MonographDOI
Realist social theory : the morphogenetic approach
TLDR
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Approach not only rejects methodological individualism and holism, but argues that the debate between them has been replaced by a new one, between elisionary theorising and emergentist theories based on a realist ontology of the social world.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.read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
The problem of agency in feminism: a critical realist approach
TL;DR: The authors argue that critical realism has much to offer theories of political action, while acknowledging the enormous contribution of feminist scholars working within a poststructuralist paradigm, they argue that the epistemological and ontological assumptions at the hear...
Book
Realising Systems Thinking: Knowledge and Action in Management Science
TL;DR: This book deals with the contribution of a systems approach to a range of disciplines from philosophy and biology to social theory and management and weaves together material from some of the pre-eminent thinkers of the day.
Journal ArticleDOI
Realism and the Problem of Agency
TL;DR: In this article, it is argued that both the undersocialised and the oversocialised models of humankind are inadequate foundations for social theory because they present us with either a self-sufficient maker of society, or a supine social product who is made.
Journal ArticleDOI
Enterprise Resource Planning and a contest to limit the role of management accountants: A strong structuration perspective
TL;DR: In this paper, strong structuration theory is used to analyse how the contest over the role of the management accountant in a new organization was played out during the partially successful attempt to establish ERP in conjunction with a system that was felt to better support the requirements of the EU for performance-based budgeting.
Journal ArticleDOI
Technological objects, social positions, and the transformational model of social activity
Philip Faulkner,Jochen Runde +1 more
TL;DR: The transformational model of social activity, in many ways the centerpiece of critical realism, has been widely used in areas of information systems research but little has been done so far to develop a systematic theory of the nature, position, and identity of technological objects within the context of the TMSA.