Realist social theory : the morphogenetic approach
TL;DR: The Morphogenetic Cycle: the basis of the morphogenetic approach 7. Structural and cultural conditioning 8. The morphogenesis of agency 9. Social elaboration.
Abstract: Building on her seminal contribution to social theory in Culture and Agency, in this 1995 book Margaret Archer develops 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Approach not only rejects methodological individualism and holism, but argues that the debate between them has been replaced by a new one, between elisionary theorising and emergentist theories based on a realist ontology of the social world.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.
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TL;DR: In this paper, the sociological notions of structure and agency were used to understand why engineering and built environment students fail to continue their degree programs despite being academically eligible to do so.
Abstract: The retention of students to graduation is a concern for most higher education institutions. This article seeks to understand why engineering and built environment students fail to continue their degree programmes despite being academically eligible to do so. The sample comprised 275 students registered between 2006 and 2011 in a faculty of engineering and the built environment, who were academically eligible to continue, but failed to register for their studies the following academic year. The sociological notions of structure and agency were used to make sense of the data. The findings suggest that some students had control over their decision to leave and some students’ decisions were dominated by various structural factors. The outcome of the study is helpful in terms of suggesting what actions can be taken in order reduce the number of students leaving in good academic standing.
21 citations
TL;DR: In this article, critical realists and interactivism are shown to independently converge on the same general process (or constraint) view of emergence and develop complementary accounts of particular emergents.
Abstract: For advocates of critical realism emergence is a central theme. Critical realists typically ground their defence of the relative disciplinary autonomy of various sciences by arguing that emergent phenomena exist in a robust non-ontologically, non-causally reductionist sense. Despite the importance they attach to it critical realists have only recently begun to elaborate on emergence at length and systematically compare their own account with those developed by others. This paper clarifies what is distinctive about the critical realist account of emergence by comparing it with an alternative. Critical realism and interactivism are shown to independently converge on the same general process (or constraint) view of emergence and develop complementary accounts of particular emergents.
21 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a reflection on the main implications of complexity theory for science in general, redefining and dispelling myths of traditional science, and Sociology in particular, suggesting a redefinition of Parsons' classic concept of social system, articulated around the property of self-maintenance of order rather than on its possible discontinuity and instability.
Abstract: This essay presents a reflection on the main implications of Complexity Theory for science in general, redefining and dispelling myths of traditional science, and Sociology in particular, suggesting a redefinition of Parsons’ classic concept of Social System, articulated around the property of self-maintenance of order rather than on its possible discontinuity and instability. It argues that Complexity Theory has established the limits of Classic Science, leading to a more realistic awareness of working and evolution mechanisms of Natural and Social Systems and showing the limits of our capacity to predict and control events. Dissipative structures have shown the creative role of time. Instability, emergence, surprise, unpredictability are the rule rather than the exception when systems move away from equilibrium (entropy), even if these processes are generated from a system’s deterministic working mechanisms. Therefore, we have come to realize how constructive the contribution of Complexity is, in regards to the long lasting problem of the relationship between order and disorder. Today, the terms of this relationship have been re-specified in its new configuration of inter-relationship link, according to a unicum which finds its synthesis in self-organization and deterministic chaos concepts. From this perspective, as Prigogine suggested, studies on Complex Systems are heading toward a historical, biological conception of Physics, and a new alliance between natural systems and living, social systems. Non-linearity, far from equilibrium self-organization, emergence and surprise meet at all levels, as this paper attempts to highlight. In Sociology, insights of Complexity Theory have contributed to a new way of thinking about social systems, by re-addressing some fundamental issues starting to social system, emergence and change concepts. The current social system conception as complex dynamical systems is supported by a profitable use of non-liner models (in particular, the Logistic map) in the study of social processes.
21 citations
11 Nov 2015
TL;DR: In this article, a critical review argues that accounts of cultural value designed to articulate the specific value of culture within contemporary polity and governance cannot but fail to achieve their objective, arguing that culture's articulation is either quantitative or mute.
Abstract: This critical review contends that accounts of cultural value designed to articulate the specific value of culture within contemporary polity and governance cannot but fail to achieve their objective. Trammeled by economistic utilitarianism on the one side and an uncritical aestheticism on the other, culture’s articulation is either quantitative or mute. This state of affairs has arisen as a result of a set of intellectual reflections on social order which can clearly be traced as far back as the fourteenth century, arguably achieve their hegemony by the late eighteenth century and have continued to dominate thought intio the twenty-first century. Whilst it has been common to argue that such reflections codified the distinctions of economy and aesthetics, or as is often said today the instrumental and the instrinsic, this critical review argues that these positions are the product of a singular process and that therefore the persistent representation of them as antagonists is false. That process is called abstraction and is the form in which the political codification of market society took place over that period. These categories are a product of that process, co-defining each other in mutual exclusion. This is one aspect of abstraction. There are two others. In defining the public sphere as one governed by market relationships, ethics was disembedded from the social and re-cast in a form appropriate to the new form of society – utilitarianism being its clearest expression. In a similar way, human labour was both abstracted by exchange and instumentalised as a simple means to an end. The instrumentalisation of labour completed art’s isolation from the routines of social production. The paper concludes by suggesting that the emergence of a set of new cultural economic imaginaries in the last twenty years draws the historical limitations of abstraction to critical attention.
21 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide a clearer picture of how the nexus between institutional and behavioral dynamics operates among doctors in hospital organizations, on the basis of qualitative, in-dep...
Abstract: This article seeks to provide a clearer picture of how the nexus between institutional and behavioural dynamics operates among doctors in hospital organisations. On the basis of qualitative, in-dep...
20 citations