Full Description
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Approach not only rejects methodological individualism and holism, but argues that the debate between them has been replaced by a new one, between elisionary theorising and emergentist theories based on a realist ontology of the social world.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.
Contents
1. The vexatious fact of society; Part I. The Problem of Structure and Agency: Four Alternative Solutions: 2. Individualism versus collectivism: querying the terms of the debate; 3. Taking time to link structure and agency; 4. Elision and central conflation; 5. Realism and morphogenesis; Part II. The Morphogenetic Cycle: 6. Analytical dualism: the basis of the morphogenetic approach; 7. Structural and cultural conditioning; 8. The morphogenesis of agency; 9. Social elaboration.
