I suppose there is an inevitable gap between reading and writing. In the late ‘noughties’ I added reading ‘Maggie’ Archer to a long-term familiarity with the works of Roy Bhaskar. Eventually, if this is the apt phrase, it bore fruit in my published work. (I have blogged about her work in some detail outside of the confines of these autobiographical fragments, so will be brief here.)
I’m ashamed to admit that I was unaware of Maggie’s work up to that point, that is, until the late noughties. I came to it, I recall, simply because: (a) her name was frequently mentioned by critical realists, and (b) she was a sociologist. She was therefore a natural resource for someone venturing a critical realist input into sociological investigations, in my case on understanding and explaining health inequalities.
I began reading Maggie’s work in some depth, focusing in particular on her notion of reflexivity. She insisted on the causal efficacy of agency – which entails, against Giddens and others, holding onto an analytic distinction between structure and agency – while maintaining that different and distinctive modes of reflexivity (reflected in the ‘internal conversations’ we all have with ourselves) have social structural roots. (In my terminology, agency is structured but never structurally determined.)
The beginnings of an interest and commitment to her writings was strengthened when I met her in person and was able to discuss matters of mutual interest. I first met her in fact when I was invited by her Ph.D student, Mark Carrigan, to give a talk at Warwick. It was a talk on the mediating role of her modes of reflexivity in relation to the production and reproduction of health inequalities. I confess I experienced a moment of nervousness when, unexpectedly, Maggie walked into the room and joined the audience. It went ok; and afterwards Maggie, Mark and I adjourned to the bar and enjoyed more conversation.
From 2012 onwards I incorporated Maggie’s theories into my own sociological approach and output. The first effort was in the form of a book chapter: I have never bought into the current orthodoxy that insists that novel work should be published in high impact international journals (but then as a babyboomer I’ve never had to). The main theme of this piece was the characterisation of the ‘greedy bastards’ of the GBH as ‘focused autonomous reflexives’: they are, in this view, oriented to accumulating capital at a rate of knots and totally strategic to this end.
The second excursion into print was in the journal Sociology, also in 2012. This time I explored what Maggie called ‘meta-reflexives’, comprising those people who are oriented principally by values, self-interrogating ‘dreamers’ with an acute and realistic sense of context. I referred to ‘dedicated meta-reflexives’ in suggesting that it might be from this grouping that resisters to financial capitalism might most fruitfully be recruited.
The third effort was also printed in a journal, this time in Social Theory and Health in 2013. I identified another reflexive cluster, this time drawing on Maggie’s notion of ‘fractured reflexives’, or those who have lost their way, have an external locus of control and feel powerless and swept up by events. I contended here that those I called ‘vulnerable fractured reflexives’ were probably especially vulnerable to poor health and premature death. Might fractured reflexivity, I asked, be a significant mediating concept, sitting between structure and agency, in a credible sociology of health inequalities?
There is an unhappy rider to attach to this celebration of Maggie’s important contributions to sociological theory. She sought a London base for her endeavours, a position and a location that would facilitate her own work and that of her wide circle of critical realist friends and colleagues. Now in retirement, I managed to secure an honorary appointment for her at UCL, within the IOE, once more through the good offices of UCL’s Vice-Provost for Research, David Price. All seemed well. But I was subsequently informed by Maggie that administrative staff within the IOE had told her that she could not import and deposit (very considerable) funding because of constraints attaching to the nature of her appointment. I know, scarcely credible! Nose cut off to spite the face. Weber’s iron cage of bureaucracy imprisoning and torturing the life out of an intrinsically worthwhile initiative. I – and David Price – found out about this lunacy too late to take up Maggie’s cause; she was off elsewhere. UCL lost a very significant sociologist with a wide and well-deserved international reputation.