s dress, accent, vocabulary, age etc. The other is being invited to respond in similar vein and the twenty minutes can pass amicably between them but without follow-up. Conversely, one of them may initiate a discussion of some substantive issue raised in the seminar and, if this proves of interest to both, another coffee next week is on the agenda. This skeletal account can serve to illustrate the compatibility of the two approaches without doing violence to either. Crudely put, the M/M contribution would focus on how the two students came to be sitting in the same seminar room in the first place and would do this on SAC lines, dealing with factors that had a prior responsibility for shaping this context. Structurally, their socio-economic backgrounds would likely be examined, regardless of where they came from, to establish if they comfortably met the university’s financial demands or struggled to do so – for most young people could do neither. Culturally, emphasis might be placed on the schools they had attended, and the preparation and recommendation given for applying to the course in question. Agentially, attention could focus on their attendance records and grades to date, as indicative of the commitment of each student to succeeding in obtaining that degree. Note that no determinism attaches to any element of SAC which may reveal a variety of profiles for undergraduates (e.g. sacrificial parents, schools more concerned with pupil satisfaction than their own official ratings, and agentially that some undergraduates can get by academically with putting in fewer hours than others). The frequent finding of homophily (like gravitating towards like) is not an iron rule.

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CDA is of less use in accounting for how the pair got to be in that specific cafeteria than in explaining what happens there in the present and how their possible future (together or not) unreels. CDA protagonists may often refer to the term ‘archaeology’ but their analyses are more frequently presentist. Nevertheless, many of the life stories of subjects in my trilogy of books on reflexivity9 could readily be supplemented in CDA terms. Indeed, one generous colleague, using corpus analysis, ran some lengthy interview transcripts through her software and discovered that semantically the phrases distinctive of the Communicative Reflexives, compared with practitioners of the other three dominant modes, was ‘I couldn’t possibly do X’ and its synonyms. It is a great pity that geographical mobility prevented us from continuing with this secondary data analysis.

The Meso or Organizational Level

Organizations are, from the M/M perspective, often emergent from micro-level interaction, but are more formalized. Alistair Mutch is of considerable help here, in addition to our both welcoming the synergy between the M/M and the CDA approaches. He has focused on organizational forms and procedures – old and new – in a manner that I approached only in Social Origins of Educational Systems,10 which Newman does not use in this or his preceding article. Because my main comparative concern was with the emergent novelty of state education as a nationwide organization whose component parts had specified linkages (both positive and negative),11 the actual practice of education in the four countries covered was given rather minor attention in relation to which group had the ability to impose a particular definition of instruction, why they promoted their different definitions, against what opposition and by what means. Despite being far from irrelevant to the present topic, Mutch’s considerably more fine-grained historical analysis of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland and the Church of England enabled him to draw a distinction between a practice that was common to both (the celebration of Communion) and the different practices involved (or were elaborated over time) for doing so.12 His distinction then is between 9 Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation; Archer, Making Our Way through the World; Archer, The Reflexive Imperative. 10 Margaret S. Archer, 1979, Social Origins of Educational Systems, London, Sage. 11 For my definition of a State Educational System, see ibid., pp. 54ff. 12 I concentrate upon his article, ‘Practices and Morphogenesis’, 2017, Journal of Critical Realism, 16:5, 499–513, although the following are very relevant: 2003, ‘Communities of Practice and Habitus: A Critique’, Organizational Studies, 24:3, 383–401, and

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rituals, the theological differences between what Communion is held to represent by various Churches (and sects) and the routines that developed ‘which enable the rituals to take place in their particular form’.13 Those Churches that endorsed Communion as ‘open’ to all those presenting themselves, without requiring any qualification for so doing, has the consequence that only minimal routines are necessary for the ritual to take place, Conversely, ‘closed’ participation is restricted to those who have demonstrated their suitability by regular attendance and awareness of the basis of their beliefs, generally by demonstrating the appropriate responses to the Catechism involved. Hence, for example, the importance attaching to the First Communion made by young people and their subsequent church attendance. In short, these ‘demanded comprehensive record keeping’14 and record keepers. Such strict closure in Scotland contrasted with the greater autonomy of local ministers in the established Church of England about preparation, looser monitoring of attendance and little role extension to support the work required. Importantly, there was also no national educational system until 1902 providing biblical literacy to back up the meaning of the Catechism, which thus tended to rote learning at best, spelling less meaningful practices. However, these less exigent Anglican practices had their own interpretative consequences, sometimes shoddy but at other times facilitating creative actions. Charlotte Yonge, often known as the novelist of the Oxford Movement, gives the example of Theo in the Pillars of the House.15 He is born with brain damage, but is very sensitive to music. Theo takes to accompanying his brothers to church choir practice where he is welcomed by the others because of his wordless but accurate humming accompanying hymns and psalms. When his age group are being prepared for First Communion by their hard-working vicar, Theo is automatically left out, as someone who can neither speak nor read, and thus could not participate. When the great day comes, however, Theo follows the choristers to the communion rail and is not turned back by the vicar, appreciative of his reverence. Probably a different minister would have behaved differently but the point of recalling this fictional anecdote is that CDA must also be willing to incorporate the micro level of individual agents as well as the meso level of institutional influences. As Mutch summarizes his argument, he has illustrated ‘the value of 2013, ‘“Shared Protestantism” and British Identity: Contrasting Church Governance Practices in Eighteenth-Century Scotland and England’, Social History, 38:4, 240–61. 13 Mutch, ‘Practices and Morphogenesis’, 506. 14 Ibid., 508. 15 Charlotte M. Yonge, 1898, The Pillars of the House, London, Macmillan.

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viewing practices as a central part of the social world that people encounter. They provide the immediate context within which action takes place but mediate and mobilize wider structural and cultural logics. Focusing on practices, rather than practice, raises questions about how practices get to be the way they are and how they are perceived by those who engage in them.’16 Mutch and I are in overall agreement about the value of the M/M approach and the temporal priority of structure as exemplifying our ‘thrownness into the world’, already furnished with organizations that newborns and newcomers have no option but to confront. Nor, I think, do we part company in refusing to regard organizational stability and change as simple mirrors of cultural beliefs or material circumstances. Ultimately, there is no ontological difference between the reality status of organizations and institutions, though each may potentially actualize properties and powers that are different in kind, and in consequence each may be confronted with different forms of agential contestation. This will be considered next, but before moving on there is a final point about synergy with CDA, which I hope will also be congenial to Newman. When I used to drive my young boys to the Peak District for our summer camping, on the edge of West Yorkshire and Derbyshire we would pass through a semi-rural street containing three still functioning churches: the Methodist Church, the Primitive Methodist Church and the Ebenezer Methodist Church. I was (and remain) puzzled for, whatever the source of their differences, these must have thrived in the middle of the contestation between the Established Anglican Church and the Dissenters (where both church and school often added insult to injury by being constructed alongside or across the road from the other). It is not only that architecture is another expression of semiosis but the question of how this small community could have sustained such ideational distinctions when throughout the twentieth century the old theological animosities were diminishing and some dissenting churches were amalgamating, decades before we regularly grouped them together as the Free Churches. This is cited because it seems an area where CDA could provide an explanatory analysis whereas it appears the M/M has little to offer.

The Macro Level (Institutional Interrelations)

In their different ways the founding fathers of sociology were preoccupied with the dynamics of macroscopic changes in social formations and the M/M approach follows in their footsteps. Let’s not forget that it 16

Mutch, ‘Practices and Morphogenesis’, 509.

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began simply called the ‘Morphogenetic Approach’. This never denied that such processes were always accompanied by morphostatic mechanisms trying to ‘hold them back’, which could succeed for centuries, nor that morphogenesis never conformed to exactly to what any party wanted because of compromise and concession with defenders of the status quo. This is precisely what kept it going, just like scientific ‘pro­ gress’, which can also be told as a history of successive failures rather than a remorseless success story. As already noted, Newman defines ‘discourse’ as ‘A relatively stable way of using language to represent reality’ (30), and this we will come to in a moment in Fairclough’s work with its not infrequent appeal to ‘habitus’ as the home of stability. At any moment, the CS is the product of historical Socio-Cultural interaction but, having emerged (cultural emergence being a continuous process) then qua product, it has properties but also powers of its own kind. Like structure, some of its most important causal powers are those of constraints and enablements. In the cultural domain these derive from contradictions and complementarities. 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 be able to deem true.17 In other words, the exercise of CS causal powers are dependent upon their activation from the S-C level. What ideas are entertained SocioCulturally, at any given time, result from the properties and powers belonging to that level. Obviously, we social agents do not live by propositions alone; we generate myths, are moved by mysteries, become rich in symbols and ruthless at manipulating hidden persuaders. These elements are precisely the stuff of the S-C level, for they are all matters of interpersonal influence – from hermeneutic understanding, at one extreme, to ideological assault and battery, at the other. Once agents do any of these, then their ideational projects will confront CS properties (that were not of their own making) and unleash these systemic powers upon themselves – which they may seek to realize or to contain. However, the S-C level possesses causal powers of its own kind in relation to the CS; it can resolve apparent contradictions and respond adaptively to real ones, or explore and exploit the complementarities it confronts, thus modifying the Cultural System in the process. It can set its own cultural agenda, often in relation to its structurally based 17 For a theory of the formation of agents’ ‘projects’ in the light of their personal concerns and consideration of their social contexts, see Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation.

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Cultural level

Dependent upon

Type of relations

CULTURAL SYSTEM

Other ideas

Logical

SOCIO-CULTURAL LEVEL

Other people

Causal

Figure 4.1. The two cultural levels and their different internal relationships Cultural Conditioning (CS) T1

Socio-Cultural Interaction (S–C) T2

T3 Cultural Elaboration (CS) T4

Figure 4.2.  Cultural Morphogenesis and its intrinsic temporality

interests, by creatively adding new items to the systemic register. In these ways, the S-C level is responsible for elaborating upon the composition of the CS level. The different relationships between the two levels are summarized in Figure 4.1. To omit the S-C level deprives the M/M approach of its indispensable relation with human agency, thus inviting a cultural determinism that is entirely alien to it. In turn, the relations between them form the three phases of one analytical cycle made up of (Figure 4.2). In fact, the final phase may culminate at T4 in either morphogenesis (transformation) or morphostasis (reproduction). In both cases, T4 constitutes the new T1, the conditional influences affecting subsequent interaction. This explanatory framework, which operationalizes analytical dualism for undertaking practical cultural investigations, depends upon two simple propositions: that cultural structure necessarily pre-dates the actions which transform it; and that cultural elaboration necessarily post-dates those actions. Temporality is what prevents analytical dualism from wrongly being construed as dualism (see Chapter 5), let alone duality. Cultural Conditioning (CS) This phase is concerned with the effects of holding ideas which stand in particular logical relationships of contradiction or complementarity to other ideas. To hold such ideas is to activate the CS powers of constraint

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and enablement, but why they are held is an S-C question whose answer would require historical recourse. Although Newman and Fairclough both accept the importance of contradictions, equivalent importance is not given to the effects of CS complementarities. Nor do they acknowledge the fact that both can take two forms and that each form has a distinct generative mechanism tending to produce equally diverse types of social interaction and outcomes. This selective neglect deprives the M/M approach of its main contribution to explaining distinct trajectories of social change, for it is untrue to maintain that every item lodged in the CS ‘stands in a necessary relation to every other item’ (23) although Newman does a little later accept that both contradictions and complementarities can be contingently related (23). ‘Constraining contradictions’ exist when there is an internal or necessary relationship between the ideas (A), advanced by a given group, and other ideas (B), which are lodged in the CS – and yet (A) and (B) are in logical tension. Durkheim provides an important historical example of this in his analysis of the logical inconsistencies in which Christianity was embroiled, from earliest times, because its inescapable dependence upon classicism confronted the Church with ‘a contradiction against which it has fought for centuries’.18 Because the relationship between (A) and (B) is a necessary one, their contradiction could not be evaded by the simple renunciation of (B) – Christians could not repudiate the classical languages in which the Gospel was enunciated nor the classical philosophical concepts through which it was theologically explicated. Although substantively far removed, the ‘constraining contradiction’ also confronts any explanatory theory (A), which is advanced in science, but whose observational theory (B) does not provide immediate empirical corroboration – that is, if scientists think they have good reason not to jettison (A).19 What the ‘constraining contradiction’ does in practice is to confront those committed to (A), who also have no option but to live with (B) as well, with a particular situational logic. According to this logic, given their continuing dedication to (A) (its abandonment is always possible because conditioning is never determinism), then they are constrained to deal with (B) in a specific manner. Since (A) and (B) are logically inconsistent, then no genuine resolution is possible between them, but if (B) remains unaltered, it threatens the credibility or tenability of (A). 18

Emile Durkheim, 1977, The Evolution of Educational Thought, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, pp. 25f. 19 Imre Lakatos, 1970, ‘Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes’, in I. Lakatos and A. Musgrave (eds.), Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, London, Cambridge University Press, pp. 99f.

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Consequently, the situational logic directs that continued adherence to (A) entails making a correction of its relationship with (B) mandatory. Corrective action involves addressing the contradiction and seeking to repair it by reinterpretation of the ideas involved. The generic result will be some form of syncretism which brings about union between the antithetical but indispensable sets of ideas. Obviously, for protagonists of (A), their interest concentrates upon syncretic reinterpretations of (B), in order to make it compatible. However, whether a CS syncretic formula can be made to stick depends upon how it meshes with the state of S-C integration in society. At the systemic (CS) level, the direct counterpart of the ‘constraining contradiction’ is the necessary or ‘concomitant compatibility’, because it bears the same formal features in reverse and its conditional influence is that of enablement. In other words, invoking idea (A) also necessarily evokes idea (B), but since the (B) upon which this (A) depends is consistent with it, then (B) buttresses adherence to (A). Consequently (A) occupies a congenial environment of ideas whose exploration, far from being fraught with danger, yields a treasure trove of confirmation and corroboration because of the logical consistency of the ideas involved. This was the generic feature that Weber analysed as linking the religious beliefs, rationale for status distribution, and the economic ethos of ancient India and China. A similar relationship obtained between classical economics and utilitarian philosophy. Modern examples are so abundant in natural science that Kuhn was tempted into portraying the whole enterprise as a succession of paradigms, each of which constituted a cluster of ‘concomitant complementarities.20 What emerges is an enlarged and highly consistent conspectus. It represents a substantial increase in cultural density, by which this sector of the CS becomes especially rich in fine and subtle distinctions and develops an elaborate vocabulary to describe them. The end-product of this exploration and inclusive formalization is a growth in ideational systematization (that is, the strengthening of pre-existing relations among the parts, the development of relations among parts previously unrelated, the gradual addition of parts and relations to a system, or some combination of these changes). The intricacies of caste rights, the detailed protocols for ‘normal science’, and the bulging libraries of exegetical literature are produced by the same systemic conditioning. The more complex the internal structure of such a corpus of ideas becomes, the more difficult it is to assimilate new items, without major 20

Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1962.

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Constraining Contradictions and Concomitant Complementarities Which Condition Situational Logic of

Correction

Protection

CS

Syncretism

Systematization

S-C

Unification

Reproduction

Figure 4.3.  Cultural System: types of logical relations

disruption to the delicately articulated interconnections. Tight and sophisticated linkages eventually repel innovation because of their disruptive capacity. This is the result of the situational logic of protection. Its implications within the conspectus are that it progressively accommodates fewer and fewer radical innovations until, in Kuhn’s words, it ‘suppresses fundamental novelties because they are fundamentally subversive of its basic commitments’.21 Weber, of course, made the same point about the effects of complex ritualization in Hinduism being incapable of the innovative ‘germination of capitalism in its midst’.22 The situational logic of protection means brooking no rivals from outside and repressing rivalry inside. The former is at the mercy of ‘international relations’; the latter depends upon the success of its main Socio-Cultural thrust towards cultural reproduction in the (relevant) population. Ultimately, whether or not this sticks and endures turns upon cui bono; non-beneficiaries have no interest in sustaining protection. The conditional influences of the two types of logical relations at the CS level (societal or sectional), just examined, are summarized in Figure 4.3. Socio-Cultural (S-C) Interaction The whole point of distinguishing between the Cultural System and the Socio-Cultural levels is because the orderly or conflictual relationships characteristic of the one can vary independently of the other, which is crucial to the explanation of stability or change. If conditional influences were determinants, cultural stability would ensue in both cases. Yet this is not invariably the case. An economical way to explain why 21 Ibid., p. 5. 22 Max Weber, in H. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (eds.), 1967, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, p. 413.

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not is to ask what properties and powers may be possessed by agency and exercised during Socio-Cultural interaction such that the outcome is contrary to the conditioning. In other words, what accounts for discrepancies between the orderliness (or disorderliness) of the two levels? First, why can social integration persist despite the existence of tensions within society’s system of ideas? Secondly, what explains a syncretic set of ideas failing to take hold in society or a systematized conspectus failing to be reproduced? The answer to the first question (the persistence of disproportionately high S-C integration) seems to lie in the effective exercise of cultural power. Where upholders of (A) have the position and the resources to control the diffusion of information, they can practise a variety of ‘containment strategies’ designed to insulate the majority of the population from dangerously familiarity with B. In this context, Lukes’s23 threedimensional concept of power seems readily transferable to the cultural domain. Power is used to control the social visibility of contradictions and thus to prevent the eruption of S-C controversy. Its applications can vary from the straightforward first-dimensional use of censorship to the more subtle third-dimensional strategies that induce ‘misrecognition of symbolic violence’ – perceptively analysed by Bourdieu,24 although always (wrongly) presumed by him to be lastingly successful. However, ‘containment strategies’ are seen here as strictly temporizing manoeuvres, most effective against the least influential.25 One answer to the second question (unexpectedly low S-C integration) is that independent Socio-Cultural discrepancies in orderliness occur when the social (or sectional) distribution of material interests does not gel with the situational logic of the Cultural System (or sub-system) at any given time.26 Important as this is, if that were the end of the matter it would amount to saying ‘cultural conditioning works ceteris paribus unless structural conditioning contravenes it’. It would be to retreat from advancing a theory of cultural dynamics because only countervailing material interests (and their promotive organizations) would constitute the properties and powers capable of resisting cultural conditioning. Instead, two scenarios will be sketched, which give ideal interests their due – thus advancing a theory of cultural dynamics which parallels one of structural dynamics, without collapsing into it. 23

Steven Lukes, 1974, Power: A Radical View, London, Macmillan. 24 Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, 1964, La Reproduction, Paris, Ed. de Minuit. 25 See Archer, Culture and Agency, pp. 189–95. 26 See Margaret S. Archer, 1995, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ch. 7.

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On the ‘corrective scenario’, associated with necessary and internal CS contradictions, the unificatory thrust of the situational logic can be deflected in three ways. Cumulatively they spell a growing disorderliness in the cultural relations between people that may ultimately precipitate a corresponding clash in the realm of ideas. First, there is progressive desertion. At the Socio-Cultural level no one is compelled to take part in a syncretic enterprise. Exit is a permanent possibility, and a steady stream of deserters attends the unfolding of any constraining contradiction. Ideational wranglings breed sceptics in the scientific as in the metaphysical domain, and it has often been remarked that the ex-member of a school of thought becomes its most virulent critic. This aggregate source of growing disorder then provides the impetus for a bolder syncretic manoeuvre – a more thoroughgoing correction, involving interpretative adjustment of (A) itself. Ironically, these more radical syncretic moves themselves become bones of contention among the ‘faithful’. Those who were once united in their ideational difficulties fall into schismatism when they try to solve them. A copybook example is the relationship between the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which generated lasting sectarian conflict rather than restoring consensus in post-Renaissance Europe – despite both movements being equally concerned to prevent the actualization of secular classical rationalism. Finally, whenever the manifest systemic unity of ideas is reduced through public wrangling, their unificatory role in society falls disproportionately. Those with an interest in so doing can then (sometimes) harness social disorder to bring about a full actualization of (B), whose contents have unintentionally become better and more widely known as syncretic formulae made more generous adaptations to it. What is crucial for a social group to be able to actualize a contradiction, by inducing a split along the systemic fault line, is that it has no cross-cutting allegiances with other social groups to restrain it.27 This is why the French revolutionary bourgeoisie rather than the leisured aristocracy (allied with the clergy as the two privileged Estates) was responsible for actualizing secular rationalism, anti-clericalism and laicization. The emergence of secularist Republicanism is a replication, in the cultural domain, of the conditions Lockwood set out for profound structural change28 – where 27 A. W. Gouldner, 1967, ‘Reciprocity and Autonomy in Functional Theory’, in N. J. Demerath and R. A. Peterson (eds.), System, Change and Conflict, New York, Free Press, Collier Macmillan. 28 David Lockwood, 1964, ‘Social and System Integration’ in G. K. Zollschan and W. Hirsch (eds.), Explorations in Social Change, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, pp. 244–57. See also Margaret S. Archer, 1996, ‘Social Integration and System Integration: Developing the Distinction’, British Journal of Sociology, 30:4, 679–99, and Archer, 2022, ‘Social

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social disintegration finally superimposes itself upon systemic mal-integration, forcing the latter asunder and actualizing the changes that had previously been strategically contained. On the ‘protective’ scenario, linked with internal systemic complementarities, a substantial drop in Socio-Cultural integration is the exclusive motor of change, for there is little tension to exploit within the Cultural System itself. However, the consistent conspectus does slowly generate a sufficient differentiation of interests to unleash social disorder. This is one of the trajectories lost in the oversimplified CDA presentation of M/M. The root cause is the increase in CS density, as the complementary conspectus is explored and then systematized. Eventually, it becomes too great to be fully reproduced (societally or sectionally) because it has become too elaborate and expensive for all to share. (This is one example of why ‘sharing’ cannot be definitional of culture, as I argued in ­Chapter 3.) Consequently, CS density turns into the enemy of S-C equality, and the resulting hierarchy of knowledgeability progressively delineates different ideational interest groups in relation to the CS. As the cultural conspectus is gradually in-filled and work on systematization reduces to mopping up, the concentration of rewards and benefits among the S-C elite means that more and more of the ‘educated’ become a category of marginals. They have made a major investment in the CS but are denied much return from it as it stands, yet are firmly discouraged from making cultural innovations to increase their rewards. The disaffection of the marginals correspondingly reduces S-C integration, but CS integration remains high. The disaffected do not kick it for they have invested too much in it, but they are opportunists, ready to migrate towards new sources of ideational variety to increase their payoff. Impelled by their ideal interests, boundaries (geographical, disciplinary or paradigmatic) are crossed and the departure of these disruptive S-C elements is not resisted. In short, marginal migrants go out seeking new but complementary items (novel but consistent ideas, skills, techniques) to augment their ideal interests. From this a distinctive type of cultural change emerges – born of innovative amalgamation. Cultural Elaboration Although the two scenarios above have been presented as ones that may unreel autonomously within the cultural realm, there is no denying that Integration and System Integration Re-visited’, in P. A. Fernandez, Alejandro N. Garcia Martinez and J. M. Torralba (eds.), Ways of Being Bound: Perspectives from Post-Kantian Philosophy and Relational Sociology, Cham, Springer, pp. 137–57.

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they are usually accelerated and decelerated by their interaction with structural factors. What is of particular importance is how far structure differentiates material interest groups that reinforce or cross-cut the Socio-Cultural alignments conditioned by the Cultural System. This interplay between culture and structure is even more marked when we turn, in conclusion, to the ways in which cultural elaboration can be independently introduced from the Socio-Cultural level without the form of cultural interaction involved nor the type of cultural changes induced being reduced to epiphenomena of structure. This is because there is considerable cultural work to be done by agents when the ideas with which they are dealing are only contingently rather than necessarily related – for here agency alone is responsible for bringing these ideas into conjunction and achieving social salience for them. It is also because once they have done so, they have created two new forms of situational logic in which the promotion of their own ideal interests are then enmeshed. In contrast to the ‘constraining contradiction’, where the alternative to a given set of ideas is also internally related to them, and thus constantly threatens them with its own counter-actualization, here the accentuation of a contingent contradiction is a supremely social matter. Accentuation depends upon groups, actuated by interests, making a contradiction competitive, by taking sides over it and by trying to make other people take their side. In brief, opposed interest groups cause the ‘competitive contradiction’ to impinge on broader sections of the (relevant) population; it does not ineluctably confront them, as is the case with constraining contradictions, the moment that anyone asserts (A). Perhaps the best and most important illustration of the ‘competitive contradiction’ is ideological conflict. Were ideologies no more than passive reflections of material interests, then it would be impossible that they could advance, foster or defend such interests. To the extent that they succeed, they necessarily do so in competition with other ideologies, which perform the same task in relation to opposed interests. In the process, their ideational conflict becomes subject to its own distinctive situational logic. In contradistinction to the ‘constraining contradiction’, here the situational logic fosters elimination, not correction. In the former case, agents were driven to cope with ideas that necessarily contradicted their own (compromising, conciliating and conceding much en route), whereas those involved (and drawn into involvement) over a ‘competitive contradiction’ have every incentive to eliminate the opposition. Because partisans of ideas (A) and (B) are unconstrained by any internal and necessary relations between these ideologies, there is nothing to restrain their combativeness, for they have everything to gain from inflicting maximum damage on one ­another’s ideas during cultural competition.

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In principle, victory would consist in so damaging and discrediting oppositional views that they lose all salience in society, leaving their antithesis in unchallenged supremacy. However, in practice, the cut and thrust between them has the entirely unintended consequence that far from one ideology being eliminated, both contribute to one another’s refinement. Charge is not merely met by countercharge, but also by self-clarification and response (as is equally the case for competing scientific frameworks). Ironically, both sets of ideas undergo ‘progressive problem-shifts’,29 thus inserting much greater pluralism into the Cultural System. Correspondingly, since both groups of protagonists seek to win over uncommitted agents, the effect of their refined interchanges is Socio-Culturally to increase cleavage within the population. Finally, the existence of discoverable but wholly ‘contingent complementarities’ at the CS level constitutes a source of novelty that is systemically available to human agency with few strings attached. Both the detection of these items and their synthesis are entirely dependent upon the exercise of agential powers of creativity. Certainly, the fact that such agents are on the lookout for such items is fostered by frustration of either or both their ideal and material interests, but there is nothing automatic about discontents yielding creative innovations. Certainly, too, the existence of contingent complementarities is a necessary condition for their exploitation, but the sufficient condition requires active agents to produce constructive and concrete syntheses from what is only a loose situational logic of opportunity. When and if they do so, newly elaborated items are added to the Cultural System, which in practical terms represent novel areas of intensive specialization, such as radio-physics, molecular biology, experimental psychology and biochemistry. If and when they are successful (and defective syntheses are common), institutionalization usually follows, and, as it does so, more and more people are attracted to work upon the new source of cultural variety. In turn, variety stimulates more variety, because this interplay between the CS and the S-C represents a positive feedback loop. This is the exact obverse of the negative feedback mechanism that regulates the protection and reproduction of the necessary complementarity. Not only are the logics of the two kinds of complementarities the inverse of one another, but so are their results. Cultural variety is the opposite of cultural density. Variety feeds on what looks promising but is ill-defined; density deals with what feel like certainties but are already over-defined. Variety pushes on to extend cultural horizons unpredictably; density stays at home to embellish the cultural environment systematically. 29

Lakatos, ‘Falsification’, pp. 158f.

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Cultural Systems Integration

High Socio-

High

Low

Concomitant

Constraining

Complementarity

Contradiction→→

Contingent

Competitive

Complementarity

Contradiction→→

Morphostasis

Cultural Integration Low

Morphostasis

Figure 4.4.  Combinations of Cultural Systems integration and SocioCultural integration: their consequences for morphogenesis and morphostasis

These differences are equally marked in their Socio-Cultural effects – specialization prompts ideational diversification; systematization fosters cultural reproduction. The proliferation of specialist groupings is fissiparous in its social effects for, as more and more sectional groups are carved out, they have less and less in common with one another and with the rest of society. Sectional groups, unlike polarized ones, are defined not by their opposition to others, but by their differences from everyone. The dialectics of specialization and sectionalism contribute to the progressive exclusion of vast tracts of the population from larger and larger portions of specialized knowledge. The division of the population into lay people and experts is repeated over and over again as each new specialism emerges. This is a horizontal form of Socio-Cultural differentiation, quite unlike the vertical stratification engendered by the necessary complementarity. The relationships discussed in the second part of this paper are summarized in Figure 4.4. Conclusion Throughout his article Newman was trying to bring the Morphogenetic Approach and Cultural Discourse Analysis together, which is welcome because the two share the Critical Realist meta-ontology and many interests in common. In the process he raised what I called the question of which should be the Senior Partner. One inoffensive conclusion could be that the honours go to the M/M framework for its greater contribution to providing an explanatory framework accounting for morphogenesis, whilst CDA might claim the laurels for the analysis of morphostasis. Unfortunately, I don’t think this mannerly formula works, although it does not preclude collaboration between them.

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There are three main reasons why this cannot end in a draw. Drawing the threads of the preceding text together these can be summarized as CDA showing, first, a presentist bias. This is understandable since until the twentieth century the majority of the world population were not text producers. Nevertheless, it is surprising that no serious references are made to CDA’s relations with anthropology, archaeology, architecture, mythology and sculpture etc. Does this confine it to ‘modernity’? In which (unlikely) case, what about oral traditions which were passed in song and stories from generation to generation? Secondly, the importance of the Axial age was that most world faiths did produce literate sources and thus could lay claim to be founders of the Universal Archive. Significantly, Alistair Mutch is outstanding for his theoretical contribution to CDA through engaging with the theological literature of the Reformation – before and after – which might explain his long-term openness to M/M. But the seeming neglect of history by most CDA analysts may account for the enduring attractions of Foucault – not that he would have claimed to be a historian. Thirdly, there is a persistent ‘evasion’ of ‘forces of change’ which is hard to explain since from the beginning of written philosophy and science ‘opposition’ plus ideational innovation were the names of the game. Putting these reasons together, they can be summarized as weaknesses in each of the SAC components. In turn this reduced the ability of CDA to theorize their interrelations and thus to round out a general sociological framework. I’ll conclude by providing an example from each of the other two elements of SAC.

Structure and Agency

As Newman puts it, ‘roles or positions within social structure require the repetition of particular courses of action as inherent features of those roles; these are social practices’ (17). I fear this takes us back to the old debate about role-taking or role-making. With this repeat of ‘repetition’, we are brought back to the ‘morphostatic bias’ of CDA. To begin with, there is no space for Martin Hollis’s important concept of ‘personification’, namely that as different persons with different concerns we ‘personify’ the same role in different ways. Certainly, as university teachers we (mainly) do turn up on term time dates and give lectures and seminars as scheduled on the timetable. But they will or can be very distinct for two people. Porpora is introduced here because of his argument that roles are rule-governed and that means to Newman ‘giving social structure a clear role in all human interaction’ (16). This is a misunderstanding. Porpora draws a clear distinction between when

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rules are regulatory and when constitutive (as in chess), and it is the latter alone to which he refers here. ‘In contrast with regulative rules, constitutive rules tell us not how to behave but what our behaviours signify.’30 The signification here is that two persons are playing the game of chess. Obviously, agential ingenuity can lead one to suggest that they play 3D chess, but that is a different game as it would be were Monopoly played for real money. And different persons are involved, which means that both can ‘personify’ their roles in different ways, to use Martin Hollis’s invaluable distinction.31 Porpora and I have taught the Albach seminar together and these were two very distinct performances. I wandered with my roving mike and threw out questions; he told jokes, made greater use of the blackboard and on one occasion designated the centre of the USA as ‘Jesus country’. They liked both (though I think he won the student evaluations by a point or two), but unlike other lecturers we would often sit and drink with the students in the evening. So far this has all been about individuals and role occupancy but during social change roles change too. It is pure nominalism to suggest that because the role of ‘doctor’ or ‘teacher’ retains the same name after major social change, so do their role requirements. This is where the ‘Double Morphogenesis’ comes into play. It ‘results from agents succeeding in introducing structural and/or cultural transformation but being themselves transformed and transforming other agents in the self-same process. In other words, it entails agential re-formation, in terms of personal motivation and also a re-grouping of alliances.’32 A clear example, one that should engage adherents to CDA, would be the conflict between Church and State over Napoleon’s establishing his new educational system. It should have appeal to them because he was very open in the National Assembly about it providing services to the imperial State.33 In other words, he supplied material for discursive analysis. Equally, he provided a glaring invitation to intertextual commentary as the document that all intending teachers had to sign before taking up post was a simple adaptation of that previously used by the Roman Catholic Church for the same purpose; the basic change replaced the word ‘God’ with that of Emperor.

30

Douglas V. Porpora, 2015, Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 103–4. 31 Martin Hollis, 1977, Models of Man: Philosophical Thoughts on Social Action, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 105f. See also Hollis, 1987, The Cunning of Reason, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 32 Margaret S. Archer, 2015, ‘How Agency Is Transformed in the Course of Social Transformation: Don’t Forget the Double Morphogenesis’, in Archer (ed.), Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 135–57. 33 A. Aulard, 1911, Napoléon Ier et le Monopole Universitaire, Paris.

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Agency The presentism that has dogged CDA in the aporia that I have touched upon has also been associated with another that again impedes its development of a robust theory of macroscopic change. It will only be mentioned here, for it properly belongs to Part III on Agency. I can find very little mention of collective agency, yet it was Corporate agents that played such an important part in the relational contestation animating the cultural debate over, for example, laïcité in French education, one that continues today although mainly directed against the Muslim population. Given its interpretations and reinterpretations it seems almost to beg for attention from semiosis. Yet there is one snag – it is part of Realpolitik, defined and redefined in the context of centralized institutions and thus in the hands of collective agents. And such Corporate agents are not an amalgam of some habitus of its members but are tooled to maximize their impact on the political centre. This seems true of any historical social movement and certainly of the British attempts to weld working people into organized labour by learning from their failed social practices – Luddism, moral and physical force Chartism, aspirations for one Grand National Consolidated Trade Union. Since we are about to move on to the next part, I’ll leave it to Newman to prepare the way: Rather than analysing texts and discourse within ‘social practices’ we can instead analyse them within ‘social morphogenesis’. This will not only provide CDA researchers with a readily applicable model of social change, which is currently absent in CDA’s existing social theory, it will also open the potential for a more sophisticated, and more critically realist, understanding of the relationship between structure and agency (16).

Part II

Structure

5

Misrepresenting SAC as Dualism Featuring Stephen Kemp, 2012, ‘Interests and Structure in Dualist Social Theory: A Critical Appraisal of Archer’s Theoretical and Empirical Arguments’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 42:4, 489–510

ARTICLE ABSTRACT

This article evaluates the structural conception of interests developed by Margaret Archer as part of her dualist version of critical realism. It argues that this structural analysis of interests is unacceptable because, first, Archer’s account of the causal influences of interests on agents is contradictory and, second, Archer fails to offer a defensible account of her claim that interests influence agents by providing reasons for action. These problems are explored in relation to Archer’s theoretical and empirical work. I argue for an alternative account of interests that focuses on agents’ understandings of their interests and problems with these understandings. Introduction ‘Dualism’ has become a term of abuse in social theorizing. If it can be made to stick to any current theorists, it becomes a stick with which to beat them. The irony is that if Kemp, who has made multiple attempts to level this charge against Critical Realism and the M/M approach in particular,1 does not define the term and appears unfamiliar with the complexity of the philosophical literature on dualism. In late modernity the Aristotelian theological preoccupations were displaced by ‘the Mind/ Body problem’. Thereafter, it underwent considerable further differentiation, broadly in terms of ontological or epistemological versions. The former consisted in disputes over ‘Predicate’, ‘Property’ and ‘Substance’ ontologies inter alia for distinguishing the ingredients of dualism, whilst the latter focused upon conflicting dualistic epistemologies such as an interactive versus an epiphenomenal construal.2 1

Stephen Kemp, 2005, ‘Critical Realism and the Limits of Philosophy’, European Journal of Social Theory, 8:2, 171–91. See also Stephen Kemp and John Holmwood, 2003, ‘Realism, Regularity and Social Explanation’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 33:2, 166–85. 2 For those unfamiliar with this history of ideas, a clear introduction is Howard Robinson, 2020, ‘Dualism’, in Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.), Stanford Encyclopedia of

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The oddity is that Kemp makes no reference to these divergent definitions but merely transposes ‘dualism’ to refer to any theoretical approach that treats ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ as being separable rather than matters of mutual constitution. Implicitly, this makes him a central conflationist. There are three main issues between us. First, Kemp objects to me regarding ‘structure’ as conditioning (not determining) agency through the interests with which their social positioning endows them in a variety of situations they encounter. I do not hold this to be a universal statement. (There are many situations from declining the offered cabbage, welcoming or shunning dogs, marriage versus partnership, where social position seems to play little role.) However, what Kemp strangely is arguing for appears to be determinism here. If someone like me maintains that people’s social positioning often or even sometimes gives them an interest in acting in one way rather than another, why not all of the time he asks? Secondly, he pillories M/M for holding that all normal agents may indeed have such structural incentives/disincentives for a given course of action in a given social context, but they also have discretionary agential powers to resist both. Again, this is not a universal statement. But if they do not adopt the/any incentive which their structural positioning extends to them, it is not through failure to understand the advantages proffered in that situation but because they have reservations about doing so. Similarly, some ignore disincentives, which are always of a particular description, because they have reasons for their counter-actions. This is what Kemp will not accept – that agents are capable not only of weighing different courses of action against one another (in the balance) but also of producing different outcomes from one another in the same or similar situations. Thirdly, what such different responses from agents, similarly structurally placed or not, turn upon is the last major disagreement with Kemp. I am convinced that agents possess concerns that they have developed, that is, like Andrew Sayer, the various things that matter most to people or, as Harry Frankfurt puts it, ‘the importance of what we care about’. These concerns define how agents balance their (personal or collective) concerns against the interests they have acquired involuntarily from their structured social placements at any given time/situation – including those that would have left them materially better off. Agents set up their own scales, they establish the currency in which they will work, and thus they decide whether following their personal concerns outweighs their expected Philosophy, Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/spr2023/entries/dualism/.

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material benefits or losses. This combination of structurally defined contexts (objective) and agential concerns (subjective) produces a variation in outcomes over time that then interact constantly. Finally, it is what produces some specific form of morphogenesis. Does that make Kemp into a closest supporter of morphostasis? The only factors that prevent or modify this is his claim that agents (often?) do not understand the situations in which they find themselves or lack a social theorist who will beneficially correct them! It has to be a misrepresentation to call M/M dualistic because SAC is tripartite, and three into two don’t go. Nevertheless, that is an injury which can be inflicted when culture is excluded. Increasingly, the burning issue in social theorizing was held to be ‘the structure–agency problem’, a preoccupation equally gripping on both sides of the Atlantic. Even to name its protagonists would take up the rest of the chapter, so I will leave it at Bourdieu and Giddens, both of whom I critiqued as central conflationists at the time. I will return to this issue in Chapters 6 and 7. For the moment it is more important to stress the consequences of trying to make culture do a vanishing act in order to dwell only on ‘the problem of structure and agency’. Of course, it cannot be done; a place has to be found for legitimately talking about values, beliefs, norms, ideologies and ideas, legitimacy and legitimation, etc. In short, the ideational ‘corpus’ does not disappear at any time or place at the convenience of its detractors. Instead, the usual tactic is to incorporate it in bits and pieces on either side (or in the centre) of ‘The Problem’. This is easier to do for the full-blooded central conflationists, since everything eventually ends up in the middle, and separating out the components is taboo to such theorists. ‘Separability’, even analytical separation, is another dirty word. The featured article may be the last gasp of the old ‘Interpretivist versus Explanation debate’ and it contains strong hints of a shift of allegiance to pragmatism, though not that much use is made of its concepts here. There are sufficient misrepresentations in its introductory couple of pages to signal them at the start. First, the author claims that ‘Critical Realist arguments have often been framed as contributions to the structure/agency debate’ (490),3 which is only the case on the criminal meaning of ‘framing’. Secondly, despite the title stating that Kemp intends to examine my empirical arguments, this is a blatant instance of cutting out my key book which launched the M/M approach in 1979, before I had encountered 3

Stephen Kemp, 2012, ‘Interests and Structure in Dualist Social Theory: A Critical Appraisal of Archer’s Theoretical and Empirical Arguments’, Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 42:4, 489–510. Page numbers given in parentheses in this chapter refer to this article.

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CR. Its 800-plus pages, taking ten years to write, as detailed historicaldocumentary empirical work can do, is not given any acknowledgement. The summary diagram of its contents is reproduced in the Introduction (Figure 1.1), simply because the M/M analytical framework was born there. This also frees me from being a camp follower of Roy Bhaskar, close friends and colleagues as we later became, for his Possibility of Naturalism4 was published in the same year. Hence, Kemp quite wrongly states that ‘Archer’s later work attempts to connect theory and research’ (495 n. 3). By this he means he will skip over quarter of a century of books and articles until we arrive at my trilogy of books on reflexivity.5 Thirdly, Kemp systematically refuses to distinguish the philosophical position of ‘dualism’ with the sociological use of ‘analytical dualism’ – the latter acknowledging that two or more entities may well be interdependent and mutually influential without being or becoming inseparable. Their inseparability is the hallmark of central conflation. As will be seen, analytical separability in the M/M framework rests only upon the incorporation of time and a refusal of ‘presentism’. Fourthly, and of most relevance to this chapter, Kemp is uniformly hostile to structure being viewed as shaping the situations in which agents find themselves (because this would grant their historical priority). Ordinary folk who smoke would have no problem with accepting this statement. The reason why many did quit was because the habit became more and more expensive as the government regularly imposed tax increases. Yet, for this to occur there needed to be a government in place with the right to control taxes prior to the sale of cigarettes. Without it, the situation would not exist of being prised out of a bad habit by financial means, and it is pure speculation if health warnings alone would have had a similar outcome.

Kemp’s Denial of Any Separation between Subject and Object

This heading is the central tenet in Kemp’s critique of the M/M approach. Coincidently, he is also incorrect in terming M/M a ‘theory’ when in fact it is a meta-theory, since distinguishing between the components of SAC explains nothing in itself, any more than do Bhaskar’s elements of his

4

Roy Bhaskar, 1989 [1979], 2nd ed., The Possibility of Naturalism, London, Routledge. 5 Margaret S. Archer, 2003, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Archer, 2007, Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Archer, 2012, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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transformational model of social activity (TMSA). As Porpora rightly insisted at the beginning of the Centre for Social Ontology’s five books on morphogenesis, As a meta-theoretical principle, the morphogenetic approach does not explain anything in particular. It resides rather at the level of underlying philosophy or fundamental ontology. The morphogenetic approach identifies the ingredients of any explanation of social change, namely structure, culture, and agency, and the generic form of their interrelation. Any particular social change will need to be explained by the particular structures, by the particular cultures, and by the particular agents involved. In itself, as a meta-theory, the morphogenetic approach explains nothing. On the other hand, I will argue, the morphogenetic approach identifies the inescapable form that every effective account of social change must take when fully explicated [my italics].6

In direct opposition, Kemp endorses Holmwood and Stewart in their rejection of any theory which argues that it is necessary, if only at some point of the analysis, to accept a distinction between the structural aspects of society and the agential response to these.7 Anyone failing to subscribe to this latter view is promptly held to be a dualist. There are major problems with Kemp’s denial of the possibility of making such a distinction. The main one is the impossibility of maintaining that there exists anything approximating to ‘contextless action’. The only conceivable contenders would be autonomic knee jerks by agents (also including the incidence of hiccups or maybe suffering from hallucinations, but even these latter are provoked by something and these somethings could be elements of the context, such as associations  – remember where the taste of madeleines led Proust). Obviously, I am not saying that the flavour determined that he wrote all the succeeding books and just those books. However, I do maintain that many contexts give us determinate interests in doing something specific in our agential actions. This is not axiomatic. In my neglected 1979 book on the Social Origins of Educational Systems,8 for example, I argued that the agricultural sector (the majority of those working in it) played no part in the early struggles to expand access to schooling because their children were fully occupied on the land, which had no need of their acquiring literacy and would have subtracted from the hours they gave to farm work. In short, eighteenth-century rural parents had little interest in the educational issue and were largely non-participants in the nascent struggle.

6

Douglas V. Porpora, 2013, ‘Morphogenesis and Social Change’, in Margaret S. Archer (ed.), Social Morphogenesis, Dordrecht, Springer, p. 26. 7 J. Holmwood and A. Stewart, 1991, Explanation and Social Theory, London, Macmillan, ch. 6. 8 Margaret S. Archer, 1979, Social Origins of Educational Systems, London, Sage.

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My using the word ‘interest’ is deliberate, but prompts Kemp to pounce on one of his two points of attack, namely, ‘Archer sees interests as a ­feature of “objective social structure” and as having a character and influence upon agents that is not reducible to agents’ own understandings’ (490). Yes, indeed, and I will defend this, although first let’s note that such ‘understandings’ may lead nowhere. As a driver for fifty years with no knowledge of car mechanics I can tell if the engine develops a nasty knocking noise but my ‘understanding’ goes no further than needing to find a garage. The same will be the case for many agents in different contexts. How else is it possible for scams to be so lucrative? In parallel, Kemp wants to strip agents in general of creativity, or of being oriented by ‘subjective values’, which culminates in his derogation of their reflexivity. In this way, if he has stripped both structure and agency of their distinctive properties and causal powers, Kemp has freed himself to mix their residues into a mélange that he asserts can only be approached through ‘understanding’. The question raised is ‘whose’ understandings? Those of the denuded agent or those of the investigator whom he has empowered? We’ll certainly come to answer this question, which is at the heart of central conflation. But first let’s examine what he has done to ‘structure’ and to ‘agency’ that he regards as so damaging to the M/M approach and CR as meta-theories.

The Parody of ‘Realist Dualism’



The Structured Context Anathematized

Both the M/M and CR do view social structures as being capable of exercising causal powers, generically deriving from the relational organization of their parts. But they do not always do so, nor are they always recognized as doing so. As Bhaskar put it, these ‘must be analyzed as the tendencies of things, which may be possessed unexercised and exercised unrealized, just as they may of course be realized unperceived (or undetected) by people’.9 In addition, various powers may interact, often deflecting one another’s effects (as with gravity and wind both affecting where leaves fall). Equally, contingencies may always intervene with distorting consequences. However, Kemp sets out a parody in which so-called Realist Dualists endorse two conflicting images, namely one where structure is presented as necessarily influencing social outcomes and another in which structure need not influence social outcomes because of the different powers exerted by agents against them. This is at the core of his charge of inconsistency against the M/M approach. 9

Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, p. 9.

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Looking at these two charges in turn, it soon becomes clear that they depend upon one another and thus Kemp’s argument fails if both cannot be sustained. Certainly, I do maintain that, at the macroscopic level, the complex of social institutions is proximately responsible for the distribution of socially scarce resources among the relevant populations – be it in health, education, housing, access to jobs and remuneration for employment etc. Moreover, the structuring of institutions themselves will be responsible for which sections of the population get most or least out of this. For instance, in those educational systems that develop as highly centralized rather than decentralized, the teachers will tend to be powerless to influence the curriculum. They will not be able to practise ‘internal initiation’, that is, by introducing significant changes in the curriculum,10 or influencing whether boys and girls may be schooled together, which languages/dialects may be used in work or play etc. Yet these are some of the nuts and bolts whose results are social inequalities and exclusion. If one wishes to generalize, then structural centralization is highly conducive to the development of the ‘Command and Control’ model for the institution or government in question. A centralized State Educational System ‘is “centred” in that it assumes the state to have the capacity to command and control, to be the only commander and ­controller, and to be potentially effective in commanding and controlling. It is assumed to be unilateral in its approach (governments telling, others doing), based on simple causeeffect relations, and envisaging a linear progression from policy formation through to implementation.’11 However, do such examples mean that structures necessarily influence social outcomes as Kemp claims I maintain – and that this must include the macro, meso and micro levels? He wants to push me into conceding this determinism is my case (whereas to me to influence something is far from determining it). There are three reasons at least for not doing so. First, the absence of culture in his critique undermines his assertion, especially at the macro level. He seems unaware that each of the founding figures in sociology attached considerable importance to ideology, to faith beliefs and to religious symbols – all of which are cultural in kind. These, in themselves, had a significant influence on matters such as the education of girls, which may or may not have been consonant with those stemming from materially based structures. 10 See Archer, Social Origins of Educational Systems, pp. 239–52. 11 Julia Black, 2001, ‘Decentring Regulation: Understanding the Role of Regulation and Self-Regulation in a Post-Regulatory World’, Current Legal Problems, 54:1, 106.

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Secondly, at the meso level, the institution – for example, of the family – played a variety of roles depending upon its hierarchical position as defined (often legally and theologically) in most historically prior contexts. For example, was child marriage primarily concerned with land amalgamation amongst the nobility? Even if so, the parties could fail to agree to its ratification in a later ceremony – times and circumstances could well have changed and with them parental interests in tying a marital bond with the family in question. Thirdly, there is the micro level, and Kemp is stressing the necessary influence of structure all the way down to the individual, on the part of both CR and M/M. Yet we cannot avoid the variability of historical subjects – the boys who fled to sea, the heirs to their fathers’ enterprises who took to the dissolute life instead of entrepreneurship, or those scions of the aristocracy who pursued their calling to ordination or preference for gambling. There is a vivid image of personal determination in William Lovett, leader of the ‘moral force’ Chartists, educating himself on the open top of the carriage whilst waiting for his rich employers to finish their dinner dance. To introduce these individuals who made their own ways through the world is the next anathema to Kemp because if structure is necessarily influential, they should not have existed – yet that they did is historically well documented. Before we come to ‘agency’, I am left with a residual problem with Kemp who bases most of his critique on my Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (1995) and ignores Being Human (2000):12 specifically, what did he make of the diagrams schematizing ‘morphostasis’ and ‘morphogenesis’? Surely these should have roused his ire, except for the fact that he shows no interest in historical social formations whatsoever. I regard him as yet another ‘presentist’ because of his illogical claim that the structural features of any context of action cannot be prior to the action itself. This is specious argument on Kemp’s part. Were I to be the caricature he constantly presents as the ‘Realist Dualist’, his readers would presumably want to know how I make the distinction between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’. This he sedulously avoids because it would mean his tackling the M/M approach, which, significantly, he never does. The answer is simple: time does most of the job. If I am right to say that there is no ‘contextless action’ then the context precedes the action (as the basic morphogenetic diagram shows). It is of no use at all to argue that in 12 Margaret S. Archer, 1995, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Archer, 2000, Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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the course of current action/interaction the context is somehow forged. The answer has to be: something that came before this particular cycle of action began – otherwise we are talking about (future) contextual or structural elaboration, which is fine by me but should not be by Kemp. The M/M framework covers . In comparison, I can only call Kemp another ‘presentist’. To link up to the next section which deals with the life histories of subjects I have interviewed, time cannot be excluded from either their contexts or their concerns – ­neither of which are atemporal.

Interests Don’t Stand Alone

Throughout my development of the M/M approach I sustain a key distinction between ‘interests’ and ‘concerns’. Everyone is born into the objective distribution of their society’s own access to global scarce resources. At whatever T1 the newborns arrive historically, they are born to ­inequality – which may affect the quality of their gestation itself through their mothers’ own nutrition inter alia. Twentieth-century sociologists have been preoccupied with this issue in its multifarious manifestations. Were it all that was involved could we say they had done a good job? This is not the case, because ‘tracking the inequality facts’ involves an ontological commitment to social structure being nothing more than lawlike regularities between social facts. In short, it is an entirely empiricist matter and the most that future academics can contribute is more empirical data. Porpora devotes chapter 4 of Reconstructing Sociology to a critique that I fully endorse, which overturns this Humean ontology. Basically, he argues that inequality ‘[p]rimordially, is a relation: a certain distribution of something and as such objective and material. If, then, inequality is itself consequential, then what is consequential is a material relation … That relation is the basis of market efficiency. Without that relation or the interests it generates, we lose completely the entire market mechanism. Then we are in worse shape even than the economists.’13 These obnoxious relations that Kemp refuses to entertain are perceived by young children from an early age, explaining to them why some of their peers have bicycles and birthday parties but they do not.14 It is part of the discovery of the social ‘Me’, as someone who has less than others. The argument is not that this turns all kids into 13 Douglas V. Porpora, 2015, Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 124. 14 See Archer, Being Human, ch. 3 and esp. Figure 3.4, p. 115.

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raving materialists but what it does instill is the middle-class ‘virtue’ of knowing the value of money. And this has an objective value. What Porpora has always advanced (as a necessary and welcome addition to CR) is that objective structural influences, such as being rich rather than poor, also  motivate agents, by giving them reasons for action. Kemp refuses to recognize this but he also is so busy with his rejection that he fails to notice that these may not be found good reasons, that is, worthy of pursuit by the agents in question. Nor, to return to the empiricists, is there anything other than a very imperfect correlation between the quest for more money and joining gangs, dealing drugs, committing knife crime etc. and having an impoverished natal background; wealthier teenagers may do much the same things because structurally induced hierarchies are multiple and not exclusively monetary – as Weber rightly argued, rankings by status and power also play their part. One problem with Kemp’s discussion of objective structurally distributed and motivating interests is that in his deterministic drive he holds them to be uniform in influence – leaving aside for the moment the differences in agential responses to them. What he advances is nothing more than the trite sayings that ‘Everyone wants to be better off’/ ‘No one wishes to be worse off’, so they are all financial cost–benefit analysts in their own lives. They are not (remember we have bracketed their values for the moment) because given their social situations or positioning they do not confront a uniform balance sheet. Consider two young couples, both keen to get on the housing ladder. One is from a working-class background, the other middle class in background. The first couple A do convince the mortgage brokers that their joint earnings can just meet the repayment schedule for their prospective purchase, and they are granted one. The second couple B offer the brokers no greater financial security from their joint earnings, and are also offered a mortgage. Now, if (for whatever reasons such as ill-health, unexpected pregnancy, redundancy etc.) both couples default on their regular payments, it transpires that the couples are not in the same position vis à vis the opportunity structure. Couple A find their mortgage foreclosed and not only lose their present house but also acquire a black mark against future attempts to purchase another. Couple B turn to the Bank of Mum and Dad, are offered a lump sum or loan to defray what they owe, and continue with their original purchase. This is an illustrative stereotype merely intended to show that objective structural inducements and deterrents are far from uniform in their effects. Importantly, the reason is

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that structural influences are relational, above and beyond the subjects’ own bank statements.15 Finally, Kemp seems to think he is administering a coup de grâce when he questions my use of the metaphor of scales. Repetitively he states that ‘Archer argues that the interests inherent in structural positions make certain courses of action less attractive because of the objective costs associated with them’ (499). Well, this is how grocer’s scales work and it is agents who work them. But the false conclusion he draws is that ‘Archer is suggesting that structural costs and penalties have an intrinsic influence on all agents’ decision-making by tipping the scales one way, no matter what their subjective priorities are. The reference to the possibility of countervailing concerns makes it sound as if Archer is arguing that the influence of structure may or may not be counterbalanced by the influence of agency’ (499). Not being a structural determinist, indeed she is! Fundamentally, what Kemp ignores is that it is agents who do the weighing. At rock bottom it is they who decide what goes onto the scales at all! For those who are indifferent to cars and do not own one, for various personal reasons, possession of a car will not figure on their scales. For instance, they will not enter competitions whose prize is to ‘win this car’. It is not that they cannot afford one or are unaware of the status significance of car ownership: it simply does not matter to them. This can be a question of positive repudiation, for example, on environmental grounds. It can also be a matter of personal taste; new visitors are always surprised that I have no television – never have had and never will have one – and are wrong if they surmise that I stream programmes instead. Such agential selectivity is part of my broader (heterodox) belief that we agents work in terms of multiple currencies and have our own exchange rates between them. Money has the advantage of operating in terms of a single unit, doubtless indispensable to accountants and in commercial transactions; usually all agents in developed counties are legally compelled to use it (in shopping) or to declare it (on tax returns). But neither convenience nor compulsion determines how agents themselves connect ‘value’ with money, let alone consider their lifestyles in terms of ‘value for money’. The objective opportunity of becoming ‘better off’ is only near-irresistible if it would enable courses of action that are currently prevented by lack of money but matter to subjects – and are no less objective for that. 15

Gary Becker, 1976, Economic Approach to Human Behaviour, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, was, at least, considerably more subtle about the shifts and contrivances to which the wealthy would (and should) go to protect their privileges in the next generation. See also Margaret S. Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter (eds.), 2000, Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonization, London, Routledge.

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This is what categorically blocks Kemp’s determinism about the supposed uniformity of the monetary interests associated with upward social mobility and why it is held by him to be a universal interest (500). However, we should not forget that Kemp earlier asserted that actors ‘cannot be wrong about their interests as such’ (492)! Clearly it is he who is advancing the contradictory account. There is no contradiction in maintaining, as I do, that something may be objectively in the interests of a given category of people, but subjectively some of them turn their backs on it – this is the case for the anti-vaxxers, as I wrote in June 2021. But his argument does perform a function for Kemp in preparing the ground for the investigator to arbitrate on what motivates agents in the modus vivendi that they seek. This will be examined in the next section. So, let’s move over to the agential side and, of course, hamstrung without reference to culture, show how some agents can spurn or deflect objective structural influences by ‘paying the cost’ involved, albeit in various currencies.

Agential Concerns and Their Attempts to Forge a Modus Vivendi

As already suggested, Kemp’s main error is to elide objective interests with agential concerns. I would agree with others that ‘concerns’ is an awkward term to employ. In French I often resort to priorités, which comes overloaded with the connotations of liberal economics or Rational Choice Theory. By a ‘concern’ I mean what matters to subjects most and use it in the same sense as does Andrew Sayer.16 However, there is a debate reaching back to antiquity about whether or not subjects endorse and pursue a single ‘ultimate concern’ or a plurality.17 As a response, I found Charles Taylor’s argument convincing: ‘even if we see a plurality of final ends of equal rank, we still have to live them, that is, we have to design a life in which they can be integrated, in some proportions, since any life is finite and cannot admit of unlimited pursuit of any good. This sense of a life – or design or plan… is necessarily one. If this is our final end, there can only be one.’18 It is what I mean by the agential quest to formulate and forge a modus vivendi. Because we are not isolated monads, it usually does involve our relations with (certain) other people.19 16

Andrew Sayer, 2011, Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 17 Ruth Chang (ed.), 1997, Incommensurability, Incompatibility and Practical Reason, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press. 18 Charles Taylor, 1997, ‘Leading a Life’, ibid., p. 183. 19 See Archer, The Reflexive Imperative, ch. 3.

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Of importance in the present debate is the fact that throughout my trilogy of books on reflexivity20 reference is made exclusively to agents seeking to design a way of life that is ‘satisfying and sustainable’ to and by them. There is no suggestion whatsoever that those who are successful in doing so are also financially ‘better off’ than they were or than those in their natal background or their current peers. It is Kemp who harps incessantly upon being ‘better off’ in material financial terms. Indeed, his touchstone in evaluating whether or not objective structural positioning exerts a causal influence (that I call only ‘conditioning’) is entirely about remuneration. It does so alone, as if considering anyone’s well-being in cash terms was all that ever influenced an actor. That, again, makes Kemp the determinist. Yet, being ‘all or nothing’ is not the criterion of causal relevance or its opposite in any scientific domain. Moreover, as we have already seen from Taylor’s summary statement, actors and agents are performing a balancing act between their concerns, insofar as they are seeking, as far as they can, to bring about complementarity between them. This is not some abstract imperative to be even-handed towards their concerns (whatever that might mean); it can involve hard choices and often regrets. In any case, we are not dealing with isolated monads but with relational subjects, so the task is even more difficult. Reading Kemp makes me wonder if he has no idea of self-sacrifice, of costs voluntarily incurred to sustain relationships – such as having or not having children or, to be less dramatic, to know when and about what to keep one’s mouth shut. And if one has children, then, however good the relationship with them, there will be ‘no-go areas’ and, valuing relational sustainability, the price is respecting them by avoidance – despite one’s curiosity, anxiety or (better) judgement.21 However, this is not confined to human relations as such. I also cited Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory, which tracks a Latino parish priest who, when the book opens, is the respected leader of his community of the faithful and whose vocation seems to demand little more than a general bonhomie, as reflected in a photograph which initially he cherishes. When he recognizes that his vocation calls him to join the political guerrillas and involves his eventual martyrdom, the photograph is lost and not missed. In case it is tempting to dismiss the above as a novelist’s idealized heroics, allow me briefly to refer to an example of real-life heroism revealed in a long interview with a retired and now disabled interviewee in i­nner-city 20

Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation; Archer, Making Our Way through the World; Archer, The Reflexive Imperative. 21 Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret S. Archer, 2015, The Relational Subject, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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Coventry. There is an important theoretical point that is revealed by Joan’s story. Born into a working-class family (father a building worker), living in social housing, she conceived the project of becoming a nurse whilst still at school. Father was intransigently opposed to this as he saw nurses as servants doing dirty jobs. This was not because he wanted social promotion for her, because he insisted she became an unskilled worker on a poultry farm. Her nursing dream did not wither as two years passed, but neither did his opposition. By age nineteen, rather than capitulate to his patriarchy, she reflexively compromised and settled for ‘second best’, becoming a nanny rather than a nurse. At twenty-one, she married a man from the same street and promptly had three children, whose care precluded nannying. Instead of capitulating, Joan reflexively revised her project again and became a childminder, strongly supported this time by her older husband, even with twelve children around the tea table (as some kept returning despite being in secondary school). This was ‘third best’ but she expressed huge satisfaction in their way of life although it seems improbable that this couple were not subsidizing it.22 I do regret reducing her story to such a bald cameo after a generous interview (of more than three hours’ duration) but, when I asked her if she had retrospectively regretted the trajectory her modus vivendi had taken, this is a summary of her reply. ‘The answer is “no”, meaning that the agent who has been an active collaborator in their social immobility, as well as the subject of structurally constrained opportunities and culturally enforced gender norms, is also a person with the self-awareness that she has worked hard to obtain her half-loaf – precisely because the full one was withheld from her.’23 To any array of detailed analyses of interviews like Joan’s, Kemp’s response is that ‘dualists want to include agency into their framework, which is understood to involve the creative or reflexive ability to cancel out and thus act inconsistently with structural inputs’ (501). Even in the above cameo, there is no question of the agent in question ‘cancelling out’ the structural influences of her natal context. Without them there is no reason why she should not have become a State certified nurse rather than a childminder. Can Kemp really give her no credit for making the best she could out of a bad contextual lot? Apparently not, but the reason is obvious. To do so would make the M/M and CR into meta-approaches based upon co-determinism.24 As I

22

Archer, Making Our Way through the World, pp. 104–13. 23 Ibid., p. 113. 24 The same wilful misinterpretation is found of Margaret S. Archer, 2013, ‘Collective Reflexivity: A Relational Case for It’, in C. Powell and F. Dépelteau (eds.), Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 145–61.

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have shown, we are not; we merely insist upon exploring the interplay between (in Kemp’s terms) structure and agency (although his absenting of culture makes his enterprise incapable of generating adequate explanations of outcomes). In the real social world there are many factors that can also intervene – biological, relational, political and, let’s not forget, contingency. Failure to reduce these to situations that can be examined only interpretively is attributed to the supposed fact that ‘the structure of her [my] thought is a dualist one’ (502). No comment, except to wonder about his credentials in psychiatry! Kemp addresses only my analysis of the Communicative Reflexives, those whose deliberations require confirmation and completion from trusted others,25 giving no explanation why practitioners of other modes merited no attention. The opening sentence of my chapter 4 states it is ‘devoted to the justification of a single proposition, namely that the practice of communicative reflexivity has the consequence of fostering social immobility amongst its practitioners’.26 By the end of their life histories, I eventually concluded that this group of subjects had not dedicated themselves to occupational projects ‘that activated either the constraints or enablements associated with the employment structure’.27 However, over half of them had given the enablements a try, and only after these experiences had they decided (in terms of their own pair of scales) that such courses of action did not yield ‘satisfaction’ for them and there were no good reasons for ‘sustaining’ them. Thus, five of them had been to university or college, including one who gained a PhD and a female teacher who had been offered a headship which she refused. They came from a variety of social class backgrounds, and it would have been extremely difficult for anyone simply reading the interview transcripts to distinguish the young men from the young women. What they did, they did knowingly. It was not the case that the escalators to occupational opportunity were not available to them or that constraints on their ambitions were heavy. So, what explains their immobility? Sociological accounts often strain to fit subjects into a pattern of reproduction, but this reduces them to passive agents in the dynamics of social mobility – those who passively bear the imprint of their natal backgrounds. Yet, this does not fit all these subjects, all of whom were quite ready to give reasons for what they had done and why they did it. In other words, they were very active agents who could only be understood as pursuing their own concerns rather than responding to structural incentives or disincentives in terms of their objective interests. 25

Archer, Making Our Way through the World, ch. 4. 26 Ibid., p. 158. 27 Ibid., p. 191.

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How Concerns Evade Constraints – at a Price

Rather than being sufficiently open-minded to entertain that people’s concerns matter to them, Kemp produces the give-away comment that ‘when it comes to the communicative reflexives, Archer certainly presents little or no evidence28 of their postulated structural interests “predisposing” them toward seeking social mobility, let alone profoundly affecting what they seek after’ (500). It is the latter part of that comment to which I object on behalf of my subjects because it means he is intransigently unwilling to take what they say seriously. Why is he so insensitive to their concerns; why does he foist the knee-jerk reaction upon his readers that the only way to be influenced by structure is by obedience to its financial incentives for social mobility? Why refuse their own accounts of their own concerns and that these furnished them with good reasons for, having experienced some of the effects of improving their social positioning, they do not deem them good? After all who or what ruled that a structural influence has to have the same influence on all people, which is effectively what he is asserting? Finally, he illogically maintains that ‘Archer’s presentation is clear: communicative reflexives are not predisposed toward a particular direction of action by their structural interests, because they evade them’ (501). This has to be the other way around. We only evade things because they are threatening or otherwise undesirable! Instead, let’s try listening to their concerns. What is the point of an empirical study if a reader has a foregone conclusion that he knows what’s going on better than the investigator, who has met and discussed this with the interviewee and recorded it? There is not space to look briefly at more than two subjects.29 The eldest subject was Alf,30 a retired miner (then aged sixty-nine) whose friends in Durham were his classmates and still are. His first dream was to become a jockey – until he became too tall. His mother and aunt independently determined that he should not go down the pit (his father, himself a miner, having died young): ‘So my aunt got me a job in the butcher’s shop and my mother, unbeknownst to her, got me a job in the chemist’s shop, and I was supposed to start on Monday. But the day before, a group of lads I went to school with decided they were going over to the pit, about five miles away. And I went with them, just for the ride – and I signed up as well …’ The concrete opportunity for white collar work had been declined twice over and Alf worked that pit until it closed, then 28

Ibid., ch. 4, is full of such evidence. 29 The interviews took place in 2003–4 so please don’t assume today’s social context. 30 All the first names used in Making Our Way through the World were pseudonyms, so these are re-used here.

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going south in search of open-cast mining with his original mates, only to confront the miners’ strike (1984–5) which he stuck to for the full fiftyone weeks. ‘When we went back there [Durham], those blacklegs had all stopped at the pit and you just couldn’t depend on them … Your workmates are the ones you’ve got to depend on, especially down the pit … When you’ve got a job, I think that it’s the people that you work with the good, kind, generous people – it doesn’t matter what job you do because you can always have a laugh and a bit of fun and take things with a bit of snuff. Friends are important, especially my work friends. That was the reason I left the pit at the finish, because the people I was working with, I just couldn’t get on with … So, I took the redundancy and then I worked on the roads for a few years … but at least the family never suffered.’31 Pauline, aged forty-four at the time of being interviewed, is now a night care worker in a home for elderly people. She describes her occupational trajectory as being triggered by her mother’s long-term illness, from which she died when Pauline was eighteen. ‘My mother started to go into hospital quite a lot as I got onto my teenage years. I used to wonder what happened behind the curtains and got interested in nursing. I left school before I took any exams because I really hated school. So my careers officer was trying to get me to do hairdressing or factory work and I said, “I’m not doing either of them and I will get into the hospital.” He kept saying, “No you won’t”, but I did – and spent ten years as an auxiliary.’ ‘You could do an entrance exam to get into being an SEN. But the ward I was on was just great and they let the auxiliaries do practically everything anyway. And I got so stuck in that I didn’t move on. But I’m glad now because if you’re a trained nurse now, it’s all paperwork and that’s not me. I’m a hands-on person. I much prefer to be doing things for people … Being an auxiliary was just good fun. The nursing students used to come to ask us for help and advice because we’d been there for years and we knew the routine of the ward and it was nice because you felt quite important … people were so nice and you felt like you were doing a worthwhile job, because people were getting better and were going home – and that was great. So, I would have stayed forever … if I hadn’t had the children, but the hospital hours didn’t work out [though] these were definitely the best years of my life. I went back part-time after I’d had my daughter. But then I had my son and my dad was looking after my daughter, and I thought I can’t leave my dad with two – it’s not fair. And we worked out that if we got a childminder, it would be too expensive; I would have been going to work for a few pounds at the end 31

Ibid., pp. 168–76. The following story, about Pauline, is also to be found ibid.

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of it – and I thought, it’s just not worth it. So, I had a year off and then I went into working nights at care homes … At first I thought I’d regret not doing my nurse’s training, but when I see it now, they’re constantly on your back to keep on training, to keep updating things – and I don’t want to be doing that sort of thing. I’m glad I stuck where I was. It’s nice to sit with the old folks sometimes, when they can’t sleep, and have a good old conversation – and I wouldn’t have had that if I’d been a qualified nurse … I think sometimes we’ve [my husband and I] been happier with less money than with more money … he was having to work lots of hours to get the money. I’d much rather have him at home, so we can be together … I’d go out and spend money on things I didn’t need, just to try and make me feel better. Even though we had the money, it wasn’t the best time in our marriage.’ The main concern of the Communicative Reflexives was the quality of their interpersonal relationships and the relational goods32 they generated within their micro-worlds. They understand what they have done and are doing, and why. How can Kemp pretend to a higher level of understanding than their own? In any case it is their understandings, not his, that have motivated them over the years in their courses of action. I will give Robbie the last word. From a working-class background, at twenty-three he has tried three courses at different universities but dropped out during the first year, not through lack of ability. Now a team leader in e-banking, he is restless and discontented but says that the quality of work relations he currently enjoys is one major deterrent against moving. ‘I’m comfortably off, and I really like the people where I am, which made it difficult to do anything different. I was in that stage where home life is good, earning enough, get to do the things I want to do. Work with people I enjoy being with, why do I want to change it?’ At the interview, he brings out of his pocket a new job offer, carrying a substantial rise in income. But it remains uncertain if he will accept it.33

Contextual Continuity Can Trump Enablements to Social Mobility

In sociology, social mobility is a generic term. It covers ‘upward’ and ‘downward’ movements but also ‘lateral’ moves and ‘immobility’ – for individuals but also for collectivities. Unfortunately, Kemp construes it in only a two-dimensional manner: subjects can go vertically ‘up’ or ‘down’, but even ‘staying put’ is not considered. Most children master 32

See Donati and Archer, The Relational Subject. 33 Archer, Making Our Way through the World, pp. 161, 173.

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the latter before they are five – hence the pleasure of running ‘up’ the ‘down’ steps on an escalator. Horizontal or lateral mobility is never allowed into the picture. This being the case, structural constraints and enablements do apply to them and over half of them try out the latter, with more who had wished to do so but were constrained to reduce their ambitions, like Joan. I will illustrate this by following the quote from Robbie above by his characterization of his natal background at the time of the interview as one conducive to ‘staying put’. ‘I come from Cobford34 [a suburb of Coventry] and basically, where I live, next door to me is my auntie, who I’m really close to as she has no kids. So, I’m spoilt rotten. Then, about two minutes’ walk away is my mum’s, and just round the corner from her is my nan – and the other side of Cobford is my grandma. I’ve always had my close family near me all the time … I’ve got a really close relationship with my mum and dad and grandma, my nan and my auntie. I tend to see at least one of them every day – at least one member of my family every day. It’s just something I’ve always had, so it’s very important to me … When you are in real trouble, you find out who your friends are, but your family will always be there and will always help.’ Well, this is where concerns begin to come in. This context is objectively neither good, bad or indifferent. To some of us it will sound like hell – huis clos or natal surveillance – and we would get away far and fast to foster our personal concerns (such as living with one’s partner, towards which some of this extended family could likely be negative). That would represent a constraint to stay away, which Kemp never entertains since it does not mean going socially ‘up’ or ‘down’ – merely away. But to those like Robbie staying put is a magnet of security (and one of his worst experiences was his experiment with a Welsh university). Thus, his current work is an inducement to remain in his present post, which is sustainable if not completely satisfying. There is always a dialectic between ‘contexts’ and ‘concerns’, as the introduction to the empirical section of the book outlines clearly.35 I ventured that where the Communicative Reflexives were concerned, three conditions were conducive to promoting it which had surfaced in the preceding and purely exploratory study, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (2003). These were first, a continuous, dense and geographically stable home background; secondly, stability in the parental relationship; and, thirdly, by the availability of occupational outlets in the vicinity, acceptable to the young subject. If found together, I termed 34

A pseudonym for the real suburb. 35 Archer, Making Our Way through the World, pp. 145–57.

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this ‘contextual continuity’, propitious to the subject becoming a ­Communicative.36 Nothing could be further from the truth than Kemp’s assertion that ‘Archer wishes to treat the characteristics of certain situations as a “positive motivating factor” independent of the goals of the agent’ (503). Instead, I am seeking to come to grips with the process by which some subjects (the Communicative Reflexives) come to deem circumstances not of their making to be good and to tailor their eventual modus vivendi to replicating them. Instead, at this point, Kemp’s alternative is to wheel in agential ‘goals’, ‘beliefs’ and ‘values’ out of the blue and despite his disdain for culture (503–4). Of course, other processes are explored and broadly confirmed empirically for different dominant kinds of reflexives, namely ‘contextual discontinuity’ for Autonomous subjects and ‘contextual incongruity’ for the Meta-Reflexive subjects,37 but do not feature in any of Kemp’s discussion. What he does instead is to cite a summary sentence of mine, covering the three different modes of exercising reflexivity plus ‘Fractured reflexives’ as part of the ‘generality of Archer’s views on agency’ (504) (whatever that means, as he makes no reference to Being Human), namely that ‘conditional influences may be agentially evaded, endorsed, repudiated or contravened’.38 Certainly, that is the case, but for different groups of people, with different contexts and concerns. This is cited to undermine Kemp’s argument that (used inappropriately) ‘implies that the conditioning influence of structure can be entirely irrelevant to agents’ (504)! To which agents is entirely unspecified. Conclusion Whilst one can welcome a well-crafted critique and become inured to blundering ones, there is something offensive in an unprofessional assault that turns out to be in the service of the writer’s agenda. This is unfortunately the case here, for Kemp’s own conclusion is devoted to how his approach would better tackle the same issues. We should not fail to note that the concept of ‘concerns’, about which agents care a great deal, is systematically eliminated and his vaunted approach deals with ‘interests’ alone. In his ‘alternative analysis of interests’ (505), Kemp wants ‘to recommend that social scientists focus both on actors’ understanding of their interests and the potential limitations of these understandings’. 36 Ibid., p. 145. 37 Ibid., chs. 5 and 6, which are completely neglected. 38 Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, p. 131.

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This orientation is consistent only with my emphasis on the ­importance of actors’ understandings. But to Kemp, ‘analyzing their interests would involve trying to grasp which outcomes actors see as promoting their interests, as beneficial to them, and which they see as contrary to their interests’ (505). This is more limited because it in no way seeks to explain the processes by which respondents came to think in these terms. It also hints to me that it is not quite so innocent as it sounds – were one to imagine these to be young subjects engaged in drug pushing. The danger begins to come into view when Kemp then argues that his neo-pragmatist or ‘problem-solving’ approach ‘does suggest the possibility of identifying problems with agents’ goals – that this, their conception of what it is in their interests to achieve – and giving a justified critique of them’ (506). However, ‘the problem-solving approach argues that the actors’ views of their interests should not be taken on their own terms’ (507). If not, then upon whose terms? Now the cat is out of the bag. Kemp finishes this article with the claim that ‘social scientists are better off thinking of interests as characterizations of what it is beneficial for agents to do and working at grasping agents’ conceptions of their interests and identifying problems that these conceptions might have. If problems are identified, “social scientists” can potentially make a positive contribution to the social world by offering solutions that help actors to better understand and realize their interests’ (508). What a terrifying therapeutic prospect! And the whole ‘social world’ is supposedly the beneficiary – as I also suppose I am assumed to be after this desultory travesty of my goals in this study.

6

The Majority of Agents Are the Dead: Implications for Central Conflation Featuring Tero Piiroinen, 2014, ‘For “Central Conflation”: A Critique of Archerian Dualism’, Sociological Theory, 32:2, 79–99

ARTICLE ABSTRACT

Taking a side in the debate over ontological emergentism in social theory, this article defends an outlook that Margaret S. Archer has dubbed “central conflation”: an antidualist position appreciating the interdependency of agency and structure, individuals and society. This has been a popular outlook in recent years, advocated broadly by such theorists as Pierre Bourdieu, Randall Collins and Anthony Giddens. However, antidualism has been challenged by those who believe the key to success in social science lies in level-ontological emergentism. Archer’s own morphogenetic theory is an explicitly dualist version of that approach. I answer Archer’s own arguments for emergentism, in so doing clearing a path for the even fuller acceptance of antidualism by theorists. Introduction It is self-evident that valid critique cannot rest upon misrepresentation, and previous chapters have shown that the M/M approach is triadic not dualistic. I have tried to dissociate my approach from misconstruction by explicitly terming it ‘analytical dualism’ and this applies to all three SAC components. What this entails is the necessary incorporation of history into any putative explanation in the social order, as all the founding figures in the social sciences agreed. There is always a before and an after in any social phenomenon under investigation, in the strong sense that the present cannot be completely dissociated from the past. The analytical element consists exclusively in recognition of this temporality. For an important current example, take Boris Johnson’s assertion when ‘getting Brexit done’ that he owed this to the British electorate who supported the policy of leaving the EU. Such support rested on the outcome of the 2016 referendum and is still cited in justification of it. 122

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Yet, seven years later, how many who had then voted ‘Leave’ had since died and how many young people had become old enough to join the electoral register? To make my point we cannot include those who has changed their views because there was no comparable second referendum. Certainly, this frequent assertion of an obligation to 2016 voters was politically self-interested by a living prime minister, but in this chapter I am more concerned with the ineluctable effect of historicity, whether invoked in the present or not. And have been for a long time, hence titling chapter 3 of my 1995 book ‘Taking Time to Link Structure and Agency’.1 To avoid repetition I will focus on three main deficiencies of Piiroinen’s argument; concerning temporality, over-socialization and sociological populism. These are all components of his generic argument for the inseparability of structure and agency, the keystone of central conflation. The only biographical mistake it is worth correcting is that, although he does refer to Social Origins of Educational Systems (1979),2 he writes that I then ‘went on to develop a sweeping “morphogenetic” theory of culture, society and agency’ (80).3 He should consult the diagram reproduced from that study in the Introduction to this book (Figure 1.1), representing two cycles of morphogenesis4 – already developed and put to work in 1979. It is completely erroneous to make claims that either my emergentist ontology or the methodological framework I developed and still advocate ‘changed quite dramatically in the 1990s when [I] ontologized [my] concept of emergence’.5 To what else does the notion of emergent entities refer unless it is reduced to merely a way of referring to changes that have taken place? To me, ‘State Educational Systems’ are ‘ontological emergents’, possessing causally influential properties and powers.6 Unfortunately, his ‘defence’ is incompatible from the start of the M/M approach. He begins by ‘quoting’ a sentence I had used in my reply to Anthony King and still hold to firmly, namely,

1

Margaret S. Archer, 1995, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 65–92. 2 Margaret S. Archer, 1979, Social Origins of Educational Systems, London, Sage. 3 Tero Piiroinen, 2014, ‘For “Central Conflation”: A Critique of Archerian Dualism’, Sociological Theory, 32:2, 79–99. Page numbers given in parentheses in this chapter refer to this article. 4 For a concise, straightforward and accurate summary, see John Parker, 2000, Structuration, Buckingham, Open University Press, ch. 6, ‘Archer: “Structuration” and the Defence of “Analytical Dualism”’, pp. 69–85. 5 R. K. Sawyer, 2001, ‘Emergence in Sociology: Contemporary Philosophy of Mind and Some Implications for Sociological Theory’, American Journal of Sociology, 107:3, 569. 6 Archer, Social Origins of Educational Systems.

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There is no philosophical dualism because (a) structures are only held to emerge from the activities of people, and because (b) structures only exert an effect when mediated through the activities of people. Structures are ever relational emergents and never reified entities existing without social interaction: the converse would be tenets of dualism.7

Although I have written this (several times) to distinguish M/M from ‘philosophical dualism’, to Piiroinen, true dualists would deny it, because it would have structures come into existence by some ‘other means than by emerging from people’s activities’ (82). I do not understand this statement other than being precisely what Structurationists maintain: if structure and agency are truly inseparable nothing can be attributed to one or to the other because analysis of their interplay has been foreclosed.

The Dismissal of Temporality by Piiroinen

The fundamental point I want to highlight here is that whilst analytical dualism is possible due to temporality, as the basic morphogenetic diagram illustrates (Figure 6.1), structuration is firmly presentist, thanks to dismissing Comte’s crucial insight that the majority of social actors and agents are indeed the dead. Having said in derogatory fashion that Archer ‘notes’ the temporality of emergence, Piiroinen ‘notes’ that ‘certainly the fact that structures have arisen from past actions may be thought to dispel the air of paradox surrounding dualist [sic] ontology’. However, this quotation continues to what he considers to be a negative logical conclusion, namely ‘if structures are dependent on past actions, are they not to that extent independent from present agency?’ (82). Instead, it seems quite illogical. It equates to asserting that, because the pyramids were physically constructed by Egyptian slaves, their endurance/maintenance has nothing to do with present agents (and the tourist income they raise). Or, more simply, the fact that most of us had parents, whenever they died, does not make us ‘independent from present agents’ (our partners, bosses etc.). However, in Dave Elder-Vass Piiroinen believes he has found an ally amongst realist theorists. In his earlier works Elder-Vass did, indeed, struggle to clarify the components of social emergence,8 but has not, to my knowledge, repeated this since. Piiroinen’s take is that Elder-Vass 7

Margaret S. Archer, 2000, ‘For Structure: Its Reality, Properties and Powers. A Reply to Anthony King’, Sociological Review, 48:3, 465. 8 Dave Elder-Vass, 2007, ‘For Emergence’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 37:1, 25–44.

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The Morphogenetic Approach

Structural

Conditioning

T1 T2

Social Interaction

T3

Structural Elaboration T4

Downward Conflation

Upward Conflation

Central Conflation

Figure 6.1. The limited time span incorporated by conflationary ­theories compared with the Morphogenetic Approach

has found that ‘emergence is chiefly a matter of present “synchronic” relations, not of “diachronic” developments in time’ (83). This is unfair because Elder-Vass does not make such a binary distinction. Instead, he lists the following summary points about the components of emergence. In his own terms, what this requires is: (i) a list of its (new) characteristic parts; (ii) an explanation of how these must be related to each other to form a whole rather than an unorganized heap; (iii) an explanation of the generative mechanism constituted by the manner in which its (novel) properties and powers are produced from that particular organization of its parts; (iv) to this, he adds a morphogenetic account of how this state of affairs comes about; and (v) a morphostatic account of how it is sustained and thus proves relatively enduring.

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Here too, I agree, but we should note that with (v), as opposed to (iv), we have now moved into the present tense.9 Yet, he also claims that the Morphogenetic Approach cannot account for synchronic relations sustaining parts and their relations at a specific moment in time – upon which their possession and exercise of causal powers depends. I disagree, but will have to unpack the realist commitment to the continuous ‘activity-dependence’ of structures to show why. To realists, nothing social, whatever its origins, is self-sustaining, which is what inter alia distinguishes the social from the natural world. Only a myriad of agential ‘doings’ (including thinking, believing and imagining) keep any given higher level of social entity in being and render it relatively enduring. In other words, whilst something like the centralized French educational system lasts, then move a marker, second-by-second, from the system’s inception until today, and each and every moment of its ‘centralization’ depends upon certain agential doings (themselves dependent upon their intentionality, including intentional inaction). This is not equivalent to some Giddensian notion that every such doing on the part of everyone somehow contributes to maintaining the whole (in this case, a centralized institution). On the contrary, some doings are entirely irrelevant to sustaining educational centralization (keeping a dog), some are more important than others, and it is only because certain further ‘doings’ exist in tension with one another that things remain the way they are (Catholic and now Muslim religious practices ‘provoke’ the supporters of centralization to exercise its powers in defence of the laïcité of education in the French Republic). Still further ‘doings’ are intended to change the status quo but have not yet succeeded in doing so. What the Morphogenetic Approach allows us to avoid is the s­ ynchronic banality and futility of asserting that, if a relational property endures, this must be because of some net balance of sustaining agential doings at each moment in time (reminiscent of Merton’s ‘net balance of functional consequences’). Instead, in completing a morphogenetic cycle, by issuing in structural elaboration, not only is structure transformed but so is agency, as part and parcel of the same process – the Double Morphogenesis.10 (This point also fails to be understood in Dépelteau’s misleading discussion of what he calls ‘co-determination theories’.)11 9 Ibid. 10 See Archer, Realist Social Theory, p. 74 and ch. 8. See also Margaret S. Archer, 2015, ‘How Agency Is Transformed in the Course of Social Transformation’, in Archer (ed.), Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 135–59. 11 François Dépelteau, 2008, ‘Relational Thinking: A Critique of Co-Deterministic Theories of Structure and Agency’, Sociological Theory, 26:1, 51–73.

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As it re-shapes structural relations at any given T4, agency is ineluctably re-shaping itself: in terms of domination and subordination, of organization, combination and articulation; in terms of its interests12 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 contexts in which all agents now find themselves, constraining to the projects of some and enabling to the projects of others, yet of significance for the motivation of all. Thus, very briefly, at any given T4 something radical happens, not only to structure but also to agency. In cases of macroscopic change this affects the ‘people’ through transforming four levels of the social order: the systemic, the institutional, the role array and the positional (the life chances of different sections of the population). Where the emergence of an educational system (at T4) is concerned, one of its immediate effects consists in re-dividing the population, not necessarily exhaustively, into those with interests in (educational) maintenance and change respectively, according to the situations in which they now find themselves – involuntarily for the majority of people. To characterize an interest as a ‘vested’ one is to associate it with a particular position, the implication being that if positions (roles, institutions) change, then so do many agents’ interests. Thus, ‘opportunity costs’ are differentially redistributed to different groups of actors – hence providing directional guidance vis à vis the course(s) of action each group adopts after T4. To illustrate this point equally briefly, the emergence of a centralized educational system creates new vested interests in maintaining that organizational form (i.e. those particular relations between its parts) as constitutive and definitive of national education. For example, at the institutional apex, consider the position of the French Minister of Public Instruction. One of the rare empirical generalizations one can venture is that no incumbent of this (new) role, or the government of which he/she is also part, will ever voluntarily cede ‘centralization’ because of the bonus that it derives from an educational system that is supremely responsive to étatist direction.13 Equally, consider the (new) educational

12

These become modified over time. Today, educational centralization is not based upon the identical interests that Napoleon articulated at the inception of his Université Impériale. 13 Lower down the educational hierarchy, consider the (new) role of primary school teacher (successfully wrested from the hands of religious personnel and now constituting part of the corps enseignant). The instituteurs, whom Péguy accurately dubbed the ‘hussars of the Republic’, consistently played an important part in upholding the laïcité of French public instruction, by actively resisting the curé’s influence throughout the villages of rural France during the nineteenth century.

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situation confronting the population at large. The various levels of instruction were carefully calibrated with entry to appropriate grades of public service, and access to each level effectively altered the contemporary form of social stratification. In sum, the new relational properties of national education exerted causal powers, influencing individual and collective motivation, sufficient for agents to act back synchronically in a manner that sustained centralization. Now, of course, we are talking about morphostasis, which is given short shrift by Piiroinen. Instead, the relatively enduring nature of structures serves to highlight the importance of the ‘Double Morphogenesis’ of structure and agency over time.14 It explains how the synchronic ‘forces’ (re-)producing morphostasis are an agential achievement, which is constantly threatened, rather than being ones conducive to eternal life for any structure. In any historical conflict, the losers in a particular struggle (as over educational control, whose outcome was the emergence of a State System) do not quietly fade away; on the contrary, they can retain their organization and their objectives for instruction. They then fight on and may win concessions (such as the French Catholic Church re-acquiring the right to own and run schools under the Loi Falloux of 1850). Paradoxical as this might seem, morphostatic analysis cannot remain the same from one time interval to another. This is because something that endures has to accommodate such changes in its constitution – changes that ‘punctuate’ morphostasis diachronically. In other words, an emergent entity (such as an educational system) can retain its key relational properties and causal powers (those making it a centralized system) without it remaining exactly the same entity. To simplify greatly, the new system also defines new groups of losers: those with limited educational opportunities but also, for example, industrialists concerned about the absence of technical training. Any group in the above situation has interests in bringing about transformation, though not of the same kind. With even greater over simplification, the crucial question for endurance versus change is: ‘Can these groups work together?’ This is an empirical question. What it means, however, is that we know where to look – and this is only contingently ‘outside’ – to explain why time is eventually up for that which was only relatively enduring. When we then address the break-up of the tense balance of forces that had

14

A frequent difficulty with persuasive synchronic accounts – and I believe Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’ to be a case in point – is how to explain that a given relationship between parts is ever susceptible of transformation (indeed, he himself relied upon external intrusions, in common with normative functionalism).

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consistently maintained morphostasis, we also know what to do next, and that is to examine the next (potentially) morphogenetic cycle. Throughout this account it has been maintained that structural ‘conditioning’ is necessarily mediated by (variable) agential responses to their circumstances, which Piiroinen scarcely addresses. Yet, without allowing for the personal powers of agents, it is impossible to explain the variability of their actions in the same circumstances. However, some question the notion of mediation itself. Thus, Manicas asks ‘why postulate the existence of structure or culture as causally relevant if, to be causally effective, these must be mediated by social actors?’15 However, the historical shaping by structure and culture could be deemed causally irrelevant only if what was being mediated was invented then and there by actors whose own personal powers were entirely responsible for it. The concept of ‘instantiation’ seems to invite this, but the ‘ban’ upon ‘mediation’ is as untenable as refusing to grant that the possession/purchase of a licence from the BBC was necessary to view the 2020 Olympics live and legally on our screens in Britain. This reflects a tendency for certain theorists to require some kind of instantiation of structural properties by agents before they are accorded any role in an explanation. In other words, far from their impinging upon agents, it is human subjects who literally bring them into play. Such a voluntaristic bias obviously provides protection against being charged with reification. Examples would include John Searle’s16 notion of ‘the Background’, to which back-reference is made, for example, by listeners to disambiguate statements that require contextualization, but neither its constitution nor ontology is explained. Similarly, Manicas17 relegates structural and cultural properties to being ‘materials at hand’, without the capacity to exert causal powers but also, from his standpoint, without any explanation of why some are within easy reach of certain actors but out of reach for others. (It is thus unsurprising that Searle’s favourite sociologist appears to be Bourdieu, whilst Manicas’s book is a virtual repetition of Giddens: these two authors thus favouring the theoretical stance I term ‘central conflation’.)18 15

Peter T. Manicas, 2006, A Realist Philosophy of Social Science, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 16 John Searle, 1995, The Construction of Social Reality, London, Penguin, pp. 127–47. 17 Manicas, A Realist Philosophy of Social Science, p. 75: ‘[P]ersons are the dominant causal agents in society – even while, of course, they work with materials at hand.’ 18 For a discussion of what I have termed ‘central conflation’, see Margaret S. Archer, 1988, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, chs. 2, 3 and 4; and Archer, Realist Social Theory, chs. 3 and 4.

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Why History Will Not Go Away: The Patrimony of the Dead

Fundamentally, no amount of regress can return to a time when there was a completely unstructured context of action. Those structural forms that are carried forward from one morphogenetic cycle to the next or further ones have their own causal powers: to constrain, to enable and to motivate.19 These can change in content over time, but how do they do this without us invoking hydraulic mechanisms – pushes and pulls – and thus slipping into determinism? The generic answer is by shaping the situations in which people find themselves at T1’ (like young pupils and new teachers entering a school for the first time). Such situations exert constraints (you cannot teach or learn what you please), and they constitute enablements (to further education and promotion). They are also sources of motivation, giving some people interests in maintaining the status quo (for example, if it rewards their particular expertise) and others in bringing about change (if, for instance, they wish to see the compulsory teaching of religion taken off the curriculum or ‘creationism’ put back on it). The maintenance or change of any organizational property is activity-dependent in the present upon what those present do – how they ally and conflict, who they can mobilize in support or defence – as also is the nature of the outcome. However, as Sayer points out, ‘one of the most pervasive illusions of everyday thinking derives from the attribution of the properties of the position, be they good or bad, to the individuals or institution occupying it. Whatever effects result, it is assumed that particular people must be responsible; there is little appreciation that the structure of social relations, together with their associated resources, constraints or rules, may account for what happens, even though these structures only exist where and when people reproduce them.’20 Hence the search for guilty parties, the ‘personalization’ of banking fraud or corporate malpractice (someone’s head must roll), which serves to foster ‘business as usual’. This is also part of the reductionist fallacy that the greed of capitalism simply results from capitalists being greedy people. From this follows the erroneous conclusion that if they became more virtuous individuals, that would reform the market. Instead, we need to turn to how these

19

Porpora, Reconstructing Sociology, ch. 4, ‘Whatever Happened to Social Structure?’ (a review of his own 1989 article). 20 Andrew Sayer, 1992, Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach, London, Routledge, pp. 92–3.

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relational organizations of positions that constitute structures condition their actions, but when they seek either morphogenesis or morphostasis they are wanting to reform or prolong their heritage from past agents. Even those who try to stand aside by practising home schooling still face the range of national qualifications etc. available. All structural influences are transmitted to people by shaping the situations in which they find themselves and mediated by what they make of them. At any given time, structures are the results of past social interaction, including the results of the results of that interaction, which may be unintended, unwanted or unacknowledged. As such, they are activity-dependent (past tense) but irreducible to current practices alone (present tense). The structural legacy of the dead crucially shapes the socio-economic environment to be inhabited. It accounts for what is there (materially) to be distributed and for the contemporary shape of such distributions; for the nature of the extant role array; for the proportions of positions currently available and the premium and penalties associated with them. Thus, there is a significant degree of involuntary placement involved. This does not consist in an inability to change our situations, but to evade one is to embroil oneself in another. Try the thought experiment of designing a way of life that completely evades any such involvement. Working for Greenpeace will not do if you pay rent, use transport other than bare feet, use public utilities, take out any form of obligatory insurance and make tax contributions. The major effect of involuntary placement is to endow different sections of global society with different objective interests as part of the positions that are available to them, by virtue of where they are born (in the developed or developing world) and of social stratification (their life chances deriving from their natal backgrounds). Moral responsibility cannot be applicable because these are determinants. It can only be associated with what people (individually and collectively) make of the positional relationships in which they find themselves and those they later can choose. But structural shaping has only just begun. By tracing three related ways in which it impacts upon agents – by endowing them with objective interests, by attaching opportunity costs to following or rejecting them, and by associating a situational logic of action to what agents are inclined to do in the context – this process of shaping can be rendered more precisely.

Objective Interests

All of us as members of society have vested interests and none of us can avoid trafficking with them, which is one means by which structural

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properties impinge upon us. The two elements of the term are important: to call an interest ‘vested’ is to say that it is integral to occupying a particular position (in the job, property, qualifications etc. markets) which is not equally accessible to all. The home of vested interests is amongst scarcity and has no meaning in the context of abundance. It acquires meaning the moment scarcity is introduced into abundance (such as the world’s current but unused ability to feed all), through social processes of unequal distribution. (Yet further distributions of non-natural goods (information, expertise, esteem) develop along with their associated positions.) One of the main antecedent effects of a structure consists in dividing the population, not necessarily and not usually exhaustively, into those with ‘interests’ in maintenance versus change of the status quo they have inherited. Such interests are objective and not to be confounded with agents’ subjectivity; a vested interest in being sufficiently competitive not to go out of business is different from a subjective feeling of competitiveness. Nor do they stand in any particular relationship to anyone’s real interests, such as the circumstances necessary for expressing and developing their capacities.21 Agents’ objective interests are equally objective features of their situations which predispose them to different courses of action with regard to maintaining the benefits associated with their positions or seeking to overcome related disadvantages. In other words, with any occupational position come interests and, with these, motives for the reproduction of advantages or the transformation of disadvantages. Both cases are about relational properties. As Porpora has put it, Among the causal powers that are deposited in social positions are interests. Interests are built into a social position by the relationship of that position to other positions in the system … [Thus], capitalists have an interest in maximising profit because they are in a competitive, zero-sum relationship with all others occupying the position of capitalist … In other words, actors are motivated to act in their interests, which are a function of their social position. Again, this doesn’t mean that actors always with necessity act in their interests, but if they don’t they are likely to suffer. A capitalist who shows no concern to maximize profits is liable to cease being a capitalist.22

The promotion of objective interests, be it by seeking social reproduction or transformation, has the effect of negating or neglecting responsibility for consequences upon others. It works in the same way for those 21 See Martha Nussbaum, 1992, ‘Human Functioning and Social Justice: In Defence of Aristotelian Essentialism’, Political Theory, 20:2, 202–46. 22 Porpora, ‘Four Concepts of Social Structure’, 208.

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seeking to defend or to advance their interests, as is ­historically well known for those defending the benefits deriving from their ­occupational positions. Motivationally, the last question they will raise is ‘Should this position exist at all?’ For example, in the 1970s, the British procedures for referring children to special education involved a combination of agencies (at least six) that had historically established a place for themselves in the process23 and exerted themselves to maintain it. Whether or not the recipients benefited seemed to be a subordinate consideration and, significantly, boys of Caribbean h ­ eritage were over-represented amongst referrals. The same characterizes multinational corporations. The very fact that they became geographically far-flung ironically represents the privilege they accord to their own concerns and indifference to distant markets and to their workers whose chief recommendation is their low pay.24 Production will be moved from one location to another if labour organization arises and begins to make higher demands at a given site.

Opportunity Costs

Thus, the conditional influences of structural relations (not d ­ eterminants) work through those experiencing benefits seeking to retain them and thus working for social stability, whilst those experiencing exigencies seek to eradicate them, thus working for change. These compel no one. Nevertheless, objective opportunity costs are associated with different responses to frustrating or rewarding situations, which condition (without determining) the interpretations placed upon them. These costs represent the next link between the historically structuring of agents’ current contexts and their reactions to them. In arguing that opportunity costs constitute reasons for the pursuit of objective interests that will be found good by many, nevertheless it is not appropriate to endorse the portrayal in mainstream economics of market employees or consumers as homo economicus: individuals trying to maximize their future utilities or as bargain hunters.25 In this view, those who appear to turn their backs on material incentives are usually motivated 23

Sally Tomlinson, 1981, Educational Subnormality: A Study of Decision Making, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul. The apparent reason for this was an interested preference for having undisrupted classrooms in mainstream schools rather than assuming any responsibility for harms done to those perceived as culturally distant others (who were usually British-born). 24 See Daniel K. Finn (ed.), 2014, Distant Markets, Distant Harms, Oxford, Oxford University Press. 25 See Martin Hollis, 1988, The Cunning of Reason, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; and Margaret S. Archer and Jonathan Q. Tritter (eds.), 2000, Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonization, London, Routledge.

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by another (non-material) form of self-interest (such as conscientious objectors). The first point to note is that the opportunity costs do not have to be great for interested parties to find them good reason for not paying and thus prolonging social injustice. The following anecdote is used because the exact prices can be cited. In the late 1960s, at the same university, had my male colleague dropped dead, his wife and children would have received ‘death in service’ payments from the compulsory contributory scheme for all academics. Had the same happened to me, as a female, my family would have received nothing, despite the parity of our contributions. When rectification of this injustice was put to secret ballot amongst the Association of University Teachers on campus, where males had a large majority, the result endorsed maintenance of the status quo. In this case, a vote for fairness would have cost male academics £1 a week. The point of recounting this is also to underline that a secret ballot allowed the (majority of) male academics to regard their female colleagues as faceless, nameless and stripped of relations to them, which seemingly facilitated taking no moral responsibility for perpetuating unfairness towards them. Those with the greatest degrees of freedom in the market, in terms of their influence over decision-making and having relatively less to lose in opportunity costs to themselves, bear a higher moral responsibility for the harms done by their corporations. It is one they do not take. The defence of patents in the pharmaceutical industry keeps the price of drugs prohibitively high and constitutes an obstacle to relief agencies. The targeting of markets in terms of profitability (Brazil is the largest marketing target for sale of soft drinks because of its youthful demographic distribution) positively creates harm. Examples could be multiplied indefinitely but what would proof them against the response that those in charge are simply immoral individuals for whom the suitable treatment is a course in business ethics or a dose of virtue ethics? The fact is that this would replicate the preferred mode of explanation of neoliberal economists themselves. It rests on the old fallacy that good people make for a good society, which inter alia denies emergent structures any role in shaping societal outcomes.

Situational Logic of Action

Instead, it is necessary to introduce the mediatory process that induces ordinary people as well as captains of industry and finance towards individualist behaviour that entails disregard for others, but especially distant others who usually have no voice with which to issue a reproach. This

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is the ‘directional guidance’ provided by the situational logic of action, as discussed in the previous chapter.

Agents’ Personal Powers: Their Mediatory Implications

Human agents have their own very different kinds of properties and powers: commitments, intentionality and evaluation. Because of these, there are no structural or cultural constraints and enablements or sources of motivation that work without being mediated through agents. There are the potential causal powers of structural properties, stemming from distributions, roles, organizations or institutions, but they are only influential through social subjects, since a constraint requires something to constrain and an enablement needs something to enable. If no agent ever ­conceived of any course of action, then they could be neither constrained nor enabled. This is impossible because, given our biological constitution and our life in the real world we have to conceive of courses of action (from thinking about how to eat today to what employment to seek in the future). Since the response of the agent to a constraint (or ­enablement) is a m ­ atter of reflexive deliberation, it can take very different forms: from ­compliance, through evasion and strategic action, to subversion. It is because of reflexive deliberations that a complete uniformity of response on behalf of every agent who encounters the same constraint or the same enablement is rarely, if ever, found (see Figure 6.2). Therefore, it is essential to distinguish between the objective existence of structural or cultural properties and the exercise of their causal powers whose realization requires them to be activated by agents. Hence, the efficacy of any social emergent property is at the mercy of the agents’ reflexive activity (although actors may be oblivious or mistaken about many aspects of Socio-Cultural organization and will pay an objective price for their epistemological shortcomings). Outcomes vary enormously with agents’ creativity in dreaming up brand new responses, even to situations that may have occurred many times before; they are not the puppets of habits. Ultimately, the precise outcome varies with agents’ personal concerns and degrees of commitment, and with the costs (in various currencies) that different agents will pay to see their projects through in the face of structural obstacles and cultural hindrances. (Here, ‘projects’ stand for any intelligible goal entertained by a human person.) Equally, they vary with agents’ readiness to avail themselves of enablements. Therefore, the examination of agential subjectivity and reflexive variability becomes even more important to understand differences of response under the same conditions.

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Quadrant 4

Quadrant 3 Corporate Agency

Actor ‘you’

‘we’

INDIVIDUAL

COLLECTIVE ‘I’

‘me’

Primary Agency

Self

Quadrant 1

PRIVATE

Quadrant 2

Figure 6.2.  The temporal development of the agent

Reflexivity is defined as ‘the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa’.26 They deliberate about this relationship under their own descriptions and most would not think in terms of their social ‘context’ but about the situation in which they find themselves. Whatever the vocabulary used, it is the process through which reasons become causes of the courses of action adopted by social subjects. In short, their subjective internal deliberations – ‘internal conversations’ – are responsible for mediating the conditional influence of objective structural factors upon social action.27 (A fuller discussion of reflexivity follows in Part III, along with that of agency itself.) Although I maintain that reflexivity is indispensable to any social form, it does not follow that its properties and powers or its modes of practice remain unchanging. On the contrary, reflexivity has a long history and a future of increasing social importance. 26 Margaret S. Archer, 2007, Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 4. 27 Margaret S. Archer, 2003, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ch. 4. However, the ‘internal conversation’ was first conceptualized by the great American pragmatists, especially Peirce and Mead, though the former are unmentioned by Piiroinen, whose loyalties lie with Dewey, who contributed little to the discussion of reflexivity.

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However, it will be useful at this point to outline how Piiroinen, as a defender of central conflationist theorizing, conceives of the social agent. He sedulously follows Dewey, to the neglect of other great American founders of pragmatism: ‘the very nature of humanity is most essentially social. There is no non-social core to be demarcated and laid down as the bottom level of self’ (85). Although it is curious if not contradictory to find Piiroinen talking about ‘levels’ and their properties, this ‘allows’ him to dismiss the notion, attributed to me, ‘of non-social self-consciousness’ (85) deriving from our human embodiment and necessary interaction with the natural environment, from which the emergence of a sense of self develops. No, I do not believe there is ‘One True Self’ (92) (whatever that means) but do maintain that neonates’ bodies must interact with their environment and are susceptible to sensations of pain (e.g. being hungry, feeling too hot or cold, uncomfortable because of the pressure of cot bars or dirty ‘diapers’). Being pre-verbal, they cannot ask philosophical questions about ‘whose body hurts’, but they are in no doubt that it is their own, months before they learn to use the words ‘I’ and ‘Mine’.28 Just as importantly, as neonates they cannot relieve their own pain. The ability to do so is genetically transmitted, but it is developmental (such as moving away from things that are too hot). All other capacities (starting with walking and talking, progressing to understanding the conservation of matter, logic, mathematics etc.) exist only in potentia.29 From meticulous daily observations of his own children, Piaget gives excellent examples of this and also of techniques for helping potential capabilities to develop better in young children.30 Nevertheless, none of this supports Piiroinen’s conviction that ‘the very nature of humanity is most [sic] essentially social’ (85). We are all (multiple births apart) born as ‘individuals’ but it is not me (or Piaget) who moves from there to ‘some non-social, “egocentric” image of the Self that encourages dualism by portraying individuals as “surrounded by society yet cut off from it by some invisible barrier”, for this picture also reifies structures’ (86). Thus, it is ironic that Elias’s last book was titled The Society of Individuals31 and that Beck and 28 Marcel Mauss, 1989, ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; the Notion of Self’ in M. Carrithers, S. Collins and S. Lukes (eds.), The Category of the Person, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–25. He claimed ‘the self (moi) is everywhere present’, and its universality consists in the fact that ‘there has never existed a human being who has not been aware, not only of his body, but also at the same time of his individuality, both spiritual and physical’ (p. 3). 29 Margaret S. Archer, 2000, Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 121, 124. 30 Jean Piaget, 1967, The Child’s Conception of the World, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, and Piaget, 1974, Experiments in Contradiction, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. 31 Norbert Elias, 1991 [1987], The Society of Individuals, New York, Continuum.

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Beck-Gernsheim used the title Individualization with the subtitle Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consquences.32 Critical Realists are no friends of the ‘solitary’ monadic individual and have been amongst the opponents of institutionalized individualism in sociology as in their support of heterodox economics. Neither am I or I would not have co-authored a book called The Relational Subject33 – though I do regard relational goods and evils as emergent properties and not as relationist transactions in the vein of Emirbayer.34 Piiroinen makes untenable and often contradictory concessions, the most important being the treatment accorded to the Natural Order. On the one hand, he claims that he does not ‘propose any particular kind of ontology’ (87) but conceptualizes reality ‘as a take on people’s conceptions of reality, not as a take on the conception-independent Nature of Reality’ (87). Ontology is thus swept up under popular epistemology. He thinks Giddens can be added to the list by virtue of his statement that ‘Structure and agency cannot form a dualism … because each is constituted by and in a single “realm” – human activity.’35 Temporality precludes this. The human race may indeed cumulatively destroy nature and the planet itself, but it did not create it. And ‘situated’ actors did not make the situations in which they find themselves; the university (and its cafeteria) precedes its current undergraduates, again as the heritage of actors, dead for centuries in the case of Oxbridge, Bologna and Salamanca, but in all instances there is a time gap before a couple of students can plight their troth over a cup of cafeteria coffee. The fact that any student intake may want a cafeteria has nothing to do with there being one in existence when they arrive. In other words, a variety of situations will simply not exist for them. Individuals, including the entire human race, are not the only ‘powerful particulars’, to use Rom Harré’s term. Nevertheless, we find an approving quote from Dewey that pre-existent ‘associations’ and ‘institutions’ (90) do exist and are influential, only we are forbidden to call them structures.36 32

Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, Individualization, London and Thousand Oaks, Sage. 33 Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret S. Archer, 2015, The Relational Subject, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 34 M. Emirbayer, 1997, ‘Manifesto for a Relational Sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, 103, 281–317. 35 Anthony Giddens, 1990, ‘Structuration Theory and Sociological Analysis’, in J. Clarke, C. Modgil and S. Modgil (eds.), Anthony Giddens: Consensus and Controversy, London, Falmer Press, p. 299. 36 John Dewey, 1983 [1922], Human Nature and Conduct: The Middle Works of John Dewey, vol. XIV, J. A. Boydson (ed.), Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, p. 44.

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The furthest Piiroinen will go in acknowledging the above points is that I do appreciate how analyses in terms of morphogenetic cycles may have seemed helpful to someone who had been investigating historical developments of educational systems … because retrospectively one can deal with such developments by conceptualizing and picking out specific structural constellations (of people and their agency) that in a sense channelled agency during a particular period of time, and to distinguish various interest groups and other agents that strove to change some of those structures, ‘each for their own purposes’, and finally state what structural changes followed from those agents’ interactions and by which year [89–90].

This quotation does seem to concede ‘historical cycles’, ‘structural constellations’ that ‘channelled agency’ (‘in a sense’), ‘interest groups’, ‘structural changes’ and ‘temporality’. However, there is a caveat: ‘but this is hardly the most typical kind of research work’ (90). If he is referring to the concessions he seemed to make above, these cannot and should not be judged on the criterion of their popularity. Anyway, what is this desirable ‘typicality’? He answers: Empirical studies into topics such as attitudes towards the legalization of marijuana, or the effects of long-term unemployment on the self-conceptions of working-class men, or recent trends in social media, or correlations between given population cohorts and dietary or drug abusing … [90].

Although this list typifies how Piiroinen characterizes ‘the buzz of social life’, one can only regret his trivialization of popular concerns, whilst simultaneously noting that he incorporates the law, unemployment and social class, which are not, as he wrongly claims, ‘autonomous entities’ (90) but structural properties with causal powers, ones that will not be revealed by Hume’s constant conjunctions. Since we are being collectively nudged towards typicality let’s finish by taking his future agenda seriously and see where it leads – to ‘a better appreciation of the richness of social life’ (90) and/or a better understanding of the ‘vibrant reality of social relations’,37 as central conflationists wish to claim?

Presentism and Sociological Populism

The two previous quotations, like many earlier ones, are both presentist and populist, hence the dubbing of comparative and historical research as ‘atypical’ when, as a student, they were the staple of my first degree. Much of Piiroinen’s last few pages have the habit of radio broadcasters of announcing that ‘Everyone is experiencing …’ or ‘mothers think …’ 37

Anthony King, 2012, The Structure of Social Theory, London, Routledge, p. 238.

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etc. The following brief quote is sufficient to give the flavour: apparently we subtly change ourselves and others ‘when we just laugh at an inappropriate moment, or make others laugh, walk with a “swagger” and tell vulgar jokes … Imitate the dance moves we saw on YouTube earlier, go to the local pub every Saturday afternoon and watch football on TV …’ (92). I simply do not recognize this way of being in the world, dislike pubs and have never had a TV. The same goes for many of my friends, and probably the author would consign us to the neglected status of ‘outliers’. Well, paradoxically, we are the only group I have encountered who were captivated some of the new sports represented in the 2020 Olympics – skateboarding and BMX, for example – where we knew we needed to learn much more about them and were ready and willing to do so. Contrast that with a pub-pundit I heard sounding off about ‘dressage’ being a cruel sport that should be banned. Though never a national, let alone Olympic, contender, I do know enough to say that no dressage movement is required that one cannot see horses doing naturally in an open field. So why is this assumed (in both senses) populism foisted upon us? Even a presentist need not toe the populist line. Nor can he blandly assert that, as far as our subjectivity is concerned, the band of central conflationists think of reflexivity in the same way as one another. Piiroinen cannot assert this (without citing any evidence) and, in any case, he derogates as ‘rationalistic’ my empirically based trilogy38 ­discussing agents reflexively seeking the modus vivendi that would be congenial, satisfying and sustainable to them in their view. He does not even acknowledge that de gustibus non est disputandum. And that is because he never takes our personal ‘concerns’ on board because he considers ­caring ‘is a social affair’ (93). It is also in his view a comprehensive affair in which ‘it cannot really be doubted that the present existence of social features is due to present people’  (84).39 This confidence rests on something that children under ten often ask, but at least with them it comes in the interrogative. Hence, the bald assertion that ‘if we all just suddenly lost our memories and other relevant neural dispositions, there would be nothing left 38 Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation; Archer, Making Our Way through the World; Margaret S. Archer, 2012, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 39 See the detailed rejection of this view by philosophers, the most important being Ernest Gellner and Maurice Mandelbaum, in Archer, Realist Social Theory, ch. 2; Margaret S. Archer, 2010, ‘After Mandelbaum: From Societal Facts to Emergent Properties’, in Ian Verstegen (ed.), Maurice Mandelbaum and American Critical Realism, London, Routledge, pp. 142–62.

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of social relations and structures’ (84). This is employed to ‘eliminate’ epistemology and to assert that ontology (selectively) would fall too. In fact, culturally, libraries, books and abacuses would remain and retain their ‘dispositional capacity as intelligibilia to be understood’, just like the Rosetta Stone under the sands, and humans could learn (painfully) to grasp them through their amazing capacity to re-learn. Those with the misfortune to undergo strokes or ‘locked-in syndrome’ often demonstrate what skills they can retrieve despite having undergone serious neurological damage. Ontologically some relationships are physiologically inscribed, so the incest taboo would (slowly) need to be understood and reimposed as a norm etc. However, it is even more important to grasp that the Natural Order is now changing rapidly, along with Material culture, as first instigated by the long dead through climate change – changes we the living exacerbate through perpetuation of their practices and social relations. Instead, we readers are encouraged to follow in the wake (both ­meanings) of sociological populism, because my analytical framework does not help us understand (the identities and behaviours of or social phenomena related to) pop culture enthusiasts, or hard core fans of, say, the Heavy Metal band Iron Maiden … or lifelong fans of football … The key elements binding such identities and social phenomena together are … just the raw, emotional charges related to iconic images and tunes and idolized persons, charges that are intrinsically social because they are charges that are created by, stirred up in the presence of, and ultimately dependent on other people – a ‘tribe’, it is sometimes called – who wear specific kinds of clothes and chant the same slogans and sing the same songs [93].

This is a revival of ‘collective effervescence’ plus ‘the crowd’ but missing the technological manipulation, the multinational labels and the marketing strategies that form its structure and the infrastructure of the digitalizing social world. Culturally, given the endless preoccupation with listening and viewing figures, is this the form an established institution like the BBC is wooing in the context of national demographic ageing in Britain? Abroad is it stripping or slimming the once valued role of the BBC World Service? Does Piiroinen want these above (Heavy Metal etc.) entities to become acknowledged role models for the new millennials? Yes, I’m afraid he does.

7

Can Structuration and Morphogenesis Be Compatible? Featuring Rob Stones, 2001, ‘Refusing the Realism–Structuration Divide’, European Journal of Social Theory, 4:2, 177–97

ARTICLE ABSTRACT

This article argues against the view put forward by Margaret Archer that there is an irreconcilable divide between realist social theory and structuration theory. Instead, it argues for the systematic articulation of the two theories at both the ontological and the methodological levels. Each has developed a range of insightful and commensurable conceptualizations either missing or underdeveloped in the other. Archer’s contention that structuration theory rejects the notion of ‘analytical dualism’ central to the realist approach is shown to be mistaken; Giddens’s rejection of ‘dualism’ refers to a different conceptualization of the term. Similarly, Archer’s critique of structuration’s notion of ‘duality’ involving structure and agency is rejected by showing that Archer’s own morphogenetic approach itself relies upon such a notion. A final section distinguishes between six key problematics of social analysis. It is clear that, for a large number of possible questions within the majority of these problematics, it is a combination of both ontologies that would facilitate the most adequate substantive accord. Introduction In Culture and Agency (1988)1 I first advanced the term ‘conflation’ in a critique of social theories that elided ‘structure’ and ‘agency’, usually in either an upward and methodological individualist version (structure was the end effect of the aggregation of a multitude of individual doings and sayings) or a downward version, where agency was organized and moulded holistically from the top down. If that were all there was to ‘conflation’, then introducing this new term would seem an unwarranted

1

Margaret S. Archer, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, 1988, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. xiii–xiv; downward version, pp. 25–45; upward version, pp. 46–71; central version, pp. 72–100.

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source of confusion. However, as I spelt out in Being Human (2000), there is another more compelling reason for introducing it: There is a third form of conflation which does not endorse reductionism at all. There is Central conflation, which is areductionist, because it insists upon the inseparability of the ‘parts’ and the ‘people’. In other words, the fallacy of conflation does not depend upon epiphenomenalism, on rendering one level of social reality inert and thus reducible. Epiphenomenalism is not the only way in which the ‘parts’ or the ‘people’ are deprived of their emergent, autonomous and causally efficacious properties and powers, and that in consequence their interplay is denied.2

In 1982, I published ‘Morphogenesis versus Structuration: On Combining Structure and Action’ in the British Journal of Sociology3 as a critique of Anthony Giddens’s structuration approach for its central conflation. It proved quite controversial, prompting Anthony King to produce a critique of my critique,4 one to which I replied.5 All of this is omitted by those who hold that this story began in 1995, and I see no point in returning to it here, except for an anecdote. When the British Sociological Association decided to reprint its best articles to mark the Journal’s sixtieth birthday, my above article was included6 – and evoked yet another ‘response’ from King. Initially, Bhaskar was attracted to Giddensian structuration theory, in comparison with the conceptualizations of structure and agency in upward conflationary individualism, downward conflationary holism and Peter Berger’s version of their dialectical relationship. Soon, Bhaskar accepted my three-point critique that elisionists (as I termed them) held that emergent entities instantiating them (a) ‘only possess a virtual existence’ until (b) they are ‘instantiated’ by actors, which (c) means these properties are neither fully real nor examinable except in conjunction with the agents who instantiate them and only then through an artificial bracketing exercise since the two are deemed inseparable.7 Increasingly, Bhaskar insisted that, ontologically, people and society ‘refer to radically different things … For the properties possessed by social forms may be very different from those possessed by the individuals upon whose 2

Margaret S. Archer, 2000, Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 6. 3 Margaret S. Archer, 1982, British Journal of Sociology, 33:4, 455–80. 4 Anthony King, 1999, ‘Against Structure: A Critique of Morphogenetic Social Theory’, Sociological Review, 47:2, 199–227. 5 Margaret S. Archer, 2000, ‘For Structure: Its Reality, Properties and Powers. A Reply to Anthony King’, Sociological Review, 48:3, 464–72. 6 British Journal of Sociology, 2010, 61. 7 Margaret S. Archer, 1995, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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activity they depend.’8 This revised line of argument concluded with his statement that, ‘I want to distinguish sharply then between the genesis of human actions, lying in reasons, intentions and plans of human beings, on the one hand, and the structures governing the reproduction and transformation of social activities on the other.’9 It is clear in Roy Bhaskar’s reactions to these repeated assaults on M/M by King that Bhaskar’s initial approval of Giddens’s structuration theory was rapidly withdrawn. Note the following from Bhaskar himself. ‘The social cube should be thought of as a cubic flow, differentiated into analytically discrete moments … as rhythmically processual and phasic to the core. This is a feature which, as Margaret Archer has convincingly demonstrated, distinguishes it from structuration, or more generally from any “central conflation” theory.’10



Rob Stones’s Commentary and Arguments for Compatibility

Although Chapter 6 was necessary to show the degree of distortion and misrepresentation often encountered in comments upon the M/M approach, fortunately it is not universal. Of considerably greater interest is Stones’s 2001 paper which contests any need for antagonistic opposition between, as he terms it, the realism–structuration divide. Instead, in his own words, ‘I shall argue that their ontological positions are compatible; perfectly so for the most part, and redeemably so for the rest’ (177).11 Despite not being able to concur with this rather sweeping statement, nevertheless, I find most of the considerations he raises worthy of detailed attention. Moreover, he begins disarmingly by admitting that he agrees very much with my critique of structuration theory in that ‘its meta-theory has an in-built tendency to direct one towards the micro, or the immediate moment … Its large-scale efforts, on the other hand, are quite schematic and indeterminate because they are undertheorized and not linked in a precise enough way to the more detailed meta-theory of structure, agency, time, space and so on’ (178).

8 Roy Bhaskar, 1989 [1979], 2nd ed., The Possibility of Naturalism, London, Routledge, p. 33. 9 Roy Bhaskar, 1989, Reclaiming Reality, London, Verso, p. 79. 10 Roy Bhaskar, 1993, Dialectic and the Pulse of Freedom, London, Verso, p. 160 11 Rob Stones, 2001, ‘Refusing the Realism–Structuration Divide’, European Journal of Social Theory, 4:2, 177–97. Page numbers given in parentheses in this chapter refer to this article.

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Stones begins by comparing the meaning of ‘structure’ as used in the two theoretical approaches. Both are held to incorporate a sense of ­dualism, that is, ‘analytical dualism’ in my case, but Giddens rejects any notion of dualism which refuses to incorporate ‘the close, hermeneutically informed, interlinking of structure and agency’ (178). This is how the differences between the approaches are articulated (in sum) at the start, meaning that Stones seeks to convince readers that morphogenesis needs to incorporate ‘a duality within agents’ (178), whilst structuration needs to expand its ontology to include temporality more prominently, meaning (broadly) the history and historicity of structures. These are the basic terms for a rapprochement between the two frameworks. And they are more demanding to meet than they first appear, so I will take these issues in turn. Temporality Stones is careful and accurate in summarizing the basic morphogenetic sequence and how its advantages are to facilitate unpicking the linkages and interconnections between structures with their emergent properties and powers and subsequent social interactions in relation to these prior conditions. Indeed, he quotes me correctly that ‘the distinctive feature of the morphogenetic approach is its recognition of the temporal dimension, through which and in which structure and agency shape one another’ (180). Agreed. However, I am considered far too hard in calling structuration theory ‘elisionist’, in that even if we suspend the criticism that structures have only a virtual existence until instantiated in action, and make nothing of the seeming contradiction (certainly in terms of tenses) that agents can still draw upon the ‘modalities’ of domination, legitimation and signification, an important problem remains – simple as it seems. How can something be ‘drawn upon’ unless it precedes the drawer? I don’t understand the defence that such structures ‘at the very least (and to a lesser degree), exist at the moment an agent draws upon them’ (181). Is it possible to draw upon something which you simultaneously create? Even were we to think of artificial intelligence responding in nano-seconds to some innovation, that has not annulled the fundamental distinction between ‘before’ and ‘after’. In any case, it is not action ‘in general’ nor is it agents ‘in general’ who create domination, legitimation and signification. Any such creations are intentional acts and, as such, require reasons for attempting to realize them. Can the reader think of a single macroscopic social example where the reason for its emergence holds good for every member of a

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given population? (This could be the case for drought or flooding in the Natural Order.) Usually, however, all social goals involve proponents, opponents and those indifferent about the matter. Thus, I am not convinced that ‘structuration theory has an ontology that is compatible with the (analytical) “dualism” of structure and agency that is placed centre stage by much realist social theory’ (184).

Structural Conditioning – Inside or Outside the Agent

However, Rob Stones seems more concerned to establish his second argument which is about ‘a different notion of dualism that Giddens rejects, the kind of dualism that sees structure as always entirely external to agency, in which structure is conceptualized as akin to the walls of a room and agency as akin to the space to move within the room. This kind of dualism is rejected because structuration theory conceptualizes structure as being partly within the agent as knowledgeability or memory traces’ (184). Terminology apart, Giddens shares with Bourdieu the desire to obliterate any distinction between subject and object. Nevertheless, Giddens is more restrained than Bourdieu even when both dwell upon the role of practice and practical knowledge to which I also attach considerable importance.12 Bourdieu regards practice as governed by ‘the logic of practice’, in response to ‘matters of immediacy, urgency, contextual embeddedness and pragmatic problems’. He accepts from this that it breaches the logical canon ‘in that the logic of practice violates the principle of identity in its referential “fuzziness” and breaks with the principle of non-contradiction in its nullification of transitivity’.13 Such an extreme view is not shared by Giddens, but the onus on him is to supply a more acceptable means by which structure gets inside us and whether or not ‘knowledgeability’ and/or ‘memory traces’ can fully account for this phenomenon. My own argument about ‘practice’ was limited to our dealings with artefacts (or material culture as the anthropologists used to call it) and is therefore inapplicable to structure. However, I am not convinced by how either factor ‘gets inside us’ in late modernity. Certainly, most people do acquire an ‘everyday knowledge’ of their context if they remain in it – and fewer do so – such as knowing which properties are beyond their means, mundane knowledge about who can obtain a free bus pass, what the responsibilities of the District Council are towards them etc. But do they understand how these are 12

Archer, Being Human, ch. 4, ‘The Primacy of Practice’. 13 Pierre Bourdieu, 1990, The Logic of Practice, Cambridge, Polity Press, pp. 84–91.

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interconnected? Giddens has never maintained that the local knowledge assimilated represents a ‘full discursive penetration’ by most of any population of their social circumstances – otherwise we sociologists would be unemployed. What is surprising is that he attached so little importance to the growing and, more importantly, discordant voices badgering people to accept their views, including Fake News galore and the expectation that the media provides disinterested representations of social structure, including from many sociologists. How any interested person could genuinely become more ‘knowledgeable’ at this tainted cultural well is difficult to imagine! Equally, I do wonder what ‘memory traces’ are being attributed to ordinary people that are likely to render their present context something that they have internalized and can rely upon. Our Centre for Social Ontology (which I founded in Switzerland and now operates in France) recently devoted a series of five books to Social Morphogenesis.14 The key point of consensus was that, under any of our collaborators’ descriptions, morphogenesis was considerably exceeding morphostasis, wherever we looked. The significance of mentioning this is what structural memory traces of the past would be of any assistance to an agent navigating him/herself around in the changed circumstances of today? I addressed this in The Reflexive Imperative (2012),15 maintaining that reflexivity has a history (as Vygotsky had called for in 1934) but one that all four great American pragmatists had ignored, by continuing to treat reflexivity (then named the ‘inner conversation’) as a uniform phenomenon over time, invoked during ‘problematic ­situations’. In Reflexive Modernization16 history is bifurcated into a long tract of ‘traditionalism’ that furnished a general guide to action and only until Giddens’s ‘juggernaut’ or Beck’s ‘risk’ conceptions of societies ­developed – as an unnamed recognition of morphogenesis! Only then did such guidance become a question of reflexivity – but still presented as a single phenomenon.17

14

Margaret S. Archer (ed.), 2013, Social Morphogenesis, Dordrecht, Springer; Archer (ed.), 2014, Late Modernity: Trajectories towards Morphogenic Society, Dordrecht, Springer; Archer (ed.), 2015, Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order,  Dordrecht,  Springer; Archer (ed.), 2016, Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity, Dordrecht, Springer; Archer (ed.), 2017, Morphogenesis and Human Flourishing, Dordrecht, Springer. 15 Margaret S. Archer, 2012, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ch. 1, ‘A Brief History of How Reflexivity Becomes Imperative’, pp. 10–46. 16 Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, 1994, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order, Cambridge, Polity Press. 17 All these themes are treated in greater detail in Margaret S. Archer, 2003, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 53–92.

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This I challenged, arguing that different reflexive modes were promoted in different epochs, and that these changed sequentially in terms of anchoring ‘contextual continuity’, ‘discontinuity’ and lastly ‘incongruity’ for young subjects – each of which served to foster its own longevity (whilst it lasted) by generating the compatible reflexive mode as the dominant one. The argument will not be summarized here, as it will come up again, except to stress that only metaphorically does this mean that ‘structure is inside us’ in the guise of parental expectations and natal normativity, but their adoption, as distinct from merely knowing what these are and having a greater capacity to reject them, is quintessentially dependent on the quality of family relations.18 I reintroduce ‘concerns’ merely to highlight the contrast with what takes their place in central conflationary accounts. Even sophisticated versions like Stones’s veer away from the concerns and the caring involved in making a particular way through the world and attempting to plot its course such that it would become for agents a satisfying and sustainable modus vivendi. Frequently, subjects fail, but that can be a painful way of learning, as is concluding that they must settle for second or third best. In any case, these experiences come from the exterior and may initially counter agential inclinations. They certainly do not illustrate that there ‘is a large place here for habits, prereflexive routines19 and background assumptions’ (185). What this section should disabuse is Stones’s summary that I have an ‘overtly transparent “vested interest” conception of the relations between structure and agency’ (186). ‘Concerns’ can obviously run counter to crude vested interests, as when Tony Benn repudiated his title to take up a seat in the House of Commons. Since most agents are concerned to remain alive, ‘giving up one’s life for one’s friends’ provides broader illustrations in both war and peace. Nevertheless, I am again hammered for considering structural conditioning in terms of vested interests. The concept of ‘concerns’ is not mentioned, despite Being Human (2000), where one-half of the book is devoted to them! Specifically, no reference is made to my DDD schema (Discernment → Deliberation → Dedication), by which agents commit themselves to some concern and necessarily to the context in which the subject hopes it will be realized.20 Of course, agents are 18

For a summary discussion, see Margaret S. Archer, 2013, ‘Reconceptualizing Socialization as Reflexive Engagement’, in Archer and Andrea M. Maccarini (eds.), Engaging with the World: Agency, Institutions, Historical Formations, Abingdon, Routledge, pp. 103–28. 19 I do not know what would constitute the referents here, apart from very young babies. 20 Archer, Being Human, ch. 7.

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fallible,  their  concerns are revisable, and other factors may preclude their realization, but this does not dispose of the fact that their concerns matter to people and that they may well have nothing to do with subjects becoming ‘better off’ (except contingently, though contingencies can work both ways).

Six Problematics for Practical Social Analysis

Rob Stones and I are in agreement that methodology is as important as theory, but I would add what he has left implicit is that the ontology upon which theorizing is based necessarily influences the appropriate methodology. Nevertheless, he presses on to state that ‘structuration theory is able to help more in relation to some angles on some problematics and realist theory is of greater help for other angles on the same or other problematics’ (187). Even more openly, he maintains ‘that for a strikingly large number of questions or problematics, it is a combination of both ontologies that clearly shows the most adequate account’ (187). I am sorry not to be able to shake hands on this compromise, but fundamentally I cannot see how these contradictory ontologies can be combined. Instead, let’s examine the six practical problems that Rob Stones advances as ‘testing’ how structuration and realism/morphogenesis fare compared with other on each and what the end result is for the above commendation of their combination.



(1) Investigating the Causal Process over Time in Terms of an Unfolding Process of Interaction between Structure and Agency

The sample test questions given by Stones are: (a) why a government decided to subsidize a loss-making company in a particular conjuncture; and (b) whether a culture of positive anti-Semitism, rather than some other factor, played a role in the German people’s passive reaction to the Nazis’ genocidal aim towards the Jews. Here Stones states that ‘hermeneutics is clearly an essential component of both the causal process and the causal analysis’ (187). Yet, crucially, hermeneutic exploration (as opposed to imputation) is only possible with living subjects, and the ‘German people’ involved in the ‘passive reaction’ to Nazi policy would have been more than ninety years old (had they lived) when Stones’s article was written. Would they have been capable of recalling their attitudes in the 1930s and be willing to share them? Would their memories not have been affected by Germany’s subsequent political attempt to distance itself from that past? It

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seems unlikely that the substitution of their children of whom to ask the same attitudinal questions about their parents’ views at that time would be considered sufficiently reliable. In that case, investigators would be thrown back upon books, commentaries, diaries and letters. And those are precisely the same as the resources available to the realist researcher in seeking to be as accurate as possible about the orientations of agency in relation to the same question. Significantly, this problem also arises in a different form from above with the first question. Can hermeneutics work better in this context? It seems less problematic because subsidizing unprofitable companies was largely unknown before the twentieth century. However, were the whole or even part of a government involved, potentially there are so many mixed motives that could be entailed – self-defence and self-promotion, considerations about unemployment in the area, indispensability of the product, and public promises, to straightforward corruption. And some of these do indeed involve vested interests, alongside hermeneutic deception and even self-deception. As in the previous example, the duality theorist would be as dependent upon written/digitalized statements as the realist. There remain two differences between them. The realist, being very realistic about the quality and quantity of information he/she can extract, are more acceptant of their reliance upon historians (in particular) when advancing their causal accounts over time. However, the structurationist effectively shuns detailed historical accounts, preferring to deal with gross generalities, such as ‘traditionalism’. In brief, hermeneutical understanding is an ideal and the difficulties (or impossibilities) involved in appealing to it in times past do not mean that it can be used to disentangle ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ more readily in present-day practical social analysis than in history. Subjects may well be inaccurate, inexact, or biased in their own accounts of how they were influenced by their context. The realist neither dismisses such understandings nor endorses them. This is not so much hermeneutic humility as respect for the subject. However mistaken subjects are about their contextual descriptions and understandings of its influences, the point is that it was their own (fallible) interpretations that grounded their own actions. We should extend the same understanding on our part to include the quite extraordinary accounts given to us by the anti-vaxxers today. Hermeneutics is not pellucidly transparent; it is not a neutral means of access to the truth-of-the-matter. Any who would presume otherwise run the huge risk of substituting epistemology for ontology. In that case, the combination of the two theoretical approaches is simply not on.

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(2) Investigating the Distribution of Structural Options Available to Agents at Any One Time

Stones considers that there are two angles from which this question may be tackled. He presents this as being a topic of significant debate upon which structurationists and realists have adopted different positions (188). Although the thrust of his article is to demonstrate that the two theoretical approaches can work together, this seems not to be the case here and the reason is their divergent treatment of time. In the first take on the problem, the investigator ‘can include the already conditioned motivations and desires of agents in the definition of what is a feasible option’ (188). This is represented as being more typical of the structurationists, but it conflates agents’ goals with the feasibility of attaining them. There are various problems here. To begin with, being motivated in such a manner must be prior to it being related in any way to assessing the ‘feasibility’ of achieving it. Next, to want something may be a necessary condition for attaining it, but it is not a sufficient one – often ‘want must be your master’. Next, if it is, are the rebuffed agents going to go quietly away: meaning cases like women who sought to become nurses and doctors in the late nineteenth century and a little later some of whom became leaders in the suffragette movement? When they eventually succeeded, can a useful account be given without including their efforts over time and their slow encroachment on their desired professions be explained without reference to contingencies such as the Crimean war? The alternative approach, instead of depending ‘in significant part upon the ways in which the external structures were internally mediated in a duality within agents’ (188) is said to be of the ‘“external” kind of structural perspective, more emphasized by Archer’ (188). How then does a theorist like Stones deal with the cases examined in an earlier chapter, where some agents had the opportunity to become, for example, registered nurses instead of nursing auxiliaries, but turned the option down! The boot is on the other foot; it is not realists who assume that, in any ­opportunity structure, all relevant agents seek to scale it, nor do they presume such structures to be stable or static. On the contrary, since late modernity, morphogenesis has grown in scope, less through conflict than thanks to the realization of synergy between complementary items (in either or both the Cultural System and/or the Structural System), without the awareness of many agents. This is a morphogenetic consequence of ‘variety generating further variety’ and, though agents are needed to exploit such novelty, this is quite different from their intentionally having constructed it. There is little likelihood that innovative variety can be

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discovered this morning and be agentially appropriated and applied by this evening. Again, there is the ‘before’ and ‘after’, however short the gap may be, and, between the two, agential understandings and actions can be directed towards ‘morphostatic Luddism’ in the fear by many of losing their positions. Conversely, to Stones the subjective or hermeneutic relation of agents to their structural options does not only concern the agent in focus, it is also a significant component of the constitution of the structural context itself. In one sense, this is simply a reverse of the above, because by calling agency only a ‘significant component’ it gives the knee to structuration without committing to how it and the other components work together to produce structural transformation. In another sense, it is therefore inferior to morphogenesis which furnishes generative mechanisms of structural elaboration.21



(3) Investigating the Durability of Particular Structures Whether Defined as SEPs (Structural Emergent Properties) (as in Archer’s work), as ‘Virtual’ Structures (as in Giddens’s Work) or as a Combination of Both

In terms of the M/M approach, to seek the conditions of durability of a structure is to ask about morphostasis, and the negative feedback loops generating it, and how long each will last. In principled terms because this is a request for a prediction and in an open system like society, it is one that will regularly be refused by realists. Yet Stones writes that the ‘structure, identified independently of any attempt by agents to change it, may be the kind of structure embodied in rates of literacy or demographic patterns, as persuasively discussed by Archer22 … or … it may take the form of certain structural relations between employers and employees at a city factory, relations that underpin unjust practices forced on the workers’ (189). Taking the example of literacy rates in Cuba after the revolution I certainly argued that from Castro’s policy of ‘each one teach one’, a graph could be produced illustrating how long it would take to abolish illiteracy, depending on the percentage of literate Cubans when this policy was initiated. However, there is an implicit ceteris paribus clause here. Many kinds of open system factors could intervene. For instance, an earlier version of the UN’s Sustainable 21 See Margaret S. Archer, 2015, ‘Introduction’, in Archer (ed.), Generative Mechanisms, pp. 1–26. 22 Archer, Realist Social Theory, pp. 143–4, 174–5.

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Development Goals (which include education) could hypothetically have made the global eradication of illiteracy its top priority, and provided (paid for) an influx of Spanish-speaking teachers and texts. In consequence, the duration of illiteracy would have shortened dramatically. That’s why realists hold back from predictions and extrapolations, not because they are always wrong but because they are ever vulnerable to such intrusions. Thank you, Rob Stones, for this olive branch but there is no way that a realist can ‘[make] a judgement on the relative imperviousness of the relevant structure to [any of] the projected actions’ (189). This cuts both ways. The duration of morphostasis is ultimately dependent on what agents do. But, unlike the caution I expressed above, it seems the structurationists are more assertive ‘because our generalized stocks of cultural knowledge mean that we already have confidence that we know what the people in the structures are likely to do’ (189). Stones freely concedes that his own group of theorists may be flattering themselves here, in which case I fail to see how the discussion of Point 3 has advanced the cause of the two approaches being compatible with one another – unless potential wrongs can make a right.

(4) Investigating the Necessary Internal Relations of Structures (SEPs), such as Landlord–Tenant Relations

The relevance of this entry is to conclude that a structuration approach can add something to a realist argument like Sayer’s.23 Instead, it is conceded that such references as his to the logically necessary real preconditions of given structures are deemed ‘perfectly legitimate as long as it is remembered that its status does not allow one to make claims about the actual course of a causal process or about the durability of structures’ (190). Why realists should need such ‘reminders’, having rather more historical investigations to their credit than their opponents, remains obscure – except for one thing that is becoming repetitive. Stones’s references to the M/M framework are all drawn from my summary 1995 Realist Social Theory, including every substantive example he uses. However, this section (4) is a preliminary to (5) which seeks to undermine the conditions I examined for lasting morphostasis, despite the glaring omission of Culture and Agency (1988) where the instances referenced in 1995 are analysed in greater length and depth. After all, his article featured here is not a book review of a single volume. 23

Andrew Sayer, 1992, Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach, London, Routledge.

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(5) Investigating the Apparent Compatibilities and/or Incompatibilities between Structures in Terms of Their Situational Logics

Why are these dubbed ‘apparent’, thus inciting a semantic source of suspicion in advance for the reader? Why are compatibility/­incompatibility to be assessed by the situational logics that they extend to agents – a false interpretation privileging ‘duality’ quite wrongly because their agential consequences alone are considered? Incompatibilities are one form of real contradiction that does have such effects for agents and actors but they are not contradictory because of that. To argue otherwise is to invert the time sequence involved. Something has to exist before it can exert an effect, and strenuous efforts can be made, especially by the powerful, to prevent others knowing of its existence, the most draconian being the Chinese Edict of Seclusion.24 When I began to write Culture and Agency, in order not to skew the argument by choosing ‘convenient’ examples, I worked with a ‘parallelism’ between religious and scientific thought. In other words, tempting as any general proposition might be, it must be readily applicable to both corpuses of thought and practice before contemplating its generalization. This proved an excellent discipline and the scenarios that unfolded pointed clearly to the ‘directional guidance’ conveyed to agency in both domains. What emerged ideationally in both religion and science did not merit Stones’s judgement upon them – namely that ‘Archer’s conceptions of “directional guidance” in relation to specific configurations are, in practice, informed hunches or guesses about why agents acted as they did in relation to historical scenarios that have already unfolded. The “conditioning” or “duality” [sic] may very well not have been as Archer suggests it was’ (191). So, was Durkheim’s ‘conception’ of the ‘necessary incompatibility’ between Christian and classical thought merely a ‘hunch’ about encouraging two groups of agents to struggle against one another for centuries?25 Was the impossibility of simply ignoring one or the other just a ‘guess’ regardless of their logical relations? Was the ‘directional guidance’ to attempt to correct the views of the opponent through redefining them not have been as Durkheim suggested it was? Stones is ever keen to suggest that more attention to hermeneutics would resolve matters, but that can hardly be so among long dead agents. However, my reason for recalling this example, amongst the dozens given in Culture and Agency, 24

See Archer, Culture and Agency, ch. 7, on containment strategies. 25 Ibid., pp. 150ff.

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is that from the start of the Common Era until the end of the eighteenth century no other issue commanded more attention in written form than did this ‘constraining contradiction’ (as I name it). Even today’s students of theology are expected to be conversant with it. That is the evidence. It is not my or even Durkheim’s ‘suggestion’. And one ancillary point it underlines is that Critical Realism is considerably more reliant on Critical Discourse Analysis (see Chapter 4) for historical sociology (as are all the social sciences) than any tenuous arguments advanced for dubious affinities with structuration theory. What specific implications do consideration of the ‘six problematics’ thus have for the M/M approach? These will be briefly outlined, since Stones never mentions them and seems unacquainted with their broad sweep and applications, particularly as developed in detailed form in Culture and Agency. When Stones dismisses this as unworthy of attention, it is strange then to find him stating that there is a ‘striking similarity … to the main (almost exclusive) form of methodological abstraction used by ­Giddens when he addresses large-scale questions of historical ­sociology’.26 I see no similarity with the M/M approach on various grounds. First, this process, termed ‘institutional analysis’ by Giddens, focuses upon the reproduction of routine practices, and thus resonates with actualism and of course empiricism. It also presumes, without giving any good reason, that morphostasis is more important than morphogenesis. Secondly, structuration takes an ‘Olympian vantage point, which provides very little detail of the causal processes including those of time, space and meaning’ (191–2). Such was also my original critique of the ‘bracketing process’, i.e. structuration theory’s own usage of analytical dualism to separate the properties of structure and agency in order to take a less Olympian view of their interplay. Thirdly, I do not use a form of ‘institutional analysis’, as Stones claims, for the fundamental reason that institutions are morphogenic, conforming to no set pattern of development over time since interaction itself is ongoing precisely because it rarely gives even the most powerful exactly what they want. (After all, this was the source of the M/M approach in the neglected 1979 book on the origins of national educational systems!) Thus, I hold to my critique of the ‘bracketing process’. It is simply wrong for Stones to state that I ever conceded that within such bracketing ‘it is indeed possible to incorporate temporal relations’ (192). On the contrary, my conclusion in the reference he cites was the exact opposite: 26

R. Stones, 1996, Sociological Reasoning: Towards a Past-Modern Sociology, London, Bloomsbury, 102–15.

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What is bracketed are the two aspects of the ‘duality of structure’, structural properties and strategic conduct being separated out by placing a methodological epoché upon each in turn. But because these are two sides of the same thing, the pocketed elements must be coterminous in time (the coexistence of the epochés confines analysis to the same époque); and it follows from this that temporal relations between structure and agency logically cannot be examined.27



(6) Investigating the Conjunctural, Hermeneutically Informed Relations between Social and Systems Integration

In considering this last part of Stones’s critique it will help to consult ­Figure 7.1, which compares different states of the social system (or sections of it) where contradictions or complementarities characterize (some part of) the Cultural or Structural Systems. What the constraining contradiction does in practice is to confront those committed to (A), who also have no option but to live with (B) as well, with a particular situational logic. According to this logic, given their continuing dedication to (A) (its abandonment is always possible because conditioning is never determinism), then they are constrained to deal with (B) in a specific manner. Since (A) and (B) are logically inconsistent, then no genuine resolution is possible between them, but if (B) remains unaltered it threatens the credibility or tenability of (A). Consequently, the situational logic directs that continued adherence to (A) entails making a correction of its relationship with (B) necessary. Corrective action involves addressing the contradiction and seeking to repair it by reinterpretation of the ideas (or revaluation of the interests) involved. The generic result will be some form of syncretism that brings about union between the antithetical but indispensable sets of ideas.28 For protagonists of (A), their concern is in developing syncretic reinterpretations of (B), in order to make it compatible. However, they may be driven to more and more ‘generous’ syncretic endeavours because the unificatory thrust of the corrective repairs can be deflected by their Socio-Cultural reception. Whether or not a syncretic formula can be made to stick depends upon how it meshes with the state of S-C integration in society. At the systemic cultural (CS) level, the opposite of the ‘constraining contradiction’ is the necessary or ‘concomitant compatibility’, because it bears the same formal features in reverse and its conditional influence is that of enablement. In other words, invoking idea (A) also necessarily evokes idea (B), but since the (B) upon which this (A) depends is 27

Archer, ‘Morphogenesis versus Structuration’, 237. 28 Indispensability need not be symmetrical, that is, bilateral and equal.

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Social Integration

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High

Low

High

Concomitant Complementarity

Constraining Contradiction

Morphostasis

Low

Contingent Complementarity

Competitive Contradiction

Morphogenesis

Figure 7.1.  Systemic integration of culture or structure

consistent with it, then (B) buttresses adherence to (A). Consequently (A) occupies a congenial environment of ideas whose exploration, far from being fraught with danger, yields confirmation and corroboration because of the logical consistency of the ideas involved. This was the relationship obtaining, for example, between classical economics and utilitarian philosophy. Modern instances are so abundant in natural science that Kuhn was tempted to portray the whole enterprise as a succession of paradigms, each of which constituted a cluster of ‘concomitant complementarities’.29 What emerges is an enlarged and highly consistent conspectus. It represents a substantial increase in cultural density, by which this sector of the CS becomes especially rich in fine and subtle distinctions and develops an elaborate vocabulary to describe them. The end-product of this extensive exploration is a growth in ideational systematization, that is, the ‘strengthening of pre-existing relations among the parts, the development of relations among parts previously unrelated, the gradual addition of parts and relations to a system, or some combination of these changes’.30 The intricacies of caste rights, the detailed protocols for ‘normal science’, and the bulging libraries of exegetical literature are produced by the same systemic conditioning. The more complex the internal organization of such a corpus of ideas becomes, the more difficult it is to assimilate new items without major disruption to the delicately articulated interconnections. Tight and sophisticated linkages eventually repel innovation because of their disruptive capacity. This is the result of the situational logic of protection. Its implications within the conspectus are that it progressively accommodates 29

Thomas S. Kuhn, 1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. 30 A. D. Hall and R. E. Hagen, 1969, ‘Definition of System’, in Joseph A. Litterer (ed.), Organization, Systems, Control and Adaptation, vol. II, New York, Wiley, p. 36.

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fewer and fewer radical innovations until, in Kuhn’s words, it ‘suppresses fundamental novelties because they are fundamentally subversive of its basic commitments’.31 The situational logic of protection means brooking no rivals from outside and repressing rivalry inside a given society or section of it. The former is at the mercy of contingent ‘international relations’; the latter depends upon the success of its main Socio-Cultural thrust towards cultural reproduction in the (relevant) population. Ultimately, whether or not this sticks and endures turns upon cui bono; non-beneficiaries have no interest in sustaining protection. The conditional influences of the two types of logical relations at the CS level (societal or sectional), just discussed, are summarized in Figure 7.1. The existence of discoverable but wholly ‘contingent complementarities’ at the CS level constitutes a source of novelty, with few strings attached, that is, novelties are systemically available to human agency. Both the detection of these items and their synthesis are entirely dependent upon the exercise of agential powers of creativity. Certainly, the fact that such agents are on the lookout for such items is fostered by frustration of either or both their ideal and material interests, but there is nothing automatic about discontents yielding creative innovations. Certainly, too, the prior CS existence of ‘contingent complementarities’ is a necessary condition for their exploitation, but the sufficient condition requires active agents to produce constructive, concrete syntheses from what is only a loose situational logic of opportunity. When and if they do so, newly elaborated items are added to the Cultural System, which in practical terms represent novel areas of intensive specialization, such as new academic disciplines or research programmes. If and when they are successful (and defective syntheses are common), institutionalization usually follows, and, as it does so, more and more people are attracted to work upon the new source of cultural variety. In turn, variety stimulates more variety because this interplay between the CS and the S-C constitutes a positive feedback loop. This is the exact obverse of the negative feedback mechanism that regulates the protection and reproduction of the ‘concomitant complementarity’. Not only are the logics of the two kinds of complementarities the inverse of one another, but so are their results. Cultural variety is the opposite of cultural density. Variety feeds on what looks promising but is ill-defined; density deals with what feel like certainties, but which are already over-defined. Variety pushes on to extend cultural horizons unpredictably; density stays at home to embellish the cultural environment systematically. 31

Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, p. 5.

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These differences are equally marked in their Socio-Cultural effects – systematization fosters cultural reproduction, whilst specialization prompts ideational diversification. The proliferation of specialist groupings is fissiparous in its social effects for, as more and more sectional groups are carved out, they have less and less in common with one another and with the rest of society. Sectional groups, unlike polarized ones, are defined not by their opposition to others, but by their differences from everyone. The dialectics of specialization and sectionalism contribute to the progressive exclusion of vast tracts of the population from larger and larger portions of specialized knowledge. The division of the population into lay people and experts is repeated over and over again as each new specialism emerges. This is a horizontal form of Socio-Cultural differentiation, quite unlike the vertical stratification engendered by the ‘concomitant complementarity’. Conclusion To move from historical analysis to discussions of late modernity and its future, I will draw together the critical points I have made and focus them upon the two very different accounts offered by structuration theory and the M/M approach on postmodernity. Nothing could be more revealing than the title of the book co-authored by Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order. Except that it is undoubtedly central conflationist, because only people can engage in reflexivity, whilst modernization is strictly inapplicable to persons. The term ‘reflexive modernization’ had been used independently by each of the co-authors.32 What it suggests adjectively is a notion of systemic reflexivity, that is, a property possessed by a social system as a whole, which is simply impossible. What institutional processes would count as being reflexive at this level and for what causal process(es) could this then be held responsible? This is the unanswered question, whether the structurationists are dealing with structure, culture or agency. It is also the biggest challenge to central conflation, namely how to link a conscious agential process (individual or collective) to macroscopic processes of change, representing ‘modernization’. Both these

32 Ulrich Beck, 1992 [1986], Towards a New Modernity, London, Sage; Anthony Giddens, 1990, The Consequences of Modernity, Cambridge, Polity Press, and Giddens, 1991, Modernity and Self-Identity, Cambridge, Polity Press; Scott Lash, 1993, ‘Reflexive Modernization: The Aesthetic Dimension’, Theory, Culture and Society, 10:1, 1–23.

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components are ducked when it comes to defining them. In their joint Introduction, where the co-authors state that ‘the bases of modernization should be clearly distinguished from the increase of knowledge and scientization in the sense of self-reflection on modernization … Then “reflexive modernization” means self-confrontation with the effects of risk society that cannot be dwelt with and assimilated in the system of industrial society.’33 In similar vein, Giddens refers to modernization’s ‘intrinsic reflexivity’.34 Thus, they differ amongst themselves over whether ‘reflexivity’ is a micro (agential) property or a macro (systemic) characteristic, which in addition means that neither can serve as a linking process between the two levels. Ten years later, reviewers were still asking what is being counted ‘as reflexive processes’ by these authors.35 In their joint Preface, they are dismissive of such analytical questioning, indispensable to anyone seeking to use this central conflationist work in practical research. Their cavalier response is that, since ‘the protracted debate about modernity and postmodernity has become wearisome’, then the ‘idea of reflexive modernization, regardless of whether or not one uses the term as such, breaks the stranglehold which these debates have tended to place on conceptual innovation’.36 My own response was to conclude that at ‘the end of the day, “reflexive modernization” is simply a catchy phrase to capture a phase, whose salient features escape both the classic “progressive” portrait of modernity and the playful figure of postmodernity’.37 Since Part III will take up reflexivity again, I shall not mount a defence of the M/M approach to it here beyond listing the eight points that are covered by it but are ignored in structuration theory: • A clear definition of reflexivity, which in the M/M trilogy consistently refers to ‘the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa’.38 • Insistence that this is a property, and causal power pertains to agency alone.

33

Beck, Giddens and Lash, Reflexive Modernization, p. 6. 34 Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, p. 19. 35 Mick Smith, 2005, ‘Book Review: Risk Society and Ethical Responsibility’, Sociology, 39:3, 547 (my italics). 36 Beck, Giddens and Lash, Reflexive Modernization, p. vi. 37 Margaret S. Archer, 2007, Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 31–2. 38 Ibid., p. 4, and Archer, The Reflexive Imperative, p. 2.

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• An explanation of its social origins as other than internalization during socialization. • An examination of various contemporary and historical modalities for practising reflexivity. • Any appreciation that reflexivity mediates between structure and agency, by transmitting how structural conditioning impinges on agents through the social contexts they confront and how agential responses act back upon their contexts. • The importance of agents’ ‘concerns’ (what matters to them most) in shaping their courses of action in society. • How those collectivities of agents who have adopted different dominant modes of reflexivity have distinctive impacts, both institutionally and societally. • The relationship between the above and Social Morphogenesis or morphostasis at the macro, meso and micro levels. Finally, a word about the ‘advantageous amalgamation’ of the ontologies of the structuration and Morphogenetic approaches as advocated by Rob Stones. If I am correct in viewing the defining characteristic of central conflation as one where the two ingredients (structure and agency) are firmly held to be inseparable, then how is it possible to conceive of some amalgamation with an approach like my own that works in terms of their ontological separation over time? I regret having to decline such a polite invitation to bury the hatchet.

Part III

Agency

8

Enter the Passive Agent Featuring Ana Caetano, 2015, ‘Defining Personal Reflexivity: A Critical Reading of Archer’s Approach’, European Journal of Social Theory, 18:1, 60–75

ARTICLE ABSTRACT

Margaret Archer plays a leading role in the sociological analysis of the relation between structure and agency, and particularly in the study of reflexivity. The main aim of this article is to discuss her approach, focusing on the main contributions and limitations of Archer’s theory of reflexivity. It is argued that even though her research is a pioneering one, proposing an operationalization of the concept of reflexivity in view of its empirical implementation, it also 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.

Introduction There is more than one way to be a dualist. In relation to SAC it can consist simply in knocking out one of its constitutive components. This was seen for ‘C’ulture in Chapter 2 and for ‘S’tructure in Chapter 6. In the present chapter we encounter the third possibility, namely the exclusion of ‘A’gency. Obviously, this does not mean the elimination of ‘people’ but it does entail the transformation of agents from being active in shaping their society to being passively shaped by it (or some section of it). This was the sine qua non of radical determinism which nullified their possession of personal causal powers (PEPs) and one that has not been silenced. I think it is less odd than it sounds to begin this third and final part with an article selected for its typicality in this respect. After all, repetition does have the effect, most damaging to young sociologists, by presenting argumentative debate as if there were a large consensus on 165

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one side, being challenged by a minoritarian counter-view. There is nothing wrong in taking sides, provided the argument between them is laid out clearly and the strengths and weaknesses of both sides are closely examined. Instead, Caetano stands as a representative of fin de siècle thinking in terms of central conflation and still regards the whole problem at issue as ‘the interplay of structure and agency’ (1).1 What is even more important than that is the portrayal of agency as the passive receiver of social imprints, whose sole property and power is that of malleability.2 Of course, a fully malleable agent is a passive agent and that is the basis of my main critique here.3 Fundamentally, without active agency nothing at all happens in the social order, including the maintenance of the status quo or morphostasis. As I have argued in my trilogy of books on reflexivity, morphostasis is as agentially dependent as is morphogenesis; it is not a default option, but rather one I sometimes call ‘working at staying put’,4 for the agent. Conversely, for Caetano ‘socialization’ is all that really matters – the agent is merely passively directed by it. Basically, she is barely interested in structure or its change and culpably not in its impact upon education and family life. Social change only unreels as a backcloth (for example, computers arrive, but not as initiating the digitalization of most social institutions; just as something people can learn – as one presumes they once learned how to cook raw meat). In this she quietly departs from the preoccupations of her conflationary mentors, especially Giddens and Beck, both of whom were interested in the changes making for the ‘runaway society’5 or the ‘Risk Society’ and under these descriptions saw them as changing agency and social relations. The distinctive

1

Ana Caetano, 2015, ‘Defining Personal Reflexivity: A Critical Reading of Archer’s Approach’, European Journal of Social Theory, 18:1, 60–75. Page numbers given in parentheses in this chapter refer to the online version of this article. 2 Andrew Sayer and I are agreed. As he argues, ‘human beings must have a particular physical make-up or nature for it to be possible for them to be conditioned by social influences in ­consistent ways’: Sayer, 1992, Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach, London, Routledge, p. 82. 3 I have dealt with the deficiencies of central conflation at length and its main perpetrators – Bourdieu and Giddens – and will not repeat it here. See Margaret S. Archer, 1988, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, Part I, ‘Rejecting Cultural Conflation’, pp. 25–102; Archer, 1995, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ch. 4, ‘Elision and Central Conflation’, pp. 93–134. 4 Archer, 2007, Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 158–91. 5 Anthony Giddens, 2002 [1999], Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives, London, Profile Books.

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‘Double Morphogenesis’6 characteristic of agency is something which is never once referred to in her chapter. To Caetano, structural changes are always subordinate to processes of socialization, which explains, for example, her failure to acknowledge the importance of the emergent structures of State Educational Systems.7 Significantly, she makes no mention of my Social Origins of Educational Systems (1979)8 and what concerns me about this omission was that these 800-plus pages were the origin of the Morphogenetic Approach (see Figure 1.1). Comments like the following, I fail to understand: ‘Personal emergent properties tend to overlay relatively easily the causal powers of structures. If, as Archer states [sic], human conduct can only really be explained by analysing the interplay between these two types of powers, it is difficult to understand the secondary role ascribed to social origins and to socialization’ (4). This is misrepresentation because I neither maintain that PEPs have some ‘easy task’ in ‘overlaying’ structures (SEPs) and nowhere ‘state’ anything of the kind about these two types of powers (of structure and agency), nor did I or do I believe in such a generalization. In any case, the M/M is triadic, not dyadic, and thus is always advanced with reference to SAC! However, ‘culture’ is missing in Caetano’s accounts, which puzzles because they fail to explain the changing contents of socialization processes which do not remain constant over time. Indeed, it troubled Mead (whom I am charged with not appreciating (7)), precisely because he was equivocal about his concept of the ‘generalized other’ once social organizations exceeded a certain size. In his own words ‘the community may in its size transcend the social organization, may go beyond the social organization which makes such identification possible’. He considers the most striking illustration of this to be the economic community, which includes everybody with whom one can trade in any circumstances, ‘but it represents a whole in which it would be next to impossible for all to enter into 6

See Archer, Realist Social Theory, ch. 8, ‘The Morphogenesis of Agency’, esp. pp. 247– 56; and Margaret S. Archer, 2015, ‘How Agency Is Transformed in the Course of Social Transformation: Don’t Forget the Double Morphogenesis’, in Archer (ed.), Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order, Cham, Springer, pp. 135–59. 7 One of my earlier articles (1983), one to which I still hold, considered both Bernstein and Bourdieu guilty of discussing ‘Process without System: Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu’, European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie, 24:1, 196–221. 8 Margaret S. Archer, 1979, Social Origins of Educational Systems, London, Sage. See Archer, Unn-Doris K. Bæck and Tone Skinningsrud (eds.), 2022, The Morphogenesis of the Norwegian Educational System: Emergence and Development from a Critical Realist Perspective, London, Routledge.

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Theoretical Assumptions

Implications for Theory

Penetrability (of Educational Institutions) Explains Absence of Educational Politics and Accounts for Accentuates Educational Adaptation to General Social Change

Makes Penetrability Axiomatic, not Problematic

Complementarity (of Education and Social Stratification)

Stresses Functional Similarities, not Structural Difference

Eliminates Issue of Differential Penetrability in Different Structures of System Emphasizes Universal not Variable Processes of Change

Homogeneity (of Educational Systems)

Figure 8.1. Process without system (in Basil Bernstein and Pierre Bourdieu)

the attitudes of others’.9 Thus, he graciously acknowledges defeat by social change as it makes the first steps towards a global economy, but one Caetano refuses to accept. Yet despite honest avowals such as Mead’s, the powers assigned to ‘socialization’ emerged early in the work of Bernstein and Bourdieu, both of whom could be called pioneers of central conflation. See Figure 8.1; in particular, note the complete absence of agency and of action itself.

Conditions for the ‘Generalized Other’ to Govern Socialization in Modernity

This is a theoretical question in its own right. Stated in the terms of transcendental realism, it asks what would need to be the case structurally and culturally for a homogeneous, normative Zeitgeist to be general in a society. Various theorists have ventured answers, such as Mead’s above, where he focuses on it being ‘small’ in size, or Parsons’s, where 9

George Herbert Mead, 1934, Mind, Self and Society, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, pp. 326–7 (my italics).

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Experiential Requirements for the Individual

Generative Cultural and Structural Conditions

(1) Receipt of Consensual Messages

High Socio-Cultural Integration

(2) Clear and Durable Role Expectations

Stable Functional Differentiation

(3) Normative Consistency

High Cultural System Integration

Figure 8.2.  Conditions for the ‘generalized other’ to govern socialization in modernity

the crucial element is the existence of a central value system. In one way or another, all such responses depend upon an acknowledgement of social change over time – what was once small has become large or even global. But neither change nor time play any part in Caetano’s thinking which is why she neglects the relationship between the M/M approach and reflexivity to the point of detaching the latter from the former. Since I obviously take the opposite view, I tried to provide an answer to the transcendental realist question, i.e. what needs to be the case for a social phenomenon (a State Educational System or Christmas shopping) to be possible. This is summarized in Figure 8.2 along with a detailed commentary in the books cited below.10 I do maintain that, in this new millennium, ‘socialization’ is not the sole or necessary formative influence on the perspectives, projects or purposes of young agents. That they are subjectively intentional is indisputable in the light of my empirical findings, but Socio-Cultural changes have reduced the ‘ease’ of inter-generational transmission, which one can doubt was ever sufficiently simplistic as to represent ‘traditionalism’. Had Caetano paid attention to David Lockwood’s distinction between 10

Margaret S. Archer, 2013, ‘Reconceptualizing Socialization as Reflexive Engagement’, in Archer and Andrea M. Maccarini (eds.), Engaging with the World: Agency, Institutions, Historical Formations, Abingdon, Routledge, pp. 103–28. See also Archer, 2012, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 87–124, for a more detailed account of the alternative I offered.

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‘social’ and ‘system’ integration,11 she would have been more aware of how narrowly dependent her conception of socialization was upon both simultaneously being ‘high’. Figure 8.2 summarizes why this was less and less the case anywhere, with the consequence of transforming many previously ‘passive agents’ into more active ones. I concluded that by the late twentieth century each condition had become the obverse of the above. ‘As nascent morphogenesis increasingly replaced morphostatic processes fostering social reproduction, especially from the 1980s onwards, “Socio-Cultural integration” declined precipitously; “Stable functional differentiation” ceded the way to novel variety in organizations, roles and occupations; and “cultural system integration” plummeted as global connectivity increasingly exposed larger tracts of both ideational complementarities and contradictions to more and more of the world’s population.’12 In brief, contemporary socialization could no longer be viewed as a passive process. In increasing part this was because the messages received by the young came from multiple and divergent sources with growing digitalization playing an important role before the end of the twentieth century. Mixed messages rather than those held to stem from normatively consensual families and natal backgrounds predominated; these imposed a necessity of choice on the young and accounted for the new interest taken by sociologists in Youth Culture. In greater part, the more morphogenesis outweighed morphostasis, the larger the ‘contextual incongruity’ faced by young people, regardless of the domestic consensuality – or its absence – amongst their first domestic socializers. Second-Hand Dispositions instead of First-Person Concerns Although Caetano purports to welcome more attention now being given to reflexivity, her contemporary heroes are Bourdieu and Lahire, whose ‘dispositionalist approaches’ she considers ‘offered key contributions at this level, as they emphasize the routine and habitual character of action, which articulates with the practice of reflexivity on a daily basis’ (2). As so often in her texts, she shows only a superficial familiarity with the theorists 11

David Lockwood, 1964, ‘Social Integration and System Integration’, in G. K. Zollschan and H. W. Hirsch (eds.), Explorations in Social Change, Boston, Houghton Mifflin, pp. 244–57. See also Margaret S. Archer, 1996, ‘Social Integration and System Integration: Developing the Distinction’, British Journal of Sociology, 30:4, 679–99, and Archer, 2022, ‘Social Integration and System Integration Re-visited’ in P. A. Fernandez, Alejandro N. Garcia Martinez and J. M. Torralba (eds.), Ways of Being Bound: Perspectives from PostKantian Philosophy and Relational Sociology, Cham, Springer, pp. 137–57. 12 Archer, The Reflexive Imperative, p. 96.

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invoked. In Chapter 9 of this book, devoted to Lahire, I find it impossible to regard him as having anything other than a very ambiguous relationship with Bourdieu, and he explicitly condemns the concept of habitus. Moreover, he outrightly rejects ‘group influences’ as promoting the homogeneity and transferability of habitus, founded, for example, on class lines, seeking instead to put forward an individualistic account. Conversely, Bourdieu countenances reflexivity at all only if conducted by collective debate and mutual critique amongst a group of (academic) colleagues.13 More to the point, I find no argument justifying Caetano’s statement that routine and habitual action is articulated with reflexivity ‘on a daily basis’. If some form of behaviour is indeed habitual, why is it held to be so regularly scrutinized reflexively? The only meaning I can imagine for her conceptualizing this as ‘articulating’ such a process is if the ‘routine’ has to be positively sanctioned reflexively every time it is evoked. In that case, ‘habitual action’ loses all sense. Douglas Porpora gives an excellent example.14 As an early riser, he wants his first cup of coffee but has to put his feet down carefully (thoughtfully) in the kitchen to avoid their clamouring cats. Certainly, he is being a creature of habit in wanting his first coffee but not in having to think reflexively about his footfall every morning. There is no suggestion that he reconsiders his desire for coffee and every day decides it’s worth the struggle or considers locking the cats up every night. Charles Saunders Peirce seems the best guide when there is indeed a real internal conflict involved, though rarely cited in this discussion and not in Caetano’s article. He is an advocate of our ‘personal powers’ (PEPs) which can and should lead to the self-monitoring of our habitual actions rather than their automatic replication.15 He avows that this may well involve a struggle, as he ‘pictures in his famous courtroom analogy where the advocate of change marshals his case against the deepest dispositions that have been developed biographically’.16 This is a statement of what we all know, namely that our habitual routines can be scrutinized internally and reflexively rejected without the intervention of others such as doctors. We have all encountered 13 Pierre Bourdieu interviewed in P. Bourdieu and L. J. D. Wacquant, 1992, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, Cambridge, Polity Press, pp. 136–7. See also Archer, Making Our Way through the World, pp. 44–8. 14 Douglas Porpora, 2015, Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 153–6 15 Peirce said ‘you are well aware that the exercise of control over your own habits, if not the most important business in life, is at least very close to being so’: cited in William Davis, 1972, Peirce’s Epistemology, The Hague, Martinus Nijhoff, p. 111. 16 Archer, The Reflexive Imperative, p. 61; Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. VI, p. 289; and Vincent Colapietro, 1989, Peirce’s Approach to the Self: Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity, Albany, State University of New York Press.

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someone – an active agent – who has given up smoking, alcohol, e­ ating meat and dairy, or air travel etc. Such examples illustrate the interplay between exteriority and interiority, which is never a matter of determinism. Had Caetano paid any attention to the introductory chapter of my whole trilogy,17 she would have a better grasp of my intentionality. The key points of counter-criticism can be compressed as follows: i. How, fundamentally, do ‘structures’ and ‘cultures’ influence ‘agents’ and vice versa? Central to realist social theory is Bhaskar’s statement that ‘the causal power of social forms is mediated through social agency’18 but, although successfully avoiding the reification of social forms, that says nothing about the mediatory processes involved, which needs unpacking because to compress these into ‘conditioning’ is simply too vague. Appropriate mediation involves a specification of how structural and cultural powers impinge upon agents and of how and why agents use their own personal powers to react. (Caetano addresses the first question alone.) ii. Substituting ‘constraints’ and ‘enablements’ exerted by the SocioCultural orders for bland conditioning improves matters but entails the acknowledgement of agential powers (PEPs). This is because ‘constraints’ require something to constrain and ‘enablements’ something to enable. If per impossibile, no agent ever entertained any course of action, they could neither be constrained nor enabled. Such courses of action as are endorsed by agents I generically called ‘projects’ and it is these that human creativity can design through agential reflexivity, which they do imaginatively through projecting future scenarios and consulting their internal reactions to them.19 iii. Thus, the active agent has to diagnose his/her situation, to identify their own interests and to design projects they consider suitable for attaining their ends. At all three points they are fallible: they can mis-diagnose their situations, mis-identify their interests, and misjudge appropriate courses of action. However, the basic question is not about their doing this well, but how they do it at all; and, basic­ ally, the answer is through the reflexive internal conversation as the modality by which reflexivity towards self, society and the relationship between them is exercised. 17 Margaret S. Archer, 2003, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ‘Introduction: How Does Structure Influence Agency?’, pp. 1–18. 18 Roy Bhaskar, 1989 [1979], 2nd ed., The Possibility of Naturalism, London, Routledge, p. 26. 19 Margaret S. Archer, 2000, Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ch. 7, ‘Personal Identity’, pp. 222–49.

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iv. What is not allowed for at all in the featured article is that the active agent engages in internal mental activity when his/her reflexivity prompts interactions with externality. To Harry Frankfurt, ‘Creatures like ourselves are not limited to desires that move them to act. In addition, they have the reflexive capacity to form desires regarding their own desires – that is, regarding both what they want to want, and what they want not to want’,20 i.e. ‘second-order desires’. Without the latter, there is no way of understanding agential activity for two reasons. First, it is the inescapable task of each agent to design his/her own ‘unity of a life’, as Charles Taylor puts it,21 by dovetailing what matters to them (which is usually in the plural) so that they can be combined without detriment to one another in a modus vivendi that is satisfying and sustainable. Such a second-ordering is not some vague wish to ‘be a better person’ but involves the promotion, demotion and sometimes exclusion of matters we care about to some degree. How much this ‘costs’ the agent (in, say, acquiring or refusing to keep a dog) will vary with its compatibility or incompatibility with other items he/ she values and how great the discrepancy is between them. Thus, I tell myself that I could not travel as much as I do because it would not be fair on the dog. Similarly, I mentioned earlier having wished to become a competitive dressage rider, but this can fade to the nostalgia of watching the Olympic contestants, having recognized my own limitations as a rider and how much time it would subtract from academic life. I am not bent on trivializing such reflexive decisions – some can be excruciatingly painful and unsuccessful. People can have too many or too few children and may only arrive at the second-order desire when it is too late. Secondly, if agents acquire dispositions by ‘socialization’ they are not let off the hook of prioritizing them and to do so is to make choices. This is not to turn them into Rational Choice agents, who rank what matters to them in terms of the personal utility they return.22 But one cannot care ‘wholeheartedly’, as Frankfurt puts it,23 if behaving in one way towards one group and a different manner in the company of another. Yet, the role played by reflexivity in both is the ‘necessity of selection’ 20

Harry G. Frankfurt, 2004, The Reasons of Love, Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, pp. 17–18. 21 Charles Taylor, 1997, ‘Leading a Life’, in Ruth Chang (ed.), Incommensurability, Incompatibility and Practical Reason, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, pp. 170–83. 22 Margaret S. Archer and Jonathan Tritter (eds.), 2000, Rational Choice Theory: Resisting Colonization, London, Routledge. 23 Harry G. Frankfurt, 1988, The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ch. 12, ‘Identification and Wholeheartedness’, pp. 159–76.

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and forging the ‘unity of a life’ never features in Caetano’s presentation of reflexivity. This is ironic because she recruits Lahire in her support, whereas he repeatedly insists that ‘socialization’ involves incompatibilities to which many young people attest – when later reflecting over their free-form biographies at the stage when second-order desires are of particular importance (what skills to acquire and what occupational aspirations to aim for). Then, choice is inescapable.

Agency without Personal Concerns

In my view, agents adopting and seeking to advance their concerns are as important as the contexts that they confront involuntarily and in which they try or hope to realize them. Indeed, ‘context plus concerns’ is foundational to my understanding of reflexivity from the beginning. However, this is simply denied by Caetano, who writes that my ‘emphasis assigned to agency, due to the central focus on reflexive deliberations, results in the minimization of the role of social structures in determining action’ (4). Not only is such a zero-sum statement unjustified, but could anyone other than a determinist make it? Instead, she appears committed to ignoring all the caveats that I attach to SAC. I certainly maintain that any sociological explanation that omits reference to any of its three components will prove inadequate. The three are indispensable, but that does not mean that something indispensable always must be given the same weight as the other two. Sleep and exercise are necessary to good health, which does not mean we should exercise for as long as we sleep.24 Another way I put it was that ‘it should be stressed that to place more emphasis upon the qualitative and nuanced nature of relationships does not entail the privileging of agency over structure in any way’.25 Conversely, to be a determinist about the supreme influence of socialization, such as Caetano, is simply to remain determinedly oblivious to its norms, habits and practices having been formed in a prior structural and cultural context. This alone enables her to write of ‘the secondary role ascribed to social origins’ (4) by me. In turn that statement implies that ‘social origins’ play the primary role in the formation of personal identity, as she holds to be the case, but not based on any research findings. ‘It depends largely on the importance of each social domain in terms of identity formation’ (10). But why is the social domain assigned automatic precedence amongst the constituents 24 Note from the earliest constitutions of religious orders how much detail was prescribed for mealtimes and bedtimes. 25 Archer, Making Our Way through the World, p. 147.

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of ‘context’? From 2000,26 I have argued that all three orders of natural reality (the Natural Order, the Practical Order and the Social Order) play a part and it is usually the agent who determines their relative importance in his/her own case. (There are exceptions such as plagues and desertification provided these cannot be attributed exclusively to accumulated human doings.) Instead, I hold that strict personal identity, to meet its philosophical requirements, must indeed be personal; simply being a member of a group like a social class cannot suffice to meet even the numerical demand (rather, each agent belongs to a class of one). Thus, concerns are of central importance because who we are turns on what we care about. In brief, it is our constellation of concerns that accord us particular personal identities. Each person has to work out their own modus vivendi in relation to the three natural orders. What this entails is striking a liveable balance within our trinity of inescapable naturalistic concerns. This modus vivendi can prioritize one of the three orders of reality, as with someone who is said to ‘live for their art’, but what it cannot do is entirely to neglect the other orders. Yet which precise balance we strike between our concerns and what precisely figures amongst an individual’s concerns are what gives us our strict identity as particular persons. Our emergent personal identities are a matter of how we prioritize one concern as our ‘ultimate concern’ and how we subordinate but still accommodate others to it, because, constituted as we are, we cannot be unconcerned about how we fare in all three orders of natural reality. That we all have concerns in the Natural, Practical and Social Orders27 is unavoidable, but which concerns and in what configuration is a matter of human reflexivity. The process of arriving at a configuration, which prioritizes our ‘ultimate concerns’ and accommodates others to them, is both cognitive and affective. It entails both judgements of worth and an assessment of whether we care enough to be able to live with the costs and trade-offs involved. We are fallible on each count, but our struggle to establish a modus vivendi reflecting our commitments is an active process of deliberation that takes place through our reflexive ‘internal conversations’. In these we ‘test’ our potential or ongoing commitments against our emotional commentaries, which tell us whether we are up to living this or that committed life. Because the commentaries will not be unanimous, the inner conversation involves evaluating them, promoting some and subordinating others, such that the combination of concerns we affirm are 26

Archer, Being Human. 27 Ibid., Part III, ‘The Emergence of Personal Identity’, pp. 193–252.

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also those with which we feel we can live. Since the process is corrigible (we may get it wrong or circumstances may change), the conversation is ongoing. I believe that our ‘internal conversations’ are the most neglected phenomenon in social theory, which has never adequately examined the process of reflexivity that makes us the singular subjects that we are.28 For someone who advances and defends SAC it would be a performative contradiction were I to deny that structural factors do constitute deterrents, capable of depressing agential motivation and capable of affecting the courses of action taken. They do so by attaching different opportunity costs to the same course of action (such as house purchase) to different parts of the population. This is how ‘life chances’ exert causal powers, but their outcomes are only empirical tendencies. What they cannot explain is why X becomes a homeowner and Y does not if both are similarly socially situated. That is a question of the agent’s own concerns and deliberations which govern whether or not they find the cost worth paying. The simple fact that somebody is faced with a deterrent in the form of an opportunity cost does not mean they are necessarily deterred, any more than the fact that people inherit vested interests means that they are bound to defend them – Tony Benn renounced a knighthood in order to sit in the House of Commons. Thus, there is no one-to-one relationship between social position and individual disposition in terms of actions and their outcomes. Instead, there is always some variability in the courses of action taken that is attributable to personal subjectivity. Without acceptance of this, we are thrown back upon empirical generalizations of the kind ‘the greater the cost of a project, the less likely are people to entertain it’. Not only is that no explanation whatsoever (merely a quest for a Humean constant conjunction) but also, far from having eliminated human subjectivity, it relies upon a banal and highly dubious form of it. Because human subjectivity cannot be kept out of any such account, the overwhelming tendency has been for sociological investigators to insert their own subjectivity in place of the agents’ reflexivity. Sometimes we realists have been guilty of putting things like vested interests or objective interests into our accounts of action as a kind of dummy for real and efficacious human subjectivity. There are many worse exemplars, and probably the worst is Rational Choice Theory, which imputes instrumental rationality alone29 to all agents as they supposedly seek to 28

Margaret S. Archer, 2006, ‘Persons and Ultimate Concerns: Who We Are Is What We Care About’, in Edmond Malinvaud and Mary Ann Glendon (eds.), Conceptualization of the Person in Social Science, Vatican City, Vatican City Press, pp. 261–83. 29 See Archer and Tritter (eds.), Rational Choice Theory.

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Third-person accounts 1. Structural and/or cultural properties objectively shape situations for agents and exercise constraints and enablements in relation to: 2. Subjective properties imputed to agents and assumed to govern their actions: • Promotion of vested interests (Neo-Marxism) • Instrumental Rationality (Rational Choice Theory) • Habitus/induced repertoires (Bourdieu’s/Discourse Theory)

Figure 8.3.  The Two-Stage Model

maximize their preference schedules in order to become ‘better off’ in terms of some indeterminate future ‘utiles’. Subjectively, every agent is reduced to a bargain hunter and the human pursuit of the Wertrationalität is disallowed.30 Bourdieu, too, was often guilty of endorsing an empty formalism about subjectivity, such that people’s positions (‘semiconsciously’ and ‘quasi-automatically’)31 engendered dispositions to reproduce their positions. Such theoretical formulations seem to lose a lot of the rich and variable subjectivity that features prominently in La Misère du Monde. That assessment is shared by Andrew Sayer, who questions the supposed ‘complicity’ between objectivity and subjectivity that yields ‘such an unrelentingly pessimistic view of the struggles of the social field, in which the dominated accept and rationalise their domination rather than challenging it. Ironically, it renders The Weight of the World, a book documenting people complaining and resisting, unintelligible.’32 This major difference with Caetano is probably easier to explain by contrasting the completely distinct explanatory ‘models’ to which they give rise. Hers is the Two-Stage format as illustrated in Figure 8.3. Contrast this with the Three-Stage procedure I advocate in Figure 8.4.

30

Martin Hollis, ‘Honour among Thieves’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 75, 163–80. 31 Pierre Bourdieu, 1977, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, and Bourdieu, 1990, The Logic of Practice, Cambridge, Polity Press. 32 Andrew Sayer, 2005, The Moral Significance of Class, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 31–2.

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1. Structural and/or cultural properties objectively shape situations for agents and exercise constraints and enablements in relation to: 2. Subjects’ own set of concerns, as subjectively defined by them 3. Courses of action are produced through the reflexive deliberations of agents who subjectively determine their projects in relation to their objective circumstances

Figure 8.4.  The Three-Stage Model

Caetano fails to appreciate the central role of mediatory mechanisms in key ways, all of which add to her conceptualization of agential passivity. Were structures (SEPs) – and cultures (CEPs) – acknowledged to exercise emergent causal properties and powers, for which she presents no evidence or argument, they are nevertheless presented as hydraulic forces. The relative autonomy of agential concerns is subtracted from them and attributed to the observer. In consequence, theorists of different stripes impose their own interpretations upon purposeful agential goals and doings in a confusion of the researcher’s epistemology and with complete disregard to the subjective ontology of the agent from whom any claim to be in any sense the author of their own aims and actions is withheld.



The Role of Empirical Work

It was surprising to find that in the same year, 2014, Caetano had published two articles, one on theory and featured here and the second on methodology (‘Personal Reflexivity and Biography: Methodological Challenges and Strategies’),33 although both focus on reflexivity. The puzzle is that her article concentrating upon a ‘critical reading’ of my approach contained some comments dismissive of my decade of work on reflexivity and a refusal to examine my empirical findings. However, writing on methodology, she seems to find herself in my debt.

33

2014, International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 18:2, 227–42.

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Nevertheless, in terms of both theory and methods, many of her statements are simply untrue. Take the following sample: (i) ‘Archer’s research is, at heart, a work of synthesis and dialogue, particularly in relation to pragmatist, dispositionalist and reflexive modernization perspectives’ (2). Well, no; I criticize all three and never consider they are logically capable of synthesis. (ii) Archer distinguishes herself from Bourdieu’s ‘structurationism, arguing that the mutual constitution of structure and agency hinders the analysis of their interplay’. How can it not do so? Again, no presentation or evaluation of the arguments involved is given (2). (iii) Archer proposes ‘the notion of analytical dualism in order to problematize the relationship between structure and agency, advocating the ontological primacy of the former over the latter’ (2). Analytical dualism is not a ‘notion’ and does not entail ontological primacy – she should replace this with ‘temporal priority’. The importance of time she simply does not grasp and actually writes that I ‘nevertheless consider that structure and agency operate on different time34 scales’! All of this is on one of the introductory pages and no reference is made to my arguments in favour of this, within these books or in separate articles. Again the importance of temporal priority is supported by Sayer who sensibly remarks that: [W]e can still acknowledge that most of our powers and susceptibilities are socially acquired (though this very process presupposes enabling pre-discursive and biological powers (Archer, 2000)). To see this we need to avoid collapsing time, and note that our susceptibility to social shaping at time t is constrained and enabled by the products of social shaping at time t–1, and hitherto.35

However, this is mentioned only because it paves Caetano’s way for disposing of ten years of empirical research (during which I am held to have defined ‘a typology of four modes of reflexivity’ (3)). How many times have I written that this is not a typology because we can all avail ourselves of all four modalities (especially when subjects know themselves to be uninformed about something).36 I even give a made-up example of a man doing so in relation to his unfamiliar toothache at the start of The Reflexive Imperative, which Caetano just ignores, as she does two-thirds of each book in the trilogy – namely the subjects’ accounts from which the origins of dominant modes of reflexivity are drawn. Nevertheless, she can write that my ‘empirical analysis is not always consistent with these 34

See Archer, Realist Social Theory, ch. 3, ‘Taking Time to Link Structure and Agency’, and look at the basic morphogenetic diagram! 35 Sayer, The Moral Significance of Class, p. 34; the work that Sayer is referring to here is Archer, Being Human. 36 See the introductory chapter to Archer, The Reflexive Imperative, pp. 1–9.

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principles’ (4) (namely the diminution of the role of social structures in comparison with reflexivity in late modernity). Surely, her readers are owed some examples from the texts and consideration of my arguments, except that ‘the arguments she [Archer] presents are not empirically ­validated’ (4)! Enough of this, though it continues but resorts to a semantic device. I am not allowed to have made any empirical findings. Instead, what I am uniformly held to do is to ‘assert’, ‘acknowledge’, ‘assume’, ‘assign’, ‘according to Archer’, just to mention the first letter of the alphabet; what I am never allowed to do is to report on findings let alone to justify them. Ironically, in turning to her second 2014 paper on research methodology I find that Caetano follows my own rather closely. How can that be since my findings are not found worth reporting? Perhaps the answer is that she reveals none of her own either, in this or subsequent publications. In that case, the usual and common-sense link between theory and methods is broken. She regards the justification for this to be that her procedure ‘is not intended to present a conceptual model for analysing the concept, but rather [to] discuss the adequacy of a methodological strategy for researching it’ (1). But without some conceptualization how can the ‘adequacy’ of any method of research be ascertained? Significantly, in neither article does she cite my own conceptual definition of reflexivity, namely, ‘reflexivity is the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa’.37 That post-dated my Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (2003) based upon what was openly presented as an ‘exploratory study’ of twenty people, selected only on the grounds of their social diversity. Its guides were the work of Elizabeth Bott38 and Doug Porpora39 where for us the point of the interviews was ‘to identify inner mechanisms of thought on ultimate matters’. Both Porpora and I were and are predominantly theorists but, having chosen to work in unknown territory, we independently concluded that we must find out more by exploring this terrain. No existing theories gave a ready-made handle to this new geography and as theorists we had a principled resistance to the syntheses advocated and employed by Caetano. It seems sensible for explorers to be humble; we don’t know the dangers or how far we can go or sometimes when we have hit pay-dirt. Yet 37 Archer, Making Our Way through the World, p. 4. 38 Elizabeth Bott, 1971 [1957], Family and Social Network, London, Tavistock. 39 Douglas V. Porpora, 2001, Landscapes of the Soul, Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 6.

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Caetano’s advice is the reverse in dealing with subjects on such unknown ground. ‘It is necessary to go beyond their field of consciousness and explore also social dynamics and mechanisms that act, generally, at a non-conscious level. That which individuals highlight as most relevant in explaining their conduct may not necessarily be the most decisive factor from a sociological point of view’ (6). First, I doubt if sociologists are, perhaps with a tiny handful of exceptions, qualified to do so. Secondly, I do feel strongly about respecting our voluntary interviewees; after all, it is their ‘sociological’ views that guide their action. Thirdly, this type of superiority is precisely what fuels the ‘Two-Stage’ explanation, previously discussed, where the investigator imposes his/her interpretation on the subjects’ accounts. It was puzzling to find the statement that she has used my list of ten mental activities (such as ‘mulling over’, ‘deciding’, ‘reliving’ etc.)40 at the end of her three interviews, which had been rudely dismissed in her featured paper because it is ‘part of social existence’ to talk about these with other people (10). She misses the point entirely through misreading. These questions were never part of my interviews; they were an introductory means of gaining a feel for how a given subject approached an everyday situation ‘that he/she was comfortable to share’ (such as posting an important letter). What language they used, whether or not there were personal commonalities in how they approached the ten activities etc., and any hints about consulting others and any insights about what mattered to them were very useful background to the interviews proper. This also established informality and the absence of ground rules. If they were comfortable about introducing childbirth, failing a driving test, a bad visit to the hairdresser, I would join them, usually proffering as amusing an anecdote as came to mind. What this announced was simply that nothing was off-limits and I think what it started to build was unstuffy trust. What it resulted in was not Caetano’s crying subjects but a lot of laughter – could one say such things in a university and hear them from a professor? Of course one could and did – the most important message to share about reflexivity is that we are all human beings. Personally, I don’t care what they call it, never used a clipboard or an interview schedule but simply blocked out a list of areas to cover. What Caetano misses above all is that my trilogy was a continuous learning experience – explore the territory (2003), examine how reflexivity interfaces with a major social issue (social mobility in 2007) and 40

Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, p. 161.

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then broaden out into tendential implications for future social structuring (macroscopic in 2012).41 What is most important to Caetano in imposing its imprint remains social class, despite the growing trend for the most disadvantaged to become more diverse as reflected in titles of ministerial posts and governmental reports. Now the percentage of pupils in receipt of free school meals has become the gold standard for ‘poor pupils’, whatever the sources of their poverty. Metrification is more bureaucratized than politicized or related to production. That seems all right to the sociologists of education and it then allows them to produce a plethora of articles accentuating particular ethnic groups, countries of origin, regional variations, physical disabilities etc. – in short, to continue business as usual.

41

The trilogy consists of: Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (2003); Archer, Making Our Way through the World (2007); Archer, The Reflexive Imperative (2012).

9

Agents as Individuals and Dispositions as Plural Featuring Bernard Lahire, 2003, ‘From the Habitus to an Individual Heritage of Dispositions: Towards a Sociology at the Level of the Individual’, Poetics, 31:5–6, 329–55, with permission from Elsevier

ARTICLE ABSTRACT

It is argued that the notions sociologists use to conceptualize psychological processes occurring at the level of social groups capitalize too strongly on the idea that these processes are general and homogeneous in nature. In particular, the notion of ‘disposition’, which is central to Bourdieu’s theory of the habitus and which is widely employed in sociological research, is found to rest upon these tacit and problematic assumptions which have never been tested empirically. Instead, we should envision that social agents have developed a broad array of dispositions, each of which owes its availability, composition, and force to the socialization process in which it was acquired. In particular, a distinction should be made between dispositions to act and dispositions to believe. Moreover, the intensity with which dispositions affect behavior depends also on the specific context in which social agents interact with one another. A focus on the plurality of dispositions and on the variety of situations in which they manifest themselves is at the core of a sociology at the level of the individual. Its research program conceives of individuals as being products of pluriform social processes occurring in very different domains. It focuses on social factors that may account for behavioral variations and changes rather than for irreducible differences between social groups. Introduction Demarcating sociology from psychology has always been difficult and has not become any easier; most of us get by in the absence of any agreed definition either by stipulating our own meanings or simply not troubling with formal definitions. Nonetheless, this has not stopped many authors from criticising the ‘neglect’ of the other discipline in the work of fellow sociologists. This is the case here between the present chapter and its predecessor. Caetano’s approach was typically ‘sociological’ and 183

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even more narrowly typical of the approach common in the sociology of education as has already been seen in Chapter 8. Conversely, Bernard Lahire stresses sociology in his title, condemns many colleagues for their omission of psychology, but significantly his own contribution is a mixture of the two disciplines. I am less concerned about this mélange than the claim he makes for its essential role in his development of ‘a sociology at the level of the individual’. For Critical Realists, nothing prevents colleagues from concentrating on a particular level of the social order, providing they acknowledge the ontology of and interplay with other levels of society, even when these are not part of their own research. In this section, the test is how adequately they succeed in theorizing the agent and the exercise of agency. If successful in passing this test, SAC simply collapses because both social reproduction and transformation are dependent upon active agents. In France, at the time the article under consideration was written, Lahire was often presented as a critic of Bourdieu and, as will be seen, there is plenty within this paper to support such a view. However, it is impossible to avoid noting that there is considerable ambiguity in his evaluation of Bourdieu’s work and that being ambiguous – even to the point of self-contradiction – turns out to be Lahire’s signature tune. It can be traced through his treatment of the following concepts, all of which he holds onto tenaciously under his own descriptions: DISPOSITIONS

SOCIALIZATION

TEMPORALITY

SITUATIONAL CONTEXT

In dealing with them sequentially the fundamental question I pose is not merely the adequacy of the treatment given to each, but whether or not if taken together, as is intended, they do combine to furnish a ‘sociology at the level of the individual’ that is promised in the title.

On Dispositions

The first sentences of his Abstract encapsulate Lahire’s ambiguous ­attitude towards Bourdieu’s own usage and the even stronger version of the concept of ‘dispositions’ and their relationship to social positions advanced by many of his sociological followers: It is argued that the notions sociologists use to conceptualize psychological processes occurring at the level of social groups capitalize too strongly on the idea that these processes are general and homogeneous in nature. In particular, the notion of ‘disposition’, which is central to Bourdieu’s theory of the

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habitus and which is widely employed in sociological research, is found to rest upon these tacit and problematic assumptions which have never been tested ­empirically [329].1

It is not that Lahire is contemptuous of ‘dispositions’ per se, but he wants to stress that they vary in the intensity and plurality with which they impinge upon different individuals. This may account for ‘behavioural variations and changes rather than for irreducible differences between social groups’ (329). Such a rejection of ‘the group’ sets him apart from Bourdieu but more pointedly from Caetano and sociologists of education in general. This does not mean that Bourdieu’s own usage can be cleared of the charge of uncritically attributing habitus to groups-as-a-whole, such that culpability rests only with his followers from sociology. Lahire seems to hold them jointly responsible, rather than guilt being apportioned to the master or his followers. Thus, Bourdieu is held accountable for having characterized the habitus as ‘virtue made out of necessity’. But such necessities must surely be group phenomena in many cases (e.g. landholding or enfranchisement). Bourdieu’s disciples are chastised for having based their investigations on these notions, often exaggerating them – ‘e.g., on that of the “generalizability” of dispositions and schemas’ – and this has ‘reinforced a certain laziness with regard to empirical matters. When is assumed that conducting research on any particular practice cannot but enable one to assess general dispositions which can be transferred to other situations, then one is saved the expense of entering a long and tedious avenue of research’ (342). In other words, those like Caetano and many others are culpable of treating social class as a master key to the dispositionality of children regardless of what precisely class members have in common as attitudes or behaviour at any given place or time. Under Lahire’s critical rubric the notions of the ready transposition or transferability of the habitus both fall, given Bourdieu’s theory ‘takes it to be self-evident that schemes and dispositions may be transferred or transposed, and that they lend themselves to general use’ (341). I agree with him on this important point and have presented my own critique of it in the first two chapters of The Reflexive Imperative,2 emphasizing how the historical increase of Social Morphogenesis over morphostasis also spells

1

Bernard Lahire, 2003, ‘From the Habitus to an Individual Heritage of Dispositions: Towards a Sociology at the Level of the Individual’, Poetics, 31:5–6, 329–55. Page numbers given in parentheses in this chapter refer to this article. 2 Margaret S. Archer, 2012, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ch. 1, ‘A Brief History of How Reflexivity Becomes Imperative’, and ch. 2, ‘The Reflexive Imperative versus Habits and Habitus’, pp. 10–86.

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a growing challenge between dispositions developed by ‘parental’ agents in the past and their transfer to their offspring in the present who have no alternative but to confront rapidly changing social demands (in school, family, work, leisure and communication). Lahire is not oblivious to such manifestations and refers to the growing importance of social media in this article. However, rather than repeat the arguments and evidence advanced in my trilogy of books on reflexivity,3 it seems more important to ask how Lahire handles the problem of transposition involved, whilst still upholding something of the transfer of ‘dispositions’. His strategy is strikingly different from those I reviewed both in The Reflexive Imperative and in Conversations about Reflexivity.4 In the latter, the greatest contrast would have been with Andrew Sayer,5 whose solution was to insist that social classes basically retained sufficient similarity during late modernity to provide young subjects with enough inter-generational stability for a recognizable continuity of dispositions to persist between them. There may be more merit in this argument than I allowed at the time,6 but in any case it is not the route that Lahire took. Instead, he seemed unmoved by bringing down the sociology that we had all been reared upon by radically redefining society as one of ‘individuals’.7 However, this dispelled the present problem of transmissibility. Since few would dispute that each individual varied in nuanced ways in their natal backgrounds and thus their life experiences, what was so offensive in stressing that rather than them sharing a common class disposition? In other words, were they exposed to a variety of dispositions such that an individualized amalgam moved each of them in different ways? Primarily, the most deleterious consequence of Lahire’s proposition is that it erases any reference to or influence of structure and culture, however these are conceptualized if they are conceived of as pertaining to 3

Margaret S. Archer, 2003, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Archer, 2007, Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Archer, The Reflexive Imperative. 4 Margaret S. Archer (ed.), 2010, Conversations about Reflexivity, London, Routledge. 5 ‘Yet most children still have enough continuity in their relations and experiences to adjust to them – the familiar home, the dull routine of school, the daily reminders of their class and gender position. While there probably is an increase in contextual discontinuity there is still plenty of stability, and they could hardly become competent social actors if they did not develop a feel for familiar games’: Andrew Sayer, 2009, ‘Review of Making Our Way through the World’, Journal of Critical Realism, 8:1, 122. 6 Given that in most European countries the gap between ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ has widened in the new millennium, not that social class can be reduced to differences in wealth alone. 7 Interestingly, the last book of Norbert Elias carried the same title, 1991, The Society of Individuals, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, so perhaps this manoeuvre was less drastic than my own perceptions of it. All the same, why was there so little resistance to this outright demolition of structure and culture?

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social groups (and an individualistic construal of either seems ­impossible). Secondly, this would eliminate the M/M approach altogether because of its basing all adequate explanations upon SAC and never on agency alone. Thirdly, it again signals an ambiguous relationship with ­Bourdieu – retaining the centrality of ‘dispositions’ that are socially acquired but cannot be attributed to the influence of formal or informal social groups (and ones I regard as Primary or Corporate groupings). Underpinning all of these is how ‘dispositions’ are acquired in the nuanced, because individualized form that Lahire advocates? What is not open to him is the route taken, for example, by Rational Choice theorists, because this would credit agency with the capacity of freely choosing – based upon material or ideational interests – ones which are deprived of substance and influence here in the absence of structure and culture.

On Socialization

Given that he regards socialization as ultimately a matter of interpersonal influence(s) it seems unsurprising that for Lahire much hangs upon his conception of socialization as a process which is always nuanced for the persons involved. It could be argued that this is the only route left open to him. However, this does not imply, as one might think at first, that analytical attention is devoted to agential relationality, its properties and its causal powers as well as its outcomes. Instead, the focus is mainly upon what I will call ‘the fallacy of generality’, and this constitutes another break with Bourdieu, whose ‘theory of habitus takes it to be self-evident that socially constituted schemes and dispositions may be transferred or transposed, and that they lend themselves to general use’ (341). Such ‘generalization’ is the main target of Lahire’s criticism. Against it he counterposes that ‘The scientific program at the level of the individual should fill the gap left by all theories of socialization and inculcation, such as the theory of the habitus, which rhetorically refers to “the internalization of what is external” and the “embodiment of objective structures”.’ In short, by emphasizing that ‘this reproduces itself’, sociologists have neglected ‘what is reproduced’ and ‘how, in what manner, this reproduces itself. This has resulted in a “full” theory of reproduction, but an “empty” theory of knowledge and of modes of socialization’ (338). After such strictures and again repudiating ‘structure’ and ‘culture’ it comes as no surprise that he concentrates largely on the micro level. ‘It is precisely this avenue that a sociology of the individual is determined to follow’ (342). In so doing, he introduces as his counterweight to the ‘fallacy of generalization’, what he terms the ‘plural singular’, which he holds also disposes of the ‘fallacy of over-homogenization’ of socialization according

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to group membership. Briefly, qua individuals we are all held subject to a variety of socialization processes within our lifeworlds and, as sociologists, we are forced to face the plurality of individuals: ‘the singular is necessarily plural in nature. The coherence and homogeneity which sociologists attribute to individual dispositions at the level of the group, or of institutions, will then be replaced by a more complex vision of the individual as being less unified and as the bearer of heterogeneous habits, schemes, or dispositions which may be contrary or even contradictory to one another’ (343–4). There is no suggestion that one of the courses of action open to such ‘an individual’ would be to reject or repudiate the dispositional message(s) that were in contradiction with another(s). That would require judgement and personal preferences, which are in very short supply for Lahire’s individual. In Lahire’s detailed work, L’homme pluriel,8 are found a mass of references to people’s resources for action but disproportionately ­ ­little about the agent or actor as a source of action. Yet, I have found an ­admittedly small category of subjects (undergraduates) who have ­exercised their own judgement and repudiated their families. By banality or co­incidence, I called them the ‘Rejecters’.9 The main difference between us is that Lahire attributes differences between agents/actors to variable permutations in their experiences of plural forms of socialization and very little indeed to their direct experience (often relegated to mere fallible phenomenology). Thus, he can assert that the ‘(relative) coherence of habits, schemes, or dispositions that individuals may have internalized depends upon the coherence of the principles of socialization to which they were exposed’ (345). Conversely, there is much more involved in the adoption of a ‘schema’ than its coherence with others, and frequently it is not possible to judge elements as being coherent with another or not (fear of lions, fear of flying or fear of one’s father cannot be assessed for their coherence). Indeed, I consider the role of personal experience to be crucial to human uniqueness and in no way restrict this to the interpersonal domain at the expense of excluding the Natural and Practical Orders of society.10 It is through interacting with the natural environment and engaging in practical activities that from being neonates we begin to distinguish 8 Bernard Lahire, 1998, L’homme pluriel, Paris, Ed. Nathan. See especially Acte 1, Scène II, ‘Les ressorts de l’action’, and Scène III, ‘Analogie et transfert’, pp. 53–105. 9 Archer, The Reflexive Imperative. See in particular ch. 3, ‘Reconceptualizing Socialization as “Relational Reflexivity”’, pp. 87–124. 10 Margaret S. Archer, 2000, Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. In particular, see Archer, The Reflexive Imperative, Figure 2.2, p. 78, which differentiates between ‘experiences’ in the Natural, Practical and Social Orders.

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Natural Order

Practical Order

Social Order

Relationship

Object/Object

Subject/Object

Subject/Subject

Knowledge Type

Embodied

Practical

Discursive

Emergent from

Co-ordination

Compliance

Commitment

Relations Contributing to

Differentiating the bodily envelope from the environment

Distinction between subjects and objects

Distinguishing the self from other people

Figure 9.1.  Types of knowledge and the three orders of natural reality

ourselves from other things and other people. And both are necessarily prior to interpersonal socialization. The real world is influential in ‘telling’ us about our enablements and limitations; that something in nature is beyond our reach, faster than us, or dangerous to walk upon, and only through practice with tools/equipment can we become skilled spear throwers, tennis players or drivers etc. In short, fire does not burn us because ‘mother says so’; that would be to endorse a linguistic version of the epistemic fallacy which realism repudiates. These varied relationships are summarized and formalized in Figure 9.1 and have been discussed at length in my works.11 The key point they develop is that a generative mechanism is needed to account for any of the three social orders affecting the individual human being, and the ‘internal conversation’ (our personal process of reflexivity) is advanced in this role.12 It does not promote language to a position of hegemony, useful as it is; yelling ‘ouch’ or equivalent noises adequately express the pain of stubbing a toe. Linguistic uses are more subtle and enable us to 11

Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation; Archer, Making Our Way through the World; Archer, The Reflexive Imperative. 12 The most detailed discussion is contained in Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation.

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exercise the human capacity of being what Charles Taylor termed ‘strong ­evaluators’13 who  make their varied judgements on various aspects of their ­environments – employing normativity effectively, at least for themselves, in what they seek or shun. Whether they get it is a different matter, one dependent on structure and culture and their respective affordances and obstructions. We will come to these but what is crucial here is that by introducing personal reflexivity as the mediating mechanism, the oppressive role Lahire assigns to other people through socialization becomes a two-way process in which agents and actors play an active role.14 In fact, the active agent is retrieved who plays an active part in choreographing his/her life course: someone who makes things happen rather than Lahire’s passive agent to whom things happen. To plumb the depths of this passivity it is necessary to consider his ‘plural singular’ human subjects from three more angles, all of which are essential parts of my own theorization.

On the Social Contexts of Action

‘Agential passivity’ is pervasive in Lahire’s conceptualization. Take the following quotation: One of the great myths of our time is that our ultimate freedom is located in the individual, in our heart of hearts, or in our subjectivity …(W)e make substantial progress when we give up the illusion that our ‘subjectivity’. ‘inner side’, or singularity is not determined, that we have free will or a ‘personal’ existence on which the social world has no influence. When we take this step, the internal (dispositional) and external (contextual) forces and counter-forces appear to which we are continuously exposed from the day we are born, and which make us feel what we feel, think what we think, and do what we do [352].

Initially, this sounds like the Azande entrapped in their local cultural determinism (see Chapter 1), but for the fact that the internal (dispositional) confronts external (contextual) influences including counterforces. How is this conceptualized? I have consistent respect for the context-dependence of action as did Bhaskar. That goes for ‘all action as contextless action is inconceivable’ (some would prefer the name ‘situational’, though it makes no difference to this argument). Thus, each of my books on reflexivity begins with a historical summation of 13

Charles Taylor, 1985, Human Agency and Language, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, ch. 2, ‘Self-Interpreting Animals’, pp. 25–8. 14 Margaret S. Archer, 2013, ‘Reconceptualizing Socialization as Reflexive Engagement’, in Archer and Andrea M. Maccarini (eds.), Engaging with the World: Agency, Institutions, Historical Formations, Abingdon, Routledge, pp. 103–28.

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morphogenetic changes in contexts (from those furnished by international relations to innovations in giving birth). This entails something unacceptable to Lahire, namely that certain theorists, determined to keep Bourdieu in play,15 have over-generalized the flexibility of the habitus to meet all eventualities, which includes new ‘variety’ and practices. What members of Bourdieu’s supporters’ club are refusing to countenance is ultimately social innovation, that is, the intrinsic capacity of morphogenesis to generate new ‘variety’, presenting new opportunities, openings, skills, rewarded differently and entailing both a redistribution of socially scarce resources and novelty in their spatial distributions.16 Equally uncongenial to Lahire, despite the admission in the quotation above, is that certain dispositions will be found contextually unfit for purpose, and some will suffer ‘morphonecrosis’.17 After all, the title of his article stresses our ‘heritage of dispositions’ as a causally active patrimony, unlike antiques which could be treasured or offloaded at any bazaar. We do many forms of offloading – of attitudes that Mother would have been shocked to see being repudiated (on divorce, on sexual activity, on homophobia), and others by which Father would be equally horrified (his post occupied by a woman, his big car condemned, perhaps his own children, his Sunday roast and ‘full English breakfast’ may be excoriated by them too) and all of that within the domestic domain. Acknowledging this changeability of contexts, Lahire places the explanatory burden on his belief that ‘the plurality of individuals whose heritage of habits, schemes, and dispositions is more or less heterogeneous, since it is composed of elements that are more or less contradictory’ (353). Therefore, it is held to follow that it is ‘difficult to predict with certainty what, in any context, will ‘“play” or gain “force” for each individual’ and ‘which of the multiple habits he has embodied will be triggered in or by a particular context’ (353). Again, this is a statement of agential passivity; the agent cannot reject any part of his/her heritage, cannot resolve an (apparent) contradiction, cannot find the attractions of a new context to outweigh the grip that old patterns of behaviour exercise upon them. Why not? Because they are not granted reflexivity actively to reject past normative injunctions, and to embrace the novelty extended to them by new contexts – in which they nonetheless must live and try to thrive. 15 For example, Matthew Adams, 2006, ‘Hybridizing Habitus and Reflexivity: Towards an Understanding of Contemporary Identity’, Sociology, 40:3, 511–28; Paul Sweetman, 2003, ‘Twenty-First Century Disease?, Sociological Review, 51:4, 528–49. 16 See Margaret S. Archer (ed.), 2013, Social Morphogenesis, Dordrecht, Springer. 17 Ismael Al-Amoudi and John Latsis, 2015, ‘Death Contested: Morphonecrosis and Conflicts of Interpretation’, in Margaret S. Archer (ed.), Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order, Cham, Springer, pp. 231–48.

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If they feel discomfort, they have to live with it because ‘this feeling is nurtured by the rift or disjunction between what society has left within us and the possibilities it offers to mobilise the array of our dispositions and capabilities at a particular point in time’ (354). The durability of past ‘deposits’ is greater, Lahire maintains, ‘the more the context in which it is undertaken is similar to in content or in structure to the context in which the schema or disposition was acquired’ (343). Habits endure ‘if they have been adopted at an early stage in life and under conditions that favour their proper internalization, i.e. without meeting opposite demands; without obfuscation of the ‘cultural transmission’ by cultural dissonances between parents, between what adults do and what they say, or what they say and the way in which they say it; and if they meet positive conditions, which are socially gratifying, for putting them into action’ (341). At the end of the day, it was necessary for Lahire to reintroduce culture and structure in characterizing changing contexts of action, but this is not S(A)C because the agent is influenced, without being an influencer.

On Concerns

As active agents we are partially shaped by the social contexts in which we find ourselves throughout life but we contribute more to them than any socialized array of ‘dispositions’; crucially we bring and develop our own concerns. The first sentence of Andrew Sayer’s 2011 book refers to ‘social science’s difficulties in acknowledging that people’s relation to the world is one of concern’.18 I fully agree and merely accentuate that the greater the extent of passivity in the conceptualization of agency, the lesser the part our concerns play in making our way through the world. To me, that is inevitably the case if the impact of any social context is examined without reference to the ‘importance of what we care about’19 in it. What matters most to other people, particularly those who have played a role to varying degrees in the agent’s socialization, does not determine how any agent him-/herself evaluates the contexts they later confront. On the contrary, it is how ‘contexts’ and ‘concerns’ intertwine to shape their internal conversations,20 and thus in moulding the dominant mode of reflexivity characteristic of particular agents, that is of greater import. 18

Andrew Sayer, 2011, Why Things Matter to People, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 1. 19 Harry G. Frankfurt, 1988, The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 20 This is the title of Part II of Archer, Making Our Way through the World, p. 145.

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For Lahire personal concerns appear too individualistic to be seriously entertained and, in discussing the manner and degree with which context exerts an influence upon agency, social institutions outweigh social relations, as in the following quotation: What in a given context determines the activation of a particular disposition can be conceived of as the product of the interaction of (relations between) internal and external forces; i.e. between dispositions that are more or less strongly established during past socialization and associated with a greater or lesser amount of appetency, and between external forces i.e. between elements of the context, such as the objective characteristics of a situation that may be associated with different persons, which weigh more or less strongly on individual agents, forcing or challenging them with varying strength. Situations occurring in a person’s profession, at school, with family, or with friends, exert unequal pressure [353].

Thus, for Lahire, that which determines a particular outcome is the resultant of past socialization, which produces appetites of differing strength for repeat performances, in conjunction with later contextual features that force or challenge them. In neither the past nor the present does the individual play any significant part in his or her own life. At most, he/she has acquired ‘appetites’ (perhaps meaning something closer to ‘inclinations’, though if ‘strong’ approaching the Humean ‘passions’), but not approximating even to the common formula of ‘Desires + Beliefs = Motivation’ because there is no evaluative quality that has been transmitted unequivocally over time. In the present they are ‘forced’ or ‘challenged’ but who are they? Passive agents can be conceived of as forced to do all kinds of things, but to respond to a challenge requires internal resources to do so – to imagine felicific consequences, to marshal agential resources intelligently to a given end, and normatively to seek a successful outcome. Two key factors are missing from Lahire’s account, both requiring active agents: how rapidly contexts change in late modernity and how agents then have more reflexive work to do in dovetailing their concerns.21 As I put it bluntly in 2012, when ‘social change accelerates, socialization can no longer be credibly conceptualized as a largely passive process of “internalization” because there is less and less to normalize, that is, to present as being normal and normatively binding’.22 In the five volumes devoted to Social Morphogenesis by the Centre for Social Ontology we did not view this as simple acceleration (which could refer to the speed of change rather than accentuating an increase 21

See Archer, The Reflexive Imperative, ch. 3, ‘Reconceptualizing Socialization as “Relational Reflexivity”’, pp. 87–124. 22 Ibid., p. 96.

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in ‘variety’) nor did we conclude that a shift towards a new social ­formation – the ‘morphogenic society’ – was in statu nascendi.23 But we were consensual about increasing ‘novelty’ (in employment, technology, qualifications, leisure pursuits, lifestyles etc.), all of which entailed new contexts in which more and more agents found themselves, especially the young. Correspondingly, the traditional agencies for socialization – the community as the ‘generalized other’ (Mead), the family (Parsons), social class (Bourdieu) or the lifeworld (Habermas) – could no longer be deemed almost exclusively responsible. Instead, the relational intricacies involved (some micro-level and interpersonal, others meso-level and networked) shaped the contexts confronted throughout their life courses. Consequently, all agents had to deal with the necessity of selection ‘that derives from the generative mechanism of morphogenesis for “variety to stimulate more variety”, meaning more things to do, to know, or to be’.24 In short, the young faced new opportunities, unknown and unavailable to their parents and often presenting ‘mixed messages’ to them. They had to be selective without degenerating into ‘rational choosers’ and do so without any authoritative source of normativity recommending particular selections.25 Those tasks, even where the selections made can be corrected later, call for very active agents because even corrigibility carries costs, in a variety of currencies, and ultimately it is the agent who has to pay. What these temporal changes in context, deriving from morphostasis and morphogenesis ‘changing places’ as the process driving social change (rather than reproducing structural and cultural stability), meant was that all agents needed to become more active. They were increasingly induced to choose, and advances in technology/digitalization intensified this pressure. Consequently, their concerns became their main compass towards a modus vivendi that could furnish personal contentment and appeared to agents to be sustainable within a shifting social order. Yet, equally, novel ‘variety’ impacts upon agential concerns simply because when a selection has been made it is likely to involve diverse 23

Archer (ed.), Social Morphogenesis; Margaret S. Archer (ed.), 2014, Late Modernity: Trajectories towards Morphogenic Society, Dordrecht, Springer; Archer (ed.), Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order; Archer (ed.), 2016, Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity, Dordrecht, Springer; Archer (ed.), 2017, Morphogenesis and Human Flourishing, Dordrecht, Springer. 24 Archer, The Reflexive Imperative, p. 97. I am writing this during the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, and it struck me that the official list of events was a good index of this when tracked though the post-war period. 25 The importance of relationality seemed marked amongst the youngest Olympians, with certain parents devoting themselves to the sporting success of their offspring, but these young agents also had to contend with counter-influences from coaches, their team and, to varying degrees, their nation.

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agential commitments which may turn out to be incompatible. Human subjects cannot live with a ragbag of incommensurables and hence confront the second part of the reflexive imperative, namely the need to shape a life, to forge a liveable modus vivendi that reflexively entails compromises and concessions being made between their concerns. This usually involves promoting some, demoting others and perhaps eliminating another altogether. It is not a response to some stern Kantian voice of duty, it is not a felicific calculus that leaves subject ‘better off’ in terms of their preferred currency, it may not even be legal let alone laudable. Earlier in Being Human I sketched out the DDD scheme of 26 that is reflexively ­considered in the subject’s own terms of the shape they fallibly wish their own life to take. ‘Through this fallible process, not only is personal identity shaped (I am the being with that specific constellation of concerns), but it is also the same process of internal dialogue that enables the subject to seek a social identity by attempting to occupy a social role(s) whose ­personification27 (they believe) would be expressive of who they are.’28 Agentially, people need to be active in formulating such a constellation, to be continuous monitors of themselves and their changing contexts, and dedicated in seeing a modus vivendi through, albeit with compromises and concessions of different kinds (health, accessibility, partners’ requirements etc). Passivity will not do because the social order itself is not static, and the planet itself is at the merci(lessness) of our doings.

‘Indeterminate Determinism’

Since Lahire holds that ‘one of the great myths of our time is that our ultimate freedom is located in the individual, in our heart of hearts, or in our subjectivity’ (352), he rightly confronts his own conundrum, namely, ‘What conception of social determinism can account for the relative indetermination of the individual component’ (352). This is a good and necessary question for him to ask but I find his response unsatisfactory. He maintains that ‘individuals are too multi-socialized and too multi-­determined to be conscious of the determinism that is acting upon them’ (352). (In my view and far too often, in social research it is the investigator who furnishes it.) This is another instance of epistemology being 26

Archer, Being Human, pp. 230–49. 27 Martin Hollis, 1997, Models of Man: Philosophical Thoughts on Social Action, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 28 Archer, The Reflexive Imperative, p. 103.

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substituted for ontology. As sociologists we would have no job left if we expected our subjects themselves to hand us the reasons in full for why they acted as they did in a particular context. But sometimes they can and do: Joan has been quoted earlier and when her father had said emphatically ‘You cannot become a nurse’, it would have been near impossible for her to fail to understand this embargo.29 What was quite feasible for her was to try to propitiate him at first by taking a quite different type of employment, thus demonstrating her filial obedience. After a couple of years, she repeated her original wish, which was again bluntly refused by father, and again that would have been difficult not consciously to understand. Soon she married and with her husband’s support began work as a nursing auxiliary. This is the account she gave and in doing so showed her capacity as an active agent, one who could reflexively design and settle for ‘second best’ rather than abandon her prime occupational concern in this context of paternal resistance. For all I know she may have inwardly cursed her father all her life, without sharing this with me as interviewer, but I am much more interested in her doings than in her feelings. (One facet of reflexivity is that the internal conversation enables us to do and to say many things whilst simultaneously giving a vitriolic running internal commentary about them that is not shared with others.)30 Moreover, there is only one person who has to find her reasons good for the actions she undertakes – and that is she herself, not any sociologist. Of course, it follows that sometimes she is her own worst enemy and her reflexive reasoning proves mistaken and even very costly. Therefore, the key point is that it is her reasons that prompt her doings. It  is not the place of any sociologist to substitute his/her own views of what consciously or, for that matter, unconsciously promoted her action(s). This is illustrated in Figure 9.2. The conditions under which we live during the current global pandemic are relevant to this discussion because on previous occasions when ‘the poor got poorer’, many sociologists readily presumed that the old couple pictured in Figure 9.2 automatically acted by trading off heating against eating and necessarily eliminating all ‘luxuries’, the designation of which was held self-evident and uncontroversial. Now many say the 29 See ‘Joan’s story’ in greater detail in Archer, Making Our Way through the World, ch. 3, ‘Reflexivity and Working at Social Positioning’, pp. 100–13. 30 ‘[W]e are little gods in the world of inner speech’: Norbert Wiley, ‘The Sociology of Inner Speech: Saussure Meets the Dialogical Self’, paper presented at the meeting of the American Sociological Association, August 2004. We can do two things at once as in appearing to be discussing something politely whilst internally fulminating, ‘When will he/she shut up with this nonsense?’

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The effects of inflation on those with fixed incomes Objective constraints are undeniable, despite their (mis)understanding But their subjectivity explains what they actually do

Figure 9.2.  People on fixed incomes

same thing again. Yet, suppose our old couple do neither; their children live abroad and, despite the expense, both agree that retaining telephone contact matters most to them and so both their warmth and diet suffer. For them their phone is not a luxury item; it is their access to what they care about most in an undesirable context. And, again, what social scientist has the arrogance to say he/she/they know better than the subjects what moves them to action? The latter are what I term ‘accounts in the third-person’; ones that strip agents of their ‘personal powers’.31 What moves subjects are supposedly factors imposed by the investigator. At best these hydraulic accounts describe how certain social properties and powers impinge on agents, but not how they are received by them. Instead, I maintain, their reception is mediated through their internal conversations, and common conditions will be met by a varied array of responses. Mediatory reflexivity explains what gives traction amidst such variety and avoids Lahire’s embrace of ‘indeterminacy’. It does so only by taking the concerns of interviewees seriously rather than by backtracking to some facet of their socialization. So doing, this seems to me to incorporate the ‘psychological’ individuality of agency more convincingly than Lahire’s ‘indeterminate determinism’. 31

Margaret S. Archer, 1995, Realist Social Theory, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, on PEPs (Personal Emergent Properties), pp. 302–26.

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Without taking the reasons subjects recount as having found good for their doings as true and faithful accounts – because we are all fallible as well as capable of self-deception – sociology settles for ‘what most of the people do most of the time’, which is a retreat into Humean ‘constant conjunctions’ rather than an account of the role played by reflexivity in the portrayal of ‘active agents’ at the micro level, and their subjective variability in reactions to similar objective circumstances. In other words, this is to disagree importantly with Lahire’s statement that, ‘­Individuals may have the feeling that the behaviour that they engage in is freely chosen, because there is considerable chance that they are plural in nature and that different “forces” act upon them according to the social situations in which they find themselves’ (353). Conclusion Lahire’s own final remarks are of particular relevance to empirical work that takes agential accounts seriously, without endowing them with infallibility. Interestingly, he attributes their ‘going wrong’ in their interpretations of themselves and their plural relations to the multiple social investments we make in such domains as the family, profession, friendships etc. because these may turn out to be incompatible with one another. To these, he attributes ensuing ‘feelings of loneliness, incomprehension, frustration, or discomfort’ as likely to derive as ‘Primarily products of the (inevitable) gap between what the social world objectively allows us to “express” at a given moment and what it has put into us during our past socialization’ (354, my italics). No doubt exemplifications of such incongruence can be encountered and I give an analysis of a few of them in The Reflexive Imperative,32 but Lahire has deemed them to be ‘inevitable’ and then linked them to what is found discomforting, thus reinforcing the illusion that the agents’ ‘authentic ego’ – seen as ‘personal’ and, therefore, as non-social – ‘does not find its place in the coercive framework of society’ (354). Certainly, the point is not to deny the existence of such cases but rather to contest their ‘generality’, ‘inevitability’ and ‘consequentiality’, for there are (at least) two categories of agential response which can obviate the above miserable scenario. First, subjects can exercise their power of choice (about which Lahire is consistently dismissive). The subject can with conscious awareness cut herself off from family and natal background including ethnic normativity, as illustrated by Shirin who did just that, severing her Pakistani roots 32

In that book, there are diagrams of relational reinforcement and incongruity on pp. 115–24.

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and making her own self-supporting way to and through u ­ niversity.33 Secondly, they can recognize that however much they would like to achieve a particular modus vivendi they lack the qualities required for its realization. This is quite common in the Practical Order and it can be met by regret (and later nostalgia) without any of Lahire’s disconsolate responses, especially if the agent can identify an alternative. I remember, at about the age of sixteen, reconciling myself to simply lacking the finetuned bodily co-ordination needed for successful dressage riding – my body, my reactions, my fault – so put my energies into something else, which turned out to be academic life. During the pandemic, and its multifarious constraints, it is interesting to hear many agents (usually on radio) enthusing about the new activities and skills they have taken up, often from zero, and not ones requiring substantial resources (cooking, gardening, rehoming pets – and political protest). In sum, it is the passive agent who suffers the miseries that Lahire details and the best defence from them is to venture into agential action. This is not the endorsement of dubious counselling guidance; active agency is what is requisite to the flourishing of ‘the individual’ and the explanation of future social change – just as it always was in the morphogenetic past.

33

See Archer, The Reflexive Imperative, pp. 258–61.

10

Two Types of Agency, But Are They Not Related? Featuring Colin Campbell, 2009, ‘Distinguishing the Power of Agency from Agentic Power: A Note on Weber and the “Black Box” of Personal Agency’, Sociological Theory, 27:4, 407–18

ARTICLE ABSTRACT

The concept of agency, although central to many sociological debates, has remained frustratingly elusive to pin down. This article is an attempt to open up what has been called the “black box” of personal agency by ­distinguishing clearly between two contrasting conceptions of the phenomenon. These two conceptions are very apparent in the manner in which the concept is defined in sociological reference works, resembling as it does a similar contrast in the treatment of the concept of power. The two are referred to as type 1 and type 2 or the power of agency compared with agentic power, the essential contrast being that the first refers to an actor’s ability to initiate and maintain a program of action while the second refers to an actor’s ability to act independently of the constraining power of social structure. The nature of these two forms of personal agency is then illustrated by referring to material taken from Weber’s essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, this essay itself being understood as an argument that focuses on the crucial role played by an increase in the power of agency in ushering in the modern world. Finally, it is argued that these two conceptions of agency possess no given logical relationship with each other, it being perfectly possible for individuals to be possessed of considerable power of agency while lacking agentic power, and vice versa. It is therefore concluded that it is important, in all discussion of human agency, to distinguish between these two forms. Introduction Campbell and I have both politely acknowledged one another in our writings but have made no use of the other’s contributions, and this despite my still thinking that his book The Myth of Social Action (1996)1 is one 1

Colin Campbell, 1996, The Myth of Social Action, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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of the best and most necessary works produced by ‘our ­generation’. Last weekend I received a manuscript to read for a journal which asked the question ‘What need did the concept of “Agency” possess for Sociology?’ Well, from the start of this text, I committed myself to liking an original sentence from my first book (1979),2 which is not mentioned here, namely that without people’s doings we would have no such entities as State Educational Systems to live with or discuss. Truistic as that statement is, Campbell wants to unpack the ‘doings’ involved into basically those deriving from individual actors devoting their willpower (in this case) to bringing state education into being (not that this is their sole end  – and rarely is), as distinct from ‘doings’ that are agentially obstructed/impeded by structural constraints. It is relevant to note at the start that my enduring appreciation of The Myth was its basic theme (to oversimplify) that not everything affecting our doings was ‘social’. Specifically, committing to a change as in the above educational example was ‘a covert and personal event, which actors can only perform for themselves’.3 It is intrinsically unobservable, it need not (and may never) be shared with others, and it is a gross error on the part of the sociological observer to impute socialized ‘dispositions’ (singular or plural) to the actor for explaining his/her action, as in Chapter 8 and to some extent in Chapter 9. This was precisely my objection to the ‘Two-Stage Model’ (see Figure 8.3). It was also the model I rejected firmly at the beginning of Being Human4 and called ‘Society’s Being’, which even in the best of hands, namely the six volumes by Rom Harré, construed all that we were as the ‘gift of society’, conferred by our joining ‘society’s conversation’. In the same book, I also underlined the point that, as human beings, each one of us had to interact satisfactorily in survivalist terms with the whole of reality, which included the Natural and the Practical Orders. In short, there was no such entity as a wholly ‘Social Being’. Yet, because there was no such entity as a purely ‘Social Being’, I early began to speculate (2003) about ‘The Private Life of the Social Agent’.5 In my later four books devoted to ‘reflexivity’,6 ­speculation was left behind for investigation. 2 Margaret S. Archer, 1979, Social Origins of Educational Systems, London, Sage. 3 Campbell, The Myth of Social Action, p. 161. 4 Margaret S. Archer, 2000, Being Human: The Problem of Agency, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 5 Margaret S. Archer, 2003, ‘The Private Life of the Social Agent: What Difference Does It Make?’, in Justin Cruickshank (ed.), Critical Realism: The Difference It Makes, London, Routledge, pp. 17–29. 6 Margaret S. Archer, 2003, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Archer, 2007, Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press; Archer (ed.),

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This is the stage in the development of the M/M approach when it meets most fully with Campbell’s featured article. There are various points of disagreement but none claiming that Critical Realist explanations can completely dispense with interpretation. Consequently, I applaud the sentences with which The Myth closes: Those ‘meanings’ which are most pertinent to the occurrence of an act do not stem from any pool of ‘inter-subjective’ understandings or shared typifications, least of all from any social rules or conventions, but are created de novo by individuals as and when they are needed to meet the immediate exigencies of their action situation, and although they will probably draw heavily on cultural material, this will probably be closely woven into the actor’s past experiences and future hopes to comprise the effective inner ‘life-world’ of the actor. It is these essentially personal, intra-subjectively created meanings which are the immediate and direct ‘causes’ of actions.7

Ironically, one answer explaining this mutual neglect could be that we fraternize with different theorists. In previous chapters I have tried to point out that CR must be developmental, which is especially important where agency is concerned since some realists are distinctly hesitant about the introduction of innovations in Bhaskar’s corpus or seek an entente cordiale with the best-known central conflationists (yet ‘back to Bourdieu’ would, I have argued, be a bad mistake).8 On the other hand, Campbell does exhibit a certain warmth towards Giddens, who never attracts an admonitory comment, which is an equivalent mistake since it covertly endorses his central conflation. More plausibly, both of us remain unfazed by the supposed sin of ‘co-determinism’9 where the ‘structure–agency debate’ is concerned or, indeed, in general (how do you cook something more complicated than a ‘ready meal’ without it?). Obviously, by advancing SAC I am committed to according agency as great a role in sociological accounts as structure and culture (although this defies quantification and allows for variation). Equally clearly, Campbell, having decisively differentiated between ‘action’ and ‘social action’,10 has a commitment to specifying the role(s) they play in the conceptualization of agency. In short, both of us need to answer the question, ‘What is an agent’? as defined by what properties and powers. 2010, Conversations about Reflexivity, London, Routledge; Archer, 2012, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 7 Campbell, The Myth of Social Action, pp. 161–2. 8 Margaret S. Archer, 2010, ‘Routine, Realism and Reflexivity’, Sociological Theory, 28:3, 272–303. 9 Margaret S. Archer, 2013, ‘Collective Reflexivity: A Relational Case for It’, in C. Powell and F. Dépelteau (eds.), Conceptualizing Relational Sociology: Ontological and Theoretical Issues, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 145–61. 10 Campbell, The Myth of Social Action.

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Unpacking the ‘Black Box’ of Agency

Campbell’s response consists in ‘distinguishing clearly between two ­contrasting conceptions of the phenomenon of personal agency’ (407).11 For the moment I will leave aside why this is confined to singular persons and thus excludes ‘collective agency’. ‘The two are referred to as type 1 and type 2 of the “power of agency” as compared with “agentic power”, the essential contrast being that the first refers to an actor’s ability to initiate and maintain a program of action while the second refers to an actor’s ability to act independently of the constraining power of social structure’ (407) with the ‘structure–agency debate’ constituting the backcloth.12 I have no objections to the distinction per se – if someone sets their personal programme to include daily private prayer, I don’t see any social structure being able to constrain it regardless of frequent expressions of disdain for this intra-mental process. Things are quite different where sociological matters are concerned. This is provoked by Campbell’s insistence that ‘these two conceptions of agency possess no logical relationship with each other, it being perfectly possible for individuals to be possessed of considerable power of agency while lacking agentic power, and vice versa’ (408, my italics). First, if persons lacked the Weberian conviction that they could engage in voluntary, willed conduct through the ‘capacity of the agents’ which are type 1 properties, they would remain the dopes of type 2 powers and be ­effective in their private subcutaneous lives alone. That sometimes close family members might share their volitions could possibly strengthen them (as Elder-Vass maintains for ‘norm circles’ in general), but it would do nothing overall to effect Giddens’s linkage between declining traditionalism and increased macroscopic social transformation. All that would and could be, on a conception that restricts type 1 agency to individual persons, is a massive, consensual aggregation of like-minded agents seeking some particular macroscopic change – for which it is hard to find a convincing example let alone regarding this as paradigmatic. This argument is reinforced by the fact that type 1 agency

11

Colin Campbell, 2009, ‘Distinguishing the Power of Agency from Agentic Power: A Note on Weber and the “Black Box” of Personal Agency’, Sociological Theory, 27:4, 407–18. Page numbers given in parentheses in this chapter refer to this article. For agency, see M. Emirbayer and A. Mische, 1998, ‘What Is Agency?’, American Journal of Sociology, 103 (4) 962–1023. 12 Campbell writes of ‘agency’ ‘there is a good case for saying that it is the very fact that this concept has become so intimately bound up with what is known as the agency– structure debate that it has continued to be surrounded by confusion’ (‘Distinguishing the Power of Agency from Agentic Power’, 407).

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could simultaneously pertain to ‘just as many’ personal agents being strongly opposed to such a transformation because they are committed to reinforcing morphostasis. The alternative, which the M/M approach incorporates, is to make a distinction between ‘Primary’ and ‘Corporate’ agents.13 The former share the same life chances as one another without banding, much less necessarily bonding, together, and their very diversity contributes more to social fragmentation than to transformation (though unintentionally the former may sometimes assist the latter, but only through contingency). I distinguish the two14 because the Corporate agent has developed crucial properties lacked by individual agents; namely an articulated manifesto justifying and clarifying the change(s) shared and sought and having formed an organization for their pursuit. The British Chartists provide a good illustration, though it took trial-and-error learning, e.g. abandoning Luddite and physical force Chartism, before Chartism itself was itself abandoned in favour of nascent Trade Unionism, but not on Robert Owen’s ‘grand national and consolidated’ model. That is important because witnessing the trials of others deters new Corporate agents from repeating their errors. Certainly, ‘individual’ agents may choose to join with them – early on or later as the case may be. However, my use of the word ‘choice’ poses a second problem for Campbell’s type 1 agency because there is ample evidence – both historical and fictional – that individual agents agonized mentally over providing for their own families versus joining a workers’ collective organization in the foreknowledge that this could involve strike action (no pay) or violent retribution (Peterloo).15 This inner debate between jam today or justice tomorrow would surely be a profitable use of interpretivism, moderating the present clash of views. Moreover, logically, there is a third problem with which Campbell’s distinction cannot deal; that is the manifest conflict between Corporate agents themselves. Across the road from where I am writing in Kenilworth are the ruins of St Mary’s Priory. This was founded and built to serve a community following the rule of St Bernard but was overthrown by the

13

Given the importance I attach to this, I find it inexplicable why Anthony King repeatedly insisted I was referring to ‘lone individuals’ or extrapolating from a single monad, presumably myself, in what he termed my ‘solipsistic error’: A. King, 1999, ‘Against Structure: A Critique of Morphogenetic Social Theory’, Sociological Review, 47:2, 217. 14 Margaret S. Archer, 1995, Realist Social Theory; The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, chs. 7 and 8. 15 Elizabeth Gaskell portrays this inner debate convincingly in her novel North and South, which concentrates on the textile industry. See also the BBC’s 2004 adaptation of this book.

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more austere order of Augustinian canons, who retained it until the Dissolution. Neither order could be reduced to a loose association of likeminded individuals, although pace Weber each rule may have induced a greater degree of shared ‘character’ amongst novices as induction proceeded and he never suggested that Calvinism or Lutheranism were hatched fully fledged. In addition, the support or opposition of monarchies (various) in the two above illustrations reinforces the need to incorporate Corporate agents into any plausible historical interpretation and explanation. Furthermore, though still in pursuit of Campbell’s assertion that there is no logical connection between his type 1 and type 2 modes of agency, we need to ask ‘To what end?’ Above it has been seen that we make different distinctions – his between the above two types of agency and mine between ‘Primary’ and ‘Corporate’ agents – but their prime concerns are presented as being entirely distinct. Campbell writes, ‘it is not clear that there is any good reason for assuming that “the capacity for willed voluntary action” should be regarded as identical to “the capacity for individuals to act independently of structural constraints”’ (409). That would imply that voluntary action is most likely when there are no constraints operative! Not only is that uncommon if not unrealistic but it eliminates exactly those instances where willed, voluntary action is accountable for people actively challenging such constraints, sometimes successfully – but as an aggregate pressure. The concept of ‘constraints’ is usually contrasted with ‘enablements’; that we do owe to Giddens, at least in its popularization. Personally, I have treated constraining and enabling aspects of structure and culture as central to how both of them condition, though do not determine, the courses of action taken by individual agents16 under circumstances not of their making. Thus, there is another major disagreement between us here, although Campbell does associate ‘structural constraints’ with agents encountering resistance but never (in this article) acknowledges that ‘structural enablements’ could or would promote/facilitate the attainment of other agents’ goals – so that both may apply to and affect different groups in specific conflicts between them.17 Also, since Campbell wants to liken structural constraints to an exercise of power (410) this is no problem for the M/M approach. Please consult Figure 10.1,

16

Archer, Being Human; Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation; Archer, Making Our Way through the World; Archer, The Reflexive Imperative. 17 For example in Social Origins of Educational Systems, I contrasted ‘adventitious beneficiaries’ from the existing educational status quo with those ‘obstructed parties’ whose public activities were damaged by it. See Figure 1.1.

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T1 2

3

T

T

T4

T*1

T*2

T*3 T*4

T*5

Powerful Agent

T*6 T*7

T’1

T’2

T’3 T’4

Less Powerful Agent

Figure 10.1.  Power differences and the morphogenesis of codified rules

produced by Ismael Al-Amoudi, which is the most economical way to make this point, particularly at the meso level for organizations. What this tells us is simply that rules introduced by a more powerful authority can be responded to more speedily, and with several normative revisions strategically advantageous to this Corporate agent, than a less powerful agent can respond at all. By serendipity, this diagrammatic illustration deals with normativity but it resounds well with my argument since it coincides with Campbell’s agreement that if agents are to ‘undertake action in the pure Weberian sense of voluntarily willed conduct that possesses subjective meaning, given that this excludes both habit and respondent behaviours. For conduct of this kind presupposes that the actor’s ability to act is marked by those qualities that regularly feature in discussions of agency, qualities such as intentionality, choice, voluntarism and autonomy’ (410, my italics). What it signals is that neither of us is impressed by the neo-pragmatist arguments that the force of habitual action somehow undergirds what agents do and think of doing. It also is an admission, unaccentuated in the featured text, that ‘culture’ plays a significant part in the process of exerting agency type 1.

Sources of Structural Constraints?

In his theorizing about agency, ‘structural constraints’ play a much bigger role than usual in the interpretative approach with which Campbell is associated. Indeed, they are central to his definition of type 2 agency,

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Structural Conditioning T1 Social Interaction T2

T3 Structural Elaboration T4

Figure 10.2.  The basic morphogenetic sequence

i.e. ‘an actor’s ability to act independently of the constraining power of social structure’. But such constraints (and enablements) are not natur­ alistic; unlike mountains they are not simply there, having been so since time immemorial and subject in the past to natural forces alone, like erosion or volcanic eruption, for any changes in them. That both explorers and tourists experience them for the first time has nothing to do with their prior existence or ontological status. Thus, we social scientists can leave such questions about their origins and modifications over the millennia to specialists in the natural world. Obviously, the same is not true for factories, towns, trains or motorways. There is no dispute about this in general or indeed here, despite the fact that their development raises valid sociological questions – such as why manufactories flourished more in the north than the south of England. The crucial point is that no factory was simply there as part of the natural landscape – each and every one of them had its own history, part of which concerned the constraints and enablements exerted on the local population and their attractiveness to poor agricultural workers who acquired an alternative means of selling their labour power (however we may now judge them). In short, it is surprising to find Campbell being yet one more ‘presentist’. Both ‘structures’ and their ‘constraints’ are introduced as simply ‘being there’ ahistorically. Nothing could be less true of the M/M approach. In the basic morphogenetic diagram (reproduced as Figure 10.2), research starts at T1, temporally well prior to whatever phenomenon is under investigation. Why? To discover who first objected to what pre-existed in a given part of society and why and, equally importantly, which group(s) were sufficiently attached to any structure and practice to seek its defence. Instead, the ‘Morphogenetic Approach’ maintains that a full explanation requires the structural contextualization of the interaction initiated

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at T2 to be examined. This is not to endorse ‘situationism’, as Campbell calls it,18 since the very aim is to account for this context from which opposition to it and defence of it sprang. In short, it is necessary to broaden the temporal fame and return to the state of institutional affairs at T1. In my view, this further backtracking alone yields the source of motives, of positions prises, of ideological commitments, of strategies adopted but, above all, of precisely what was wanted (and, often more importantly, not wanted) sufficiently to move agents to engage in interaction. None of that can be understood without introducing the prior structural context that conditioned interaction between T1 and T2. In other words, it is necessary to consult the prior distribution of resources (various) and the status of relevant ideas anterior to ensuing struggles but constraining certain participants to delay entering the fray and enabling others to make swift headway. (It is common to find such distributions represented as ‘mere’ aggregate properties, but to neglect the structural context generated by them for agents.) Given the above, it is unsurprising that outcomes too – for example, the development of Protestantism in Western Europe – are not fully explicable without reference to all these forms of structural conditioning such as compulsory Mass attendance, the death penalty for those found with banned books (the exemplar being Erasmus’s works), a network of spies detecting and denouncing Protestant individuals and gatherings – not to mention the supportive role played by ultra-orthodox Catholic monarchs such as Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain. These are not (and are rarely) determinants, because agency too has its own properties and powers, both individually and collectively, the most important being to act innovatively in circumstances that were not of their making or choosing. These included escaping abroad for some of the hardest pressed, such as many Huguenots after the St Bartholemew’s Day massacre in France and devout English Catholic sons heading to Douai for priestly training. As and when agential action re-shapes structural relations at any given T4, agency is ineluctably re-shaping itself in the Double Morphogenesis: 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 cannot; and in terms of the novel situations in which most agents now find themselves, which are constraining to the projects of some and enabling to the projects of others, yet of significance for the motivation of most. Only the fully indifferent are immune to such influences in a given context of action as the Troubles in Northern Ireland 18

Campbell, The Myth of Social Action.

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illustrated. To be genuinely indifferent (and that includes verbal neutrality) had an almost cultic purity. Presentism of any variety is incapable of explaining or understanding structure or agency in contemporary society in contemporaneous terms alone. Some research projects will require incorporating a sequence of morphogenetic cycles and it does not seem heretical to suggest that Weber’s Protestant Ethic could lend itself to that reconceptualization without loss of his insights.

Sources of Agential Freedoms?

Returning to Campbell’s definition of type 2 agency, ‘an actor’s ability to act independently of the constraining power of social structure’, it is worth dwelling on the adverb, which is held to ‘occupy a crucial role in Weber’s thesis’ (411). At first it seems that this is a defence of agents’ voluntarism over society’s determinism. That is too simple. It arises immediately after Campbell’s summary of the Protestant Ethic and the type 1 ascetic principle of self-control which, it is claimed, ‘led to “modern military discipline”’ (414).19 Then Campbell states that this is obvious enough because ‘soldiers on the battlefield need to have a firm grip on their emotions if they are to fulfil their allotted roles’ (414). But that does not illustrate agents’ independence from structural constraints since Campbell agrees that rigid military discipline ‘leaves little or no room for autonomous or “free” action on the part of the individual soldier’ (414). At best, voluntarism in the ascetic form of type 1 may be a bonus for the military power but it does not show that army recruits acted with independence from powerful constraints, especially if brutal/deceptive methods of recruitment were used and the natal farming economy could not furnish alternative employment for young men. Thus, to me this does not illustrate that ‘even though individuals may be deceived as to the real reasons for their actions, or subject to forces they neither recognize nor understand, this is not the same as suggesting that their conduct was not willed’ (414). I disagree. They may have gone quietly, but not as actions of their unfettered free will. But Campbell insists that their voluntarism remains because they – like slaves! – had possessed the power ‘to do otherwise’, even though their compliance was not ‘cost-free’. On the contrary, I maintain that whenever any structure can impose costs on those exercising their type 1 capacity of resistance (in a variety of forms) this demonstrates the lack of independence from 19

Here Campbell is citing M. Weber, 1965 [1920], The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. by T. Parsons, with a foreword by R. H. Tawney, London, Unwin University Books, p. 235.

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structural constraints of type 2. If a course of action costs, it has to be weighed against other expenses and found affordable, however worthwhile it is also judged to be.20 Campbell has three responses to my objections – quantitative and qualitative. On the one hand, he suggests that crowd behaviour can override individuals’ self-control resulting in collective disturbances that introduce social change through the release of ‘powerful uncontrolled emotions’ among them. Although we were all brought up on ‘the crowd’ as an unruly mob, collective action does not universally share such features. The moral force Chartists repudiated group violence on the grounds that it was unproductive, and today’s climate change protests are deliberative and strategic; there was nothing of ‘uncontrolled emotions’ about the feminist movement in its various stages – to live on Greenham Common for several years in a ‘bender’ must have demanded plenty of self-control – as does ‘taking the knee’ today in a dignified collective manner for Black Lives Matter. Secondly, if ‘the crowd’ is left behind and attention is given to the individuals responsible for introducing social change, Campbell disposes of this by maintaining that they ‘do so “unconsciously” as it were, as a mere by-product of instinctive, responsive behaviour or habit and not therefore through an act of will’ (415). I thought that Campbell had already put ‘habit’ aside earlier and my reticence about unconscious motivation is well known. One of my main objections is that unconscious ‘urges’ must be non-voluntaristic and yet perform as drivers in type 1 agency. This then becomes involuntary and non-deliberative. Why he should give it house room, even in a defensive argument, defeats me. Perhaps the most serious criticism hinges on Campbell’s resort to ‘socialization’. Here, he states that: even the fact that some individuals may act in ways that defy social c­ onvention, expectation or constraint cannot be seen as necessarily implying voluntarism, let alone autonomy and creativity, for such ‘acts’ could simply be conditioned behaviours resulting from inappropriate or inadequate socialization (414, my italics).

For this to be convincing, a definition of adequate socialization and its opposite are needed but not given. Without these it is impossible to attribute ‘conditioned behaviour’ to the results of ‘convention, expectation or constraint’. And without any notion being given about the constituents and process of socialization within a society’s culture this 20

Money is not the sole currency involved: time, effort, guilt by association, loss of good relations or fear of punishment may also be deterrents.

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is an intransigent problem. Since the references made by Campbell in the previous quotation are very general ones I can only assume that he is writing in general terms. However, I have spent time on the same problem21 and concluded that bland statements about ‘internalization’ are unhelpful if not false. Only if certain conditions are met that presume social consensuality at a given time can (the same) conventions, norms and values be extended to all members through socialization and only then can their transmission be assessed as inappropriate or adequate in relation to allowing room for voluntarism. My own view is not at variance with that of Campbell, namely that from early modernity onwards these conditions were increasingly difficult to satisfy in the most advanced countries and the consequence of their inadequacy did indeed increase the scope for voluntarism though not in any even distribution throughout a population. Note that, on this argument, both Campbell and Archer would be endorsing a kind of zero-sum argument between the failed impact of socialization and a proportionately increased possibility of voluntarism. I find this far too crude because it basically leaves out of account that subjects may reject seemingly ‘appropriate’ forms of socialization for a variety of personal or political reasons, summed up as saying that socie­ties have always experienced dissidence. Three conclusions follow for the conceptualization of socialization in the tradition stretching from Mead to Habermas, each of which fuels the need to reconceptualize the process.22 The contextural conditions necessary for the subject’s socialization to be societally successful (i.e. the receipt of consensual messages, clear and durable role expectations, and normative consistency) no longer maintain. On the contrary, by the late twentieth century each condition had become the obverse of the above. As nascent morphogenesis increasingly replaced morphostatic processes fostering social reproduction, especially from the 1980s onwards, ‘Socio-Cultural integration’ declined precipitously; ‘stable functional differentiation’ ceded the way to novel variety in organizations, roles and occupations; and ‘Cultural System integration’ plummeted as global connectivity increasingly exposed larger tracts of both ideational complementarities and contradictions to more and more of the world’s population. If modernity has the marked tendency to extend inappropriate forms of socialization is this tendentially linked to the increase or decrease in type

21

Archer, The Reflexive Imperative, pp. 90f. 22 Ibid., ch. 3 in full.

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1 agency? Social theorists are in disagreement. To Ulrich Beck it represented a significant gain in the sense that individuals acquired the power of serial self-reinvention in the context of Bauman’s ‘liquid ­society’. They could present themselves as any kind of person they chose, though doubtless some were more convincingly Goffmanian than others. Individuals became ‘disembedded’ from the old ties of kinship, neighbourhood and regional location, given their liberation from traditional structural constraints and the proportional surge in the ‘dissolution of lifeworlds associated with class and status group subcultures’.23 To the Becks this meant that ‘under the tidal wave of new life designs, of do-it-yourself and tightrope biographies’, the ‘structures of the “social” are having to be renegotiated, reinvented and reconstructed’.24 Their conclusion is an unabashed statement of central conflation, namely that ‘individualization is becoming the social structure of second modern society itself’.25 This is the sociological climacteric of Campbell’s argument about the independence of structure and agency. There are no longer any structural constraints from which to be independent for central conflationists. Though the theme of ‘detraditionalization’ was popular and became popularist, sociology retained its unrepentant Marxists insisting on the durability of class differences, which also remained the staple diet of many sociological empiricists. Quite compatible with this were others of us who watched with horrified fascination as the Weberian ‘iron bars of bureaucracy’ were growing closer together.26 If the first trend had left Campbell’s type 1 agency free from structural constraint, the second retained his type 2 agency as detraditionalized but nevertheless lacking agentic power in the face of increasing regulation and the pre-millennial incursion of digital controls. We should not feebly conclude that there is ‘something valid in both’, which would be an oxymoron because ontologically structural constraints have no existence in the millennial landscape or, when they do, it is of transformed kind. So, let’s return to the important question of ‘What does voluntarism do for the subject?’ This entails a doublebarrelled response, though there is no contradiction between them. In generic support of voluntarism (type 1 agency) Campbell and I are in basic agreement.

23

24 25 26

Ulrich Beck and Elizabeth Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, Individualization, London, Sage, p. 31. Ibid, p. 14. Ibid., Authors’ Preface, p. xxii. See Margaret S. Archer, 2016, ‘Anormative Social Regulation: The Attempt to Cope with Social Morphogenesis’, in Archer (ed.), Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity, Cham, Springer, pp. 141–68.

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First, at the level of the individual, certain things matter to people, things that Andrew Sayer and I argue are their ‘concerns’. As he puts it, When someone says ‘my friends mean a lot to me’, they are indicating what matters to them, what has import. When an immigrant says ‘let me tell you what it means to be an immigrant’ she is not about to give a definition but to indicate how being an immigrant affects one’s well-being, what one can and can’t do, how one is treated by others and what it feels like. All of these everyday expressions show that we are beings whose relations to the world is one of concern. Yet social science often ignores this relation and hence fails to acknowledge what is important to people.27

Moreover, my empirically based research28 found students and ordinary members of society both ready and able to tell us which are their main concerns in life. It is to these that subjects will devote most attention, deliberation and reflexive thought. On the one hand it seems that Campbell will join us as he begins by saying that ‘Voluntarism implies that the actor can choose. That is to say, that the possibility of choice exists. It does not imply that the actors will exercise that choice in any particular manner, or that they will make “cost-free” choices in the sense of being free from any powerful constraints or limitations of choice’ (414). Note the adjective, that constraints are ‘powerful’ as limitations. If so, then one would expect subjects’ concerns to be the platforms from which they seek reflexively to plan their lives would be drastically curtailed. That is not helpful because even the most trivial of choices are regularly subject to limitations (non-availability of ingredients in the shops, no appointments at the hairdresser on a convenient day etc.). It becomes contradictory with his main argument when people’s life-concerns are structurally obstructed (for instance when protest is banned, or political opponents can be imprisoned as dissidents). Equally, why does he set his face against the relational nature of many subjects engaging in joint action to realize a particular concern? He states that ‘it is important to reject the assumption that agency is necessarily “intrinsically social and relational”’ (416) because type 1 agency is ‘intrinsically private and intrasubjective in nature’ by definition (417). Obviously, I agree about its intrasubjectivity, or I would not have chosen to use the term ‘internal conversation’ for the mode in which reflexivity is practised. But this does not prevent it or its conclusions from being 27

Andrew Sayer, 2011, Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values and Ethical Life, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 2. 28 Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation; Archer, Making Our Way through the World; Archer, The Reflexive Imperative.

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shared with others at the actors’ discretion. That is up to the individual actor and their reticence but also their confidence in their capacity to deal with the issue in question alone. Sharing seems to have less to do with the psychology underlying reticence or garrulousness than with confidence and competence to overcome some difficulty themselves, for example, by searching for relevant information that is missing. Some agents will not do so, thus extending their capacities, but there is no necessity about this. But, sometimes the issue in question requires sharing before resolution is possible – for instance one member of a couple may decide that he/she has to be the one to raise the delicate question ‘Are we ready to have a child?’ More mundanely, two motorists approaching from different directions may need to co-operate in moving a fallen tree blocking both carriage ways if they are keen to reach their destinations as planned. This instance is not a friendly gesture towards pragmatism because their invoking of only ‘problem situations’ may simply not apply. Instead, as Donati and I argued,29 relations can generate both relational goods and evils as emergent outcomes. Adam Smith’s example of pin-workers being more productive when they practise the division of labour illustrates the generation of relational goods, even though historically they were not the main beneficiaries.30 Of course, that took place in the setting of early capitalist production, where the pin-makers benefited little but cui bono is not my illustrative concern – though it is far from irrelevant to workers personally being reflexive about its fairness. It could also have factored into factory-wide support for co-operative enterprise, which is the type of response that can make Corporate agents important to the eventual outcome. Indeed, we could be on the way to produce a morphogenetic account of the emergence of trade unions, but only if type 1 agency and type 2 agency are accepted as being intertwined. In other words, it involves the rejection that these types ‘are quite different phenomena [which is] revealed by the fact that type 1 refers to the ­ability of actors to act while type 2 refers to the character and effect of their actions’ (409–10).

Actions and Modes of Reflexivity?

Campbell’s determination to maintain the above distinction between his two types of agency is joined with strictures upon how sociology has a huge tendency to err by attributing it to action itself rather than to the 29 Pierpaolo Donati and Margaret S. Archer, 2015, The Relational Subject, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 30 Archer, Realist Social Theory, pp. 51f.

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self-conscious process generating it, which enables action at all, regardless of its contents. Hence he states that the fact agents possess agency of type 1 kind is what enables them to undertake self-conscious willed actions. Possessing this form of agency is one thing; how it is used is quite another, there being no logical or empirical connection between possession of this power and the content of an individual’s actions. Failure to appreciate this distinction has led sociologists to confuse the defining characteristics of purposeful willed action with its content. That sociologists have commonly made this equation is because they have consistently assumed that evidence for the presence of voluntarism, autonomy, or creativity was to be found in the content of the actions of individuals. But this is to make a category error, for these qualities relate to the possession of type 1 agency, not to the nature of action; consequently, the place to look for evidence of Voluntarism, autonomy and creativity is in the manner through which actions are accomplished and not in their content For all truly self-conscious, willed actions are accomplished through the power of type 1 agency, whether the action in question appears to be in conformity with societal expectations or not [415].31

This portrayal of type 1 agency raises various issues concerning our two approaches. First, and crucially, it seems that Campbell’s very definition of it invokes reflexivity which is never touched upon as such. But if this type of action consists in the ability to initiate and maintain a programme of action then to be individualistic it implies that reflexive mental activities pertain to individuals rather than being matters of socialization. In other words, the exercise of this capacity appears very similar to my own definition (‘the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa’).32 Placing parentheses around the ‘social’ is only to signal that this will be of most interest to social scientists and not to exclude that people indeed reflect upon matters in the Natural and Practical Orders. It proved scandalous to one author when in chapter 8 I quoted Norbert Wiley approvingly that we ‘are little gods’ in the uses of our reflexivity, which can be preoccupied with daydreaming (subjects’ imagined views of a better life), uncensored vituperation against ‘other people’ (parents, teachers, traffic wardens, the government etc.), for there is no need to be polite when talking to oneself. There is no private etiquette for the internal conversation, although subjects can try to impose their own embargos. I suspect that empirically we do employ more ‘swear words’ there than in external dialogues – difficult as this would be to ascertain. However, this inner freedom is not the key point; rather it is since type 1 is defined by 31

See also Colin Campbell, 1999, ‘Action as Will-Power’, Sociological Review, 47:1, 48–61. 32 Archer, Making Our Way through the World, p. 4.

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Campbell as concerned with initiating and maintaining programmes of action, that these are as much concerned with what not to be or to do as with what to imitate and emulate. Since his definition includes not only initiating a ‘project’ but also maintaining it, this also involves ongoing self-monitoring to keep the subject on his/her reflexively defined track. Note that none of this internal freedom need invoke the isolated monad, as Anthony King would have it.33 The source may and often will be relational,34 as in determining inwardly to act to preserve a relationship and its emergent consequences, deemed to be ‘good’ by an actor or to attempt to eliminate relational evils from it. Donati and I give many examples of this kind35 at micro, meso or macro levels. This says nothing about reflexivity working to promote either morphogenesis or morphostasis; it can affect both. Secondly, what puzzles me is why Campbell shuns everyday examples, such as marriage and the family, in this connection, but does re-invoke ‘the crowd’. This appears as part of his effort to reject King’s ‘monadic individualism’, for to subscribe to it ‘would reveal a tendency that individuals only act alone’ (414). Instead, ‘there is no reason why action that is independent of structural constraints, or at odds with prescribed norms, should be individualistic in character’ (414). (I agree, but not with what follows.) ‘One only has to think of that kind of crowd behaviour that takes the form of collective disturbances, riots, or even rebellions, to realize that powerful uncontrolled emotions, if widely shared, can result in dramatic challenges to the social order, and hence to innovation and change’ (414). But why are ‘collective disturbances’ handed over to the ‘emotions’ and stripped of any cognitive basis, crude though some may be, but not all? For example, Extinction Rebellion, as part of resistance to climate change, has a convincing cognitive grounding and would only be misrepresented as a crowd emoting over the demise of attractive animals – and many of the doomed are not sweet and cuddly. Thirdly, Campbell attaches importance to the extent to which they have reflexivity (a term he rarely uses) – which he regards as variable within type 1. Nonetheless, ‘extent’ and ‘manner’ are two different aspects of being reflexive and can be completely unrelated, as with someone reading extensively but inattentively. In working towards my trilogy on reflexivity, we, the research team, never succeeded in measuring its extent largely, we concluded, because our subjects had never had call 33

King, ‘Against Structure’ – a straightforward error that runs through his paper. See my reply, Margaret S. Archer, 2000, ‘For Structure: Its Reality, Properties and Powers. A Reply to Anthony King’, Sociological Review, 48:3, 464–72. 34 ‘Relational emergents’ are where King stumbles in his very negative attempt to deny my illustrations of emergence. 35 Donati and Archer, The Relational Subject.

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to monitor its duration because nothing hung upon it. Even a serious question such as ‘Have you thought long and hard about this?’ (such as going to university) could gain an honest ‘yes’ even if what the subject meant was that they had always assumed that he/she would do so without further internal conversation. Equally, an honest ‘no’ may mean that reflexivity was not required to give a direct response, without implying no ensuing internal conversation follows. For example, when I moved to my present house, a new neighbour glanced at the newish car I was driving and asked ‘are you going to change it this year?’ Since I drive them into the ground, my ‘no’ was quite honest, though spontaneous. However, his question prompted a lengthy reflection on ‘What kind of guy expects his neighbours to be buying a new-car-a-year?’ However, from the exploratory start (2003)36 it seemed clear that respondents used very different ways or Campbell’s ‘manners’ of conducting their internal conversations, including a minority for whom attempting to do so only provoked distress and disorientation within them. These latter I called ‘Fractured reflexives’, which proved felicific because in a later longitudinal study (2012)37 it transpired those subjects could recover and adopt a less negative mode. Unlike Campbell, I wanted to understand the various modalities that recurred in all the successive studies with quite different samples. For those unfamiliar with these studies, I attach a summary table of the various ‘modalities’ used, as extracted from the lengthy qualitative interviews (Figure 10.3). This is not a typology (contra many commentators) because most respondents can change their dominant mode over time; most do not register zero on other modalities, some can appear as equally proficient or nearly so on two modes, and with circumstances as varied as ageing, geographical displacement or bereavement they may indeed respond inter alia with change in the dominant mode of reflexivity that they practise. Having insisted upon this ‘plasticity’ Campbell’s text raises a different problem, namely how these differences arise. He sees the generic problem as partly one of human development (newborns have none of it) (415) and his general outlook is to turn to psychology for help. Not only did I find this advice unhelpful and did not apply it, but also, although I share and applaud his opposition to interpreting all action as ‘social’ and upholding the intrapersonal domain as irreducible to social causes, nevertheless he poses a valid question. If, for argument’s sake, he accepts my differences in dominant modalities, what is the origin of the modes of reflexivity I have presented and defended in Figure 10.4? My own answer is relational. 36

Archer, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. 37 Archer, The Reflexive Imperative.

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Communicative Reflexives Those whose Internal Conversations need to be completed and confirmed by others, before they lead to action Autonomous Reflexives Those whose sustain self-contained Internal Conversations, leading directly to action Meta-Reflexives Those whose are critically reflexive about their own Internal Conversations and critical about effective action in society Fractured Reflexives Those whose cannot conduct purposeful Internal Conversations, but intensify their own distress and disorientation

Figure 10.3.  Dominant modes of reflexivity

FAMILY RELATIONAL GOODS

DETACHED Meta-

IDENTIFIERS Communicative

SELECTIVITY HIGH

SELECTIVITY LOW

INDEPENDENTS Autonomous

REJECTERS

FAMILY RELATIONAL EVILS

Figure 10.4. Dominant modes of reflexivity and quality of family relations

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Type 2, agentic, power hinges upon ‘the ability of individuals to act independently of social structural constraints’ (416). As stated in the Abstract, ‘these two conceptions of agency possess no given logical relationship with each other’: hence the importance to Campbell of distinguishing clearly between the two forms. By an absence of ‘logical relationship’ I take him to mean that there is no acceptable generalization such as ‘the higher the one, the lower the other’, for later on he writes of a lack of correlation between the two. Although Campbell does not dwell upon ‘socialization’ and I cannot locate his definition of it, nevertheless he recurs to it and its powers. Quite sweepingly he states ‘all societies require individuals to be socialized and hence capable of a degree of self-control, with the result that regulating behaviour such that it conforms to social expectations is bound to be more highly valued than conduct that fails to meet such expectations, something that can only happen if individuals have the ability to curb or suppress instinctive or impulsive reactions’ (414–15). Logical as that seems, again Campbell displays his dismissive attitude towards history. Yet, ‘history’ has been even more cruel to the preceding sociology of socialization.

Conclusion: Bringing Together Type 1 and Type 2 of Agency

Importantly, Campbell draws the reader’s attention to the end of The Protestant Ethic where although until then, ‘Weber does seem to align himself very much with the agency side of the structure–agency debate, he does of course end his discussion on a very different note, one that, in the form of his famous metaphor of “the iron cage”, emphasizes the extent to which the freedom of individuals to act is massively constrained by structural factors’ (413). From this he gives a rather negative presentation of ‘modern’ type 1 agency ‘by pointing to the fact that performing any self-conscious and willed action involves agency of type 1, no matter how conservative, derivative, irrational or stupid the action concerned might be’ (413). Why does a dismal array of residual features represent all that remains to self-conscious actors? At this point we really do part company, because I see Campbell passing up a golden opportunity to use Weber to understand not only globalized capitalism but also its running mate, the globalization of the ‘iron cage of bureaucracy’. In my 2016 chapter on ‘Anormative Social Regulation: The Attempt to Cope with Social Morphogenesis’,38 I dealt with these iron bars growing 38

See n. 26 in this chapter.

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closer through the proliferation of legal prohibitions throughout all parts of society today. The list of ‘new bars’ was long and growing but reactions to them reveal something very important about type 1 agency. This is far from entirely novel but is much intensified. Its common denominator is that no normative consent is sought (or assumed) on the part of those to whom such regulation applied. In a nutshell my argument is that adherence to these regulations was transformed into a matter of ‘risk assessment’ on their part, which is very far from routine behaviour, because it involves both consciousness and concerns. For example, take the current British rules of the road, and contexts such as breaking speed limits, illicit parking, phoning without a hands-free device etc. Few motorists are unaware of them (and that is no legal excuse in any case) and hence their varying assessments invoke their personal concerns that ‘justify’ their infringements, at least to themselves. One driver may think that getting to the hospital where his wife in unexpectedly about to give birth is imperative; another that his quick use of his mobile will clinch a business deal; and a third that he needs to park illicitly outside the jeweller’s window which he plans quickly to strip. If apprehended, not all of these are likely to be offered in exculpation, but that does not prevent them from being fully conscious and tipping the balance in their personal ‘risk assessment’. In short, reflexivity is necessary, even if only fleetingly, to reconcile what different agents do in such contexts – and the differences in their doings. Therefore, agency type 1 cannot exercise his creativity (including criminal planning) without using his reflexivity, which thus mediates between his situation and what he does within it in relation to his concerns. There is no rule book to consult so they have to resort to the inner conversation – to convince themselves that they have good reason for their actions and the hope they can convince other people to be lenient and understanding. They are all, of course, completely fallible. Introducing mediatory reflexivity has consequences too for type 2 agential power. This is necessarily the case because neither structure nor culture – as constraints or enablements – constitute hydraulic powers. Sticking with the motoring example above, it is differentially difficult for various categories of agents to act with independence from structural or cultural constraints – and not in the manner that might first suggest itself. Compare the prime minister, a royal personage and a member of the general public, all tempted for their own reasons to commit the same driving offence. With figures who are well known, it is the reverse of the case that the wealthiest and those with most status have the enablements working for them whilst the ordinary drivers confront the much more stringent constraints. Well-known public figures would be advised

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to reflect upon the rising curve of negative publicity each time they are caught ­recommitting the same driving (or financial or sexual) offences. It probably takes several repeated infringements until a prime minister’s actions get the headlines because of them, when his excuses lose their plausibility and he becomes branded as a liar. He would have done better to reflect and recognize that his recurrent practices are endangering his political position and to reform them if he has the willpower. In other words, our internal conversations mediate and moderate knee-jerk agential responses, but not through exerting hydraulic pressures. Instead, in any ‘action situation’ personal or collective reflexivity weighs up the benefits extended by enablements and the penalties associated with ignoring constraints. The result is radical – despite agential fallibility – because it means that the two types of agency are indeed intertwined. Here reflexivity does indeed mediate between type 1 and 2 and can be responsible for type 2 modifying our personal volition, which cannot be considered as fully independent from it. Thus, it becomes fully compatible with Harry Frankfurt’s view that agents can undertake second-order volitional revision by reflexively concluding that their planned vegetarianism must be wholehearted and entails renouncing fur coats and rare steaks. There is nothing necessarily normative about reflexive revisions of type 1 planning – actors do not become better or more successful people through this mediatory process. A regular gambler might possibly conclude that 8 is not his lucky number or that never entering a game without his talisman in his pocket will not enhance his chances of winning, only then to reflexively fall prey to some ‘system’ vaunted as infallible for breaking the casino bank. In sum the power of agency (type 1) and agential power (type 2) are analytical distinctions but, far from there being any necessity for them to be held independent of one another in the real world, the reflexive internal conversation mediates between them. However, this is not to conclude on a sour note because, however forthcoming research subjects may be, the lengthy transcripts they generate with stand in need of considerable interpretative sensitivity.