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Approach not only rejects methodological individualism and holism, but argues that the debate between them has been replaced by a new one, between elisionary theorising and emergentist theories based on a realist ontology of the social world.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 article, a case study of how researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds have familiarized themselves with the key social science concepts of "structure" and "agency" to reflect on the integrative research efforts of a research center in southwestern Australia.
Abstract: Transdisciplinary research is widely being promoted for its potential to effectively address complex issues, such as ecosystem management in a changing climate. Working across disciplines and with broader society can benefit greatly from continuous evaluation to improve transdisciplinary practices. However, methods for such continuous self-reflection are scarce, with little evidence of the application of social science concepts, theory, or methods. This article presents a case study of how researchers from different disciplinary backgrounds have familiarized themselves with the key social science concepts of “structure” and “agency” to reflect on the integrative research efforts of a research center in southwestern Australia. They identified influential “structures” as the geographical separation of the center's research groups, contrasting research cultures, and little previous engagement with the social sciences. Evidence of “agency” comprised various interventions to promote collaboration. Intriguingly, these interventions rendered some challenging paradoxes.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that constructivism in International Relations (IR) suffers from certain important shortcomings in its analysis of the idea of social context and that constructivists fail to adequately engage with "social structural" forces in world politics.
Abstract: This article argues that constructivism in International Relations (IR) suffers from certain important shortcomings in its analysis of the idea of social context. Specifically it is argued that constructivists fail to adequately engage with ‘social structural’ forces in world politics. While constructivists have pitched themselves as theorists who aim to account for the role of social context in world political inquiry, their conceptual focus on ideational factors – rules, norms and inter-subjective beliefs – has resulted in an inadequate, or incomplete, conceptualisation of social structure. Constructivists, it is argued here, tend to leave the role of materially embodied social structures theoretically and empirically unexplored. The limitations of constructivist treatments of social context have significant consequences for their analysis of world politics, for example, for recent constructivist attempts to deal with international law. Constructivist interventions into analysis of law remain deficient in important senses because of their failure to conceive of international law in social structural terms and because of their inability to explore in depth law's relationship with other social structures, such as patriarchy or capitalism. This entails that the structured systems of inequality and hierarchy embodied in law fail to be adequately recognised. Recognising the ‘incompleteness’ of the constructivist accounts of social context, we argue, is important in highlighting the often un-noted limitations of constructivist scholarship and in potentially redirecting constructivist scholarship towards closer engagement with ‘critical theory’ investigations into IR and law.
20 citations
Dissertation•
01 Nov 2013
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a case study of the use of social network analysis and an anthropological approach to the analysis of the Singaporean blogosphere from 2009 to 2010, and assesses which of White's three disciplines and relative valuation orders the Singapore blogosphere adheres.
Abstract: This thesis questions on one level the assertion that the Internet is a force for democratisation in authoritarian regimes (Habermas, 2006), and at the same time another means for disseminating propaganda, fear and intimidation (Rodan, 1998). It overcomes the limitations of using automated data collection and analysis of blogs by supplementing these techniques with a prolonged period of participant observation and a detailed reading of the textual extracts in order to allow for meaning to emerge. It analyses the discourses and styles of discourse of the Singapore political blogosphere. Hurst (2006) and Lin and Sundaram et al., (2007) described the same blogosphere as isolated from the global blogosphere and clearly demarcated with no central topic. Countering the social ignorance of such automated data collection and analysis techniques, this study assigns meaning to data gathered from January 2009 to February 2010. This case study will help highlight the analytic framework, benefits and limitations of using social network analysis and an anthropological approach to networks. It has targeted blogs using hyperlink network analysis and measured ‘importance’ with ‘betweenness centrality’ (de Nooy & Mrvar et al., 2005) in order to demarcate the boundaries of the sample of blogs that are archived for semantic and discourse analysis. Beyond a brief introduction to betweenness centrality, and the merits or otherwise, of combining various ranking of blogs such as Google’s PageRank, Hits and Blogrank algorithms it avoids the algorithm fetishism within hyperlink data collection and linguistic analysis of corpus collected from blogs; allowing for culture, identity and agency. It assesses which of White’s (2009) three disciplines and relative valuation orders the Singapore blogosphere adheres. The contention raised here is that social network analysis, or rather those elements within it that are focused exclusively on algorithms, are in danger of co-option by states and multinational corporations (Wolfe, 2010:3) unless they acknowledge sociocultural forces. The tools of social network analysis and data mining are moved beyond mere description, while avoiding prescription – and at the same time advancing its contribution to substantive theoretical questions (Scott, 2010). Ensuring space for agency in a field dominated by sociograms, statistics and algorithms with theory that places persons lacking recognition at its centre is important to this thesis. Focusing only on the relational aspects of the interaction and in the individual persons linked (Wolfe, 2010: 3) creates a limited representation of the wider phenomena under study and a narrow awareness of the context in which these networks exist. A people governed
by one political party since 1963 (The People’s Action Party) with the government of Singapore is the focus of this case study. This paper also highlights the use of various software technology; blogs, IssueCrawler, HTTrack, NetDraw, and Leximancer while using an ethnographic approach to counter the social ignorance of automated electronic software. The analysis of the Singaporean blogosphere from 2009 to 2010 provides a descriptive analysis of the argument that the non-democratic nature of Singapore society shapes the development of online public spheres.
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TL;DR: Most in International Relations today, whatever their view of structural realism, would agree with Robert Jervis that Waltz's theory is "the most truly systemic of our theories of international pol...
Abstract: Most in International Relations today, whatever their view of structural realism, would agree with Robert Jervis that Waltz’s theory is “the most truly systemic of our theories of international pol...
20 citations
01 Jan 2015
TL;DR: Pfade, Mechanismen, Ereignisse -das sind die drei Topoi, die in den letten Jahren und Jahrzehnten die Forschungen and Diskussionen in der Soziologie sozialer Prozesse, and dabei insbesondere in der Historischen Soziology, masgeblich bestimmt and eine Entwicklung „from comparative methods to theories of process“ eingeleitet haben as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: Pfade, Mechanismen, Ereignisse – das sind die drei Topoi, die in den letzten Jahren und Jahrzehnten die Forschungen und Diskussionen in der Soziologie sozialer Prozesse und dabei insbesondere in der Historischen Soziologie masgeblich bestimmt und dabei eine Entwicklung „from comparative methods to theories of process“ eingeleitet haben. Sie reprasentieren zudem zentrale Problemfelder einer jeglichen Theorie sozialer Prozesse. Pfadanalysen befassen sich mit der Morphologie bzw. den Trajektorien von sozialen Prozessen in spezifischen Konstellationen, die Diskussionen uber Mechanismen beziehen sich auf die Kausalitat von Prozessen und damit auf Probleme ihrer Erklarung, und ‚Ereignisse‘ stehen stellvertretend fur den Bereich, den man nunmehr etwas groszugig als ‚Ontologie‘ bezeichnet, also im Hinblick auf die kategoriale Gegebenheit von sozialen Prozessen. Der Beitrag untersucht den Zusammenhang dieser drei theoretischen Entwicklungen.
20 citations