Margaret Archer’s Threefold-Based Morphogenesis
Discussion
Jonathan Rowson:
"Margaret Archer’s Morphogenesis: Structure, Culture and Agency:
- The morphogenetic approach shows that structure and culture shape agency, but it is agency that transforms structure and culture. Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, 1995
Margaret Archer was a much admired British sociologist and social theorist (1943–2023) who recently passed away. She was known for her work on structure, culture, and agency within the framework of critical realism and for developing a morphogenetic (roughly, creation of form) perspective on social change, which explains the interaction of different kinds of influence on society at different time scales.
(Structure, agency and culture correspond loosely to systems, souls and society respectively). Margaret Archer and friend. Retrieved from Critical Theory Network.
We can see Margaret Archer there in the photograph with a friend, but her ‘enemy’ is structuration theory, particularly as articulated by Anthony Giddens who argued that structure and agency are co-constituted. She is keen to establish ‘analytical dualism’ between structure and agency to indicate how structure constrains agency, how agency shapes structure, and how culture informs the experience of constraint and the extent to which it is resisted; all of which, in turn, shapes our sense of and capacity for agency. Structures shape people's material conditions, but culture determines how they interpret and react to those conditions. Culture influences whether people accept, resist, or seek to change structural constraints. For Archer, Culture has its own reality distinct from structure and agency, and in this sense, there are overlaps with Popper’s World 3.
- Cultural systems are relatively autonomous from social structures; they exert their own influence and must be treated as analytically distinct if we are to understand social change. Culture and Agency, 1988
One value of Archer’s threesome is that it speaks to timing. Social, economic and political structures are malleable, but in non-revolutionary conditions, they take a long time to change. Culture can change relatively quickly but still in the mid-term; and agency can shape things in the short term but mostly it can only gradually influence bigger changes in culture and structure, though that depends on the extent to which the agency is organised, mobolised and focussed.
If you are not a social theorist, and I am not really, perhaps the main thing to take away from Archer is the way she contextualises and foregrounds agency:
- "Social reality is a process; structures precondition actions, but it is human agency that determines whether structures persist or change." Realist Social Theory, 1995
Archer’s emphasis on Agency is distinct here, but there is some consonance with Popper’s World 2, Perspectiva’s Souls, and Guattari’s Mental Ecology. Archer’s emphasis on agency’s power over structure also reminds me of Ursula le Guin’s line:
We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words."
(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/the-threeness-of-the-world-3)