Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach

by Margaret S. Archer

• ISBN13: 9780521484428
• ISBN10: 0521484421
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1995-10-27
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Building on her seminal contribution to social theory in Culture and Agency, Margaret Archer develops here her morphogenetic approach, applying it to the problem of structure and agency. Since structure and agency constitute different levels of stratified social reality, each possesses distinctive emergent properties which are real and causally efficacious but irreducible to one another. The problem, therefore, is shown to be how to link the two rather than conflate them, as has been common theoretical practice. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach not only rejects methodological individualism and holism, but argues that the debate between them has been replaced by a new one, between elisionary theorising and emergentist theories based on a realist ontology of the social world. The morphogenetic approach is the sociological complement of transcendental realism, and together they provide a basis for non-conflationary theorizing which is also of direct utility to the practising social analyst.

Table of Contents

List of figures	xi
Acknowledgements	xii
The vexatious fact of society	1	(30)
Part I The problems of structrue and agency: four alternative solutions	31	(132)
Individualism versus Collectivism: querying the terms of the debate	33	(32)
Methodological Individualism	34	(12)
Methodological Collectivism	46	(11)
Contesting the terms of the traditional debate	57	(8)
Taking time to link structure and agency	65	(28)
Elision and central conflation	93	(42)
Realism and morphogenesis	135	(28)
Part II The morphogenetic cycle	163	(182)
Analaytical dualism: the basis of the morphogenetic approach	165	(30)
The parts and the people: stability and change	170	(25)
Structural and cultural conditioning	195	(52)
Mediation through human agency	195	(23)
Four institutional configurations and their situational logics	218	(11)
Four cultural configurations and their situational logics	229	(18)
The Morphogenesis of agency	247	(47)
Agency: the double morphogenesis	257	(17)
Actors: the triple morphogenesis	274	(6)
Persons: genesis and morphogenesis	280	(14)
Social elaboration	294	(51)
The conditions of morphogenesis and morphostasis	295	(2)
Exchange, power and the stratified nature of social reality	297	(11)
When is there morphostasis and when morphogenesis?	308	(16)
Explanining elaboration: Analytical histories of emergence	324	(21)
Index	345