Maggie Archer has distanced herself from a significant post-doc mentor, Pierre Bourdieu, by suggesting that he paid too little attention to agency. It is a disagreement that trespasses on fine-grained philosophical territory, but it also provides a convenient opening here. What did Bourdieu argue? I will be brief and am again resorting to what I hope is an accessible precis. His thesis is complex and multi-layered, but the gist seems to be that agency can neither be reduced to intentionality nor to the pre-existing structures from which it emerges. His theory holds that our agency, what we do, arises out of dispositions accumulated via socialisation, and that it is as much the product of factors of which we remain unconscious as it is of our intentions (incidentally, I’m attracted to the idea of ‘unconscious mechanisms’, though I’ve not as yet integrated them with my theories). So for Bourdieu, our agency resonates deeply with our structurally and culturally acquired mindset, or habitus, which itself varies according to the social context, or field, in which we enter or find ourselves.
Archer requires more from agency than this. I draw in what follows on the Introduction I wrote with colleagues Mark Carrigan and Tom Brock to a collection we edited of Archer’s writings, published as Structure, Culture and Agency: Selected Papers of Margaret Archer in 2017. Archer explores structure, culture and agency in a way that owes much to Bhaskar’s critical realism, but which also shows a strong independent thrust. In her Culture and Agency, published in 1988, and more particularly in her Realist Social Theory, published in 1995, she complained that social theory, including critical realism, had long shown more interest in how structural and cultural properties are transmitted to agents and shape their thoughts, values and actions than to how these properties are accommodated and dealt with, sometimes innovatively, by agents. She sees culture not as a community of shared meanings, but rather as an objective system, replete with ‘complementarities and contradictions’, which agents both draw upon and elaborate. A desire to correct the bias ‘against agency’ runs through her work. She notes that what she calls ‘causal efficacy’ has tended to be granted more frequently to structure than to agency; and she proceeds to argue that denying autonomy to agency – what she calls ‘downwards conflation’ – has far exceeded the denial of autonomy to structure (‘upwards conflation’). She rejects Tony Giddens’ contention that structure and agency are ‘co-constitutative’, that is, that structure is reproduced through agency but is simultaneously constrained and enabled by structure (‘central conflation’). In sum, she rejects each of downwards, upwards and central conflations of structure and agency. Conflationary approaches, she insists, rightly in my view, precludes any sociological investigation of the relative influence of structure on agency and agency on structure. Echoing Bhaskar, she agrees that structure and agency are interdependent, and goes on to argue that at any given time pre-existing structures constrain and enable agents, whose actions produce intended and unintended consequences, which ‘reproduce’ (morphostasis) or ‘transform’ (morphogenesis) these structures. This is a thesis that certainly gives more latitude to agency than Bourdieu allows. My own inclination thus far is to accept Archer’s analytic distinctions, which accord true causal efficacy to agency, whilst accepting Bourdieu’s qualification that we exercise the agency we possess much less often than is commonly assumed. Much of our lives, but not all, are in fact lived travelling along pre-existing structurally and culturally laid and cleared pathways.
Archer donates a timeline and a formula: structural conditioning underlying/leading to social interaction underlying/leading to structural elaboration. She refers in this context to ‘morphogenetic sequences’. At any given time, pre-existing structures constrain and enable agents, whose actions in turn lead to structural elaboration and the reproduction or transformation of existing structures. She maintains that conceptualising things in terms of morphogenetic sequences permits both the isolation of those structural and/or cultural factors that afford a context of action for agents, and the investigation of how these factors mould the subsequent interactions of agents and how those interactions in turn reproduce or transform the initial context. Social processes are inevitably comprised of many morphogenetic sequences, but their temporal ordering opens the door to examinations of the ’internal dynamics of each sequence’. It is sociological practice, the doing of sociology, that guides her thinking here and elsewhere.
Once again it is neither possible nor necessary in a slim volume like this, which is oriented to outlining and reflecting on the largely unreflexive construction of a babyboomer career in sociology, to explore any theorist’s work in detail. Bear with me. But I must deal briefly with Archer’s notion of the ‘internal conversation’, to which I alluded much earlier in these sketches. Personal reflexivity, for Archer, mediates the effects of objective social forces on us. A direct quotation from Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation, published in 2003, is warranted here, since the idea underlies many of my sketches:
‘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 incompetently and necessarily under our own descriptions, because that is the only way we can know anything. To consider human reflexivity play 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 (b) irreducible, and (c) that it possesses causal efficacy.’
The internal conversation signals the way in which we humans reflexively make our way in the world. It is, Archer, argues, what makes us active as opposed to passive agents. It is via these that we devise projects which, if successful, translate into a set of practices. Moreover, this set of practices constitutes a personal modus vivendi. So, concerns lead to projects lead to practices. Our projects and practices can be undesirable as well as desirable!
I earlier described Archer’s distinctions between three dominant modes of reflexivity: communicative reflexivity, autonomous reflexivity and meta-reflexivity. Drawing on her own small-scale exploratory study oriented to social mobility, she suggests that communicative reflexivity is associated with social immobility; autonomous reflexivity with upward mobility; and meta-reflexivity with social volatility. Expanding on this, it might be said that communicative reflexives contribute to social stability and integration through their ‘evasion’ of constraints and enablements, their endorsement of the circumstances of their births and infancy, and their active forging of a dense micro-world that reconstitutes their ‘contextual continuity’ and projects it into the future. By contrast, the autonomous reflexives act strategically, in Archer’s memorable phrasing, ‘by avoiding society’s snakes to ride up its ladders.’ They represent contextual discontinuity. The meta-reflexives are society’s ‘subversive agents’, as immune from social rewards and blandishments associated with enablements as they are from the forfeits associated with its constraints. They are the likely source of counter-cultural values. I must pause here to qualify my earlier self-analysis in terms of meta-reflexivity (with occasional interludes of autonomous reflexivity). It may well be the mode of reflexivity most appropriate to my biography and my career, but I have also suggested, picking up on Archer’s characterisation, that meta-reflexives might best represent sources of oppositional thinking in relation to the onset of contemporary rentier capitalism. As one colleague also writing on health inequalities retorted, this might be wishful thinking on my part (ie a case of self-projection). At any event, I shrink from any such inference.
In her Reflexive Imperative in 2012 Archer develops the notion of a morphogenetic society, in which the logic and global reach of ‘opportunity’ require the continuous revision of personal projects and serve as obstacles to any settled modus vivendi. This not only suggests a general shift away from communicative to autonomous reflexivity, but it also makes it likely that some people, maybe many people, become ‘fractured reflexives’. Fractured reflexives are those whose internal conversations add to their disorientation and distress rather than precipitating purposeful courses of action. It is communicative reflexives who are most likely to slip into this category of fragility. In a later paper in Social Theory and Health, on health inequalities again, I went on to suggest that it might be worth investigating possible linkages between fractured reflexivity and poorer health and reduced longevity.
To return briefly to the idea of a morphogenetic society. What does this imply? I have often heard Maggie Archer decry the modern tendency to write of our contemporary social world as ‘X’ or ‘Y’ society; and I confess to using the term ‘fractured society’ myself, a nomenclature I shall come to in due course. But Archer herself writes of the ‘morphogenetic society’. What this implies is that partial morphostasis has given way of late to morphogenesis. Society remains structured of course, but there has been a shift. Shifts like this, in agency as well as structure, occur in interlocking and temporally complex ways. Agents come to be who they are and to act as they do in contexts set by social structural parameters. On an altogether different timescale the structures themselves change as a result of the choices and activities of historically situated agents. This results in a series of ‘cycles’ with different timelines. Hence the formula we countered before: structural conditioning leads to social interaction leads to structural elaboration.
Archer asks herself what generative mechanisms might be at work here. She sees social morphogenesis as an umbrella concept, ‘whereas any generative mechanism is a particular that needs identifying, describing and explaining – by its own analytic history of emergence.’ In an essay published in 2014 she highlights three orders of emergent properties:
‘the three coincide with what are conventionally known as the micro-, meso, and macro-levels: dealing respectively with the situated action of persons or small groups, because there is no such things as contextless action; with ‘social institutions’, the conventional label for organisations with a particular remit, such as government, health, education etc at the meso level; and with the relation between structure and culture at the most macroscopic level.’
Her argument begins at the macro-level, but with the important rider that each – macro-, meso- and micro-level – stratum is ‘activity-dependent’ on that or those beneath it; and that both downwards and upwards causation are continuous and intertwined.
Society, this thesis insists, comprises the relations between structure and culture. It is the consequence of ‘relations between relations’, all of which are activity-dependent. While structures are largely materially based, culture has primarily to do with ideas. In what Archer calls ‘late modernity’ – and which Paul Higgs and I had deemed it more prudently cautious to call ‘high modernity’ – the interplay between (structural) economic competition and (cultural) technological diffusion has fuelled intensified morphogenesis across the whole array of social institutions. In this way the two – structural and cultural – constituents of the generative mechanisms have themselves undergone morphogenesis, and their synergy has extended this to the rest of the social order via knock-on effects.
It is a thesis that Archer announces and develops with a natural reserve and with a suspicion of overly easy generalisation. She resists writing of the determinate advent of morphogenetic society, preferring to draw the line as suggesting that both structure and culture can presently be said to promote morphogenesis. She goes on to contend that structure and culture issue in different and contrasting ‘situational logics of action’. The for-profit market sector promises to extend the logic of competition throughout the social order, embracing schools, universities, hospitals, and so on. But scientific and technological ‘diffusionists’ are committed to a logic of opportunity, and so are hostile to bureaucratic regulation and restricted access; outcomes are not appraised in terms of profitability. This tension between structure and culture, based on the discordance between their logics, has yielded a ‘relationally contested order’. No ready-made predictions or prescriptions are offered here. Archer prefers to suggest period of ‘gradualism’, adding the hope that the logic of opportunity will come increasingly to permeate economic activity and nudge things towards the common good.
Once more I have only offered a precis. If it inevitably falls short of doing justice to Maggie’s sociology, I can at least claim that she judged the text I have drawn upon as accurate (similarly, Roy Bhaskar before his untimely death deemed my summarises of his work to be sound). Where does this leave us? I have now given brief accounts of the extensive contributions to philosophy and social and sociological theory of Jurgen Habermas, Roy Bhaskar and Margaret Archer, proclaiming their salience for my own developing thought. I should reiterate and elaborate on a handful of earlier observations. First, as well as the compelling nature of their arguments, it has always been their ‘usefulness’ in relations to my own sociological projects that has mattered to me. Others have and will continue to have reservations about the compatibility of aspects of the theses of my triad, but I would argue for both the telling power of those aspects of their works that I have ‘borrowed’, and the limited compatibility of precisely these in relation to my own ongoing interests and projects. Later sketches will show just how much my own theory of the fractured society of rentier capitalism owes to these three original thinkers, as well to others.
This might smack of the kind of eclecticism of which colleagues are rightly sceptical. I reject this. I trust I have not just flipped through the canonical texts of my discipline and, like a jackdaw, nicked flashy bits and pieces with instant but superficial appeal. The test, I think, is the use to which I have put what I have taken from the prior works of others as well as the degree to which they hang together in my own theorisations. I shall have more to say later, but by the early noughties I was confident in deploying Bhaskar’s under-labouring philosophy of basic and dialectical critical realism; Habermas’s insistence on a formal universal theory of rationality and aspects at least of his theory of the evolution of (lifeworld-based) communicative and (system-based) strategic action; and Archer’s much more sociological analysis of the structure/agency dyad, reflexivity and morphogenesis. Naturally my own theories are ‘out there’ (in Popper’s as well as Archer’s ‘third world’ of public scrutiny) to be judged as fit for purpose, or not.