In 2014, Margaret Archer reflected about how her research interests had been evolving and developing in the following terms:

It seemed to me that the centralised structure of the French educational system was equally central in accounting for a political outburst which very nearly toppled the Fifth Republic. Conversely, the (then) decentralised nature of English education prompted localised outbursts, whose effects diffused rather than accumulated. The next seven years were devoted to understanding the structuring of national educational systems and their consequences for educational interaction and change. Thus Social Origins of Educational Systems (Sage 1979) is the key book for understanding the research trajectory that followed.

I shall never regret a summer spent working with Pierre Bourdieu’s research team (or convincing Sage Publications, that he should be translated into English) nor my exchanges with Basil Bernstein at the London Institute of Education. However, it still remains the case that I believe Bourdieu advanced a set of theories which presumed the centralised structure of French education, just as Bernstein assumed English decentralisation, when both discussed cultural transmission.

Therefore, two books followed, which sought to come to grips with the structuring of culture and the structuring of social institutions. Firstly, there was Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory (CUP 1988). This conceptualises ‘culture’ as an objective phenomenon, in the same way as Popper’s ‘World Three’, and thus makes the distinction between the ontological status of culture and what people/groups/classes make of it epistemologically. In other words, culture is not a ‘community of shared meanings’. There is a Cultural System, replete with complementarities and contradictions, and there is Socio-Cultural interaction in which groups draw upon and elaborate various parts of the Cultural System – in accordance with their interests and aims. For those who like to establish intellectual pedigrees, there were four main influences upon this work; Karl Popper, Ernest Gellner and Tom Bottomore – all of whom were my teachers at LSE – and David Lockwood – whose 14 page article, differentiating between ‘social’ and ‘system’ integration is the most influential I have ever read.

Those who get round to reading the 854 pages of Social Origins of Educational Systems will recognise that the philosophy of social science, divided as it was between the competing claims of Methodological Individualism and Methodological Collectivism, provided a wholly unsatisfactory basis for theorising about structural properties and powers. Already, in this book (1979), I had largely developed the morphogenetic approach. This specifies how structural conditioning (which is temporally prior, relatively autonomous yet possessing causal powers) conditions social interaction, which in turn generates structural elaboration. That scheme of Structural Conditioning → Social Interaction → Structural Elaboration which crucially is stretched out over time, underlies all my work.

However, it was when I read Roy Bhaskar’s The Possibility of Naturalism (also 1979) and became involved with the nascent group of what came to be called ‘Critical Realists’, that the morphogenetic approach fully developed its ontology. All of this is spelt out in Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (CUP 1995). The hope in writing it was that this would provide a useful and useable framework for those conducting substantive research. All the same, within social theory in general, including Critical Realism which forms the basis of my own theorising, considerably more effort has been devoted to conceptualising how structural and cultural properties of society are transmitted to agents and condition their doings than has been given to the other side of the equation, namely how they are received and responded to by agents in return. It is this one-sidedness that I sought to redress in the following three books.

I maintain that realist social theory has adequately conceptualised how structural and cultural emergent properties impinge upon us; namely by shaping the situations in which we find ourselves, such that they have the capacity to operate inter alia as constraints and enablements. However, their powers as constraints and enablements require activation by agents. They only become causally efficacious in relation to individuals’ concerns in and about society – and what they seek to do to realise them. Yet, all of this presumes the active agent with his or her own distinctive properties and powers. Who are these agents? How do they acquire a sense of self, a personal identity and a social identity? These are the questions which are examined in Being Human: The Problem of Agency (CUP 2000).

Nevertheless, what had still been ignored was how agents, by virtue of their powers of reflexivity, deliberate about their social circumstances in relation to their personal concerns. Yet, this is the final link in the process through which structure is mediated by agency. I have ventured that the ‘how’ question is answered by reference to the ‘internal conversations’ conducted by all normal agents – in Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (CUP 2003). We survey constraints and enablements, under our own descriptions (which is the only way we can know anything), in conjunction with our ‘projects’, which were deliberatively defined to realise our concerns; and we adjust them into those practices that we conclude internally (and always fallibly) will enable us to do (and be) what we care about most in society.

The following volume, Making our way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility (CUP 2007) examined  the fact that as generative mechanisms, different dominant modes of reflexivity have internal consequences for their practitioners and distinctive external consequences for society. Internally, the connections are tracked between practice of these different modalities and individual patterns of social mobility by interviewing subjects about their life histories. Links were established between practitioners of different modes of internal conversation and subjects’ respective social immobility, upward social mobility, and social volatility.

The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity (CUP 2012) goes on to maintain that millennial changes are increasingly re-shaping and distancing the social order from the parameters of Modernity. The global creation and geographical re-distribution of new opportunities (almost occluded by the current unilateral preoccupation with risk), coupled with migration, increasing education, and the proliferation of novel skills re-bound upon the nature of reflexivity itself, which cannot remain optional even if subjects’ (individual and collective) seek reproduction of the status quo.

The shift towards the ‘socio-logic of opportunity’, which prompts this intensification of reflexivity also claims an increased proportion of victims – those experiencing the distress and disorientation of ‘fractured’ reflexivity. This is because the new logic of opportunity demands the continuous revision of personal projects, involving the successful monitoring of self, society and relations between them, and denies the establishment of an unchanging modus vivendi. In other words, the imperative to be reflexive intensifies with the demise of routine action – a decline that becomes precipitous once (partial) morphostasis gives way to the untrammelled morphogenesis, which increasingly characterises the shift towards one global system in the new millennium.

Globalisation is undoubtedly part and parcel of the millennial transformation of the social order, but it is not its generative mechanism. The leitmotif of contemporary commentators is to accentuate that ‘flows’ have replaced ‘structures’. What this crucially omits are the new structures that generate these detectable flows at a deeper ontological level. If the new millennium has truly begun to server its links with Modernity, we need to identify what is generating this radical disjunction. This will be examined in The Morphogenetic Society – my current project with the CSO.”

To learn more, we recommend: Margaret S. Archer, & Jamie Morgan, Contributions to realist social theory: An interview with Margaret S. Archer. Journal of Critical Realism, 19(2) 179–200. DOI: 10.1080/14767430.2020.1732760