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Making our Way through the World
How do we reflect upon ourselves and our concerns in relation to society, and vice versa? Human reflexivity works through 'internal conversations' using language, but also emotions, sensations and images. Most people acknowledge this 'inner-dialogue' and can report upon it. However, little research has been conducted on 'internal conversations' and how they mediate between our ultimate concerns and the social contexts we confront. In this book, Margaret Archer argues that reflexivity is progressively replacing routine action in late modernity, shaping how ordinary people make their way through the world. Using interviewees' life and work histories, she shows how 'internal conversations' guide the occupations people seek, keep or quit; their stances towards structural constraints and enablements; and their resulting patterns of social mobility.
Culture and Agency
Margaret Archer's Culture and Agency was first published in 1988, and proved a seminal contribution to social theory and the case for the role of culture in sociological thought. Described in Sociological Review as 'a timely and sophisticated treatment', the book showed that the 'problems' of culture and agency, on the one hand, and structure and agency, on the other, could be solved using the same analytical framework. In this revised edition of Culture and Agency, Margaret Archer contextualises her argument in 1990s cultural sociology and links it explicitly to her latest book, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Social Morphogenesis
The rate of social change has speeded up in the last three decades, but how do we explain this? This volume ventures what the generative mechanism is that produces such rapid change and discusses how this differs from late Modernity. Contributors examine if an intensification of morphogenesis (positive feedback that results in a change in social form) and a corresponding reduction in morphostasis (negative feedback that restores or reproduces the form of the social order) best captures the process involved. This volume resists proclaiming a new social formation as so many books written by empiricists have done by extrapolating from empirical data. Until we can convincingly demonstrate that a new generative mechanism is at work, it is premature to argue what accounts for the global changes that are taking place and where they will lead. More concisely we seek to answer the question whether or not current social change can be regarded as social morphogenesis. Only then, in the next volumes will the same team of authors be able to remove the question mark.
Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation
Explores the relationship between structure and agency through human reflexivity and the internal conversation.
Morphogenesis Answers Its Critics
In this final book by renowned sociologist Margaret S. Archer, her groundbreaking morphogenetic approach is defended, refined and extended through a series of engagements with her critics. Archer, a pioneer of critical realism, addresses key debates surrounding her work on structure, agency, and social change. Each chapter responds to critiques from a different scholar, using these exchanges as springboards to further develop her powerful explanatory framework. Through these lively dialogues, Archer elaborates her tools for analysing social and cultural dynamics. This book offers readers a unique window into Archer's thought as she clarifies, sharpens and expands her theoretical contributions in response to constructive criticism. It will be an essential read for scholars and students across the social sciences, and for anyone seeking to understand the forces that shape our social world and how we can reshape it.
The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity
What do young people want from life? This book shows how the 'internal conversation' guides individual choices.
Realist Social Theory
Building on her seminal contribution to social theory in Culture and agency, Margaret Archer develops here 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 practice - whether in upwards conflation (by the aggregation of individual acts) downwards conflation (through the structural orchestration of agents), or, more recently, in central conflation which holds...
Morphogenesis and the Crisis of Normativity
This volume explores the development and consequences of morphogenesis on normative regulation. It starts out by describing the great normative transformations from morphostasis, as the precondition of a harmonious relationship between legal validity and normative consensus in society, to morphogenesis, which tends to strongly undermine existing laws, norms, rules, rights and obligations because of the new variety it introduces. Next, it studies the decline of normative consensus resulting from the changes in the social contexts that made previous forms of normativity, based upon ‘habits, ‘habitus’ and ‘routine action’, unhelpfully misleading because they no longer constituted rele...
Conversations About Reflexivity
" Reflexivity" is defined as the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa. In addition to this sociological interest, it allows us to hold idle or trivial internal conversations. Focussing fully on this phenomenon, this book discusses the three main questions associated with this subject in detail. Where does the ability to be "reflexive" comes from? What part do our internal reflexive deliberations play in designing the courses of action we take: subordinate to habitual action or not? Is "reflexivity" a homogeneous practice for all people and invariant over history? In addressing these q...
Structure, Culture and Agency
Professor Margaret Archer is a leading critical realist and major contemporary social theorist. This edited collection seeks to celebrate the scope and accomplishments of her work, distilling her theoretical and empirical contributions into four sections which capture the essence and trajectory of her research over almost four decades. Long fascinated with the problem of structure and agency, Archer’s work has constituted a decade-long engagement with this perennial issue of social thought. However, in spite of the deep interconnections that unify her body of work, it is rarely treated as a coherent whole. This is doubtless in part due to the unforgiving rigour of her arguments and prose, ...
