Events

Margaret Archer to speak at Epistemology, Method and Complexity

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Epistemology, Method and Complexity

Warwick, Friday 8 May 2015

12.45-5.15, followed by Drinks Reception

Hosted by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick

Places are free but please REGISTER HERE.

In this fifth seminar, we explore one of the issues that has already started to emerge across all the seminar so far: epistemology. In particular, this seminar aims to unpack some of the ways in which different kinds of epistemological positions that tend to be implicit in complexity discussions in general. One of the features that has become clear to the seminar series organisers series is the ways in which each seminar as so far tended to ‘divide’ the seminar participants, with particular members preferring certain seminars over others in a way that tends to also map on to their respective disciplinary backgrounds.

In spite of the different approaches to complexity that are so obviously present across the disciplines, one of the aims of this seminar series has been to prioritise the social and to explore what a complex social systems methodological approach might entail. With this in mind, we return to some fundamental concepts in social science as way of exploring how they may or may not be turned on their head from a complex systems perspective.

In doing so, this seminar focuses on two aspects of the social that we consider to be fundamental to a complex systems approach, namely agency and evaluation. Often these concepts tend to sit separately to one another and they also tend not to be key priorities within complexity approaches in general either. Here, therefore, we bring them together as a way of rethinking some of the key ways we might begin to formulate what an empirical complex systems approach look like, if it acknowledged the importance of agency and evaluation together.

This seminar will follow a slightly different format to previous seminars in that we have chosen to only have a small number of key speakers and a larger audience. This will, though, still allow us plenty of time for some good discussion.

The speakers are:

Professor Margaret Archer, Sociology, University of Warwick University, Centre for Social Ontology.

Professor Edmund Chattoe-Brown, Sociology, Lancaster

Dr Ana Teixeira de Melo, Center for Social Studies, Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences, University of Coimbra

Professor Malcolm Williams, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University

Events

The Fourth CSO Workshop: Morphogenesis and Normativity

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The fourth annual CSO workshop was held from January 6th to January 9th in 2015 at Cardiff Business School. The papers from the workshop will be published in 2015 as the fourth volume of the Social Morphogenesis series.

Tuesday 6th

Doug Porpora – The Great Normative Changes of the Twentieth Century

Wolfgang Hofkirchner – Ethics from Systems: the emergence of normativity with and in social systems

Phil Gorski – Reflexive Secularity

Pierpaolo Donati – The relational understanding of the origin and morphogenetic change of social morality

Wednesday 7th

Margaret Archer –  Morphogenesis and the interpretation of codified social rules

Ismael Al-Amoudi – In letter and in spirit: Social Morphogenesis and the interpretation of codified social rules

Emmanuel Lazega – Polynormativity and Status Inconsistency: a neo-structural approach to regulation

Colin Wight –  Emergence, Development and Death: Norms in International Relations.

Tony Lawson – Collective practices, norms and modern Economics

Thursday 8th

Andrea Maccarini – A Tale of Two Wars: Ontology, Universality and the Normative Tensions of Morphogenic Society

Mark Carrigan – Fragile Movements Emerging out of Digitalization

Events

Routines and Reflexivity – March 10th

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Alistair Mutch (Nottingham Trent University)
MARCH 10TH
17.00-18.30, R1.04
Ramphal Building, University of Warwick

Much of the debate occasioned by the development of ideas about reflexivity and morphogenesis has turned on the status of habit. Whilst recognising the importance of this debate, this seminar takes an alternative tack. Returning to Bhaskar’s formulation of ‘position-practices’, it reviews recent work on organizational routines. Developing a position which sees routines as a key emergent property of organizations, recent developments in information technology are seen to cement autonomous reflexivity. Accompanied by an increasing discourse of ‘strategizing’, this might limit the development of meta reflexivity.

All welcome! E-mail socialontology@warwick.ac.uk with any questions

Events

An eclectic account of lay morality and charitable giving in the UK – Feb 17th

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Balihar Sanghera (Kent)
Tuesday, February 17th
5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.04
Ramphal Building, University of Warwick

This paper examines how charitable giving is an outcome of different interacting elements of lay morality. Charitable giving reflects people’s capacity for fellow-feeling (or sympathy), moral sentiments, personal reflexivity, ethical dispositions, moral norms and moral discourses. An eclectic account of lay morality and charitable giving is warranted because of the complex nature of the object. Though ordinary people engage in ethical reasoning, they often think and act in piecemeal fashion, so that confusion and inconsistencies can occur. This is particularly evident when gender, class and ‘race’ shape people’s feelings and evaluations of others, their attention and care for others, and their understanding of responsibility and blame for social issues. Morality is further complicated because it takes place in the mundane world of everyday life that can result in inconsistent and confusing judgements and actions on giving.

All welcome! E-mail socialontology@warwick.ac.uk with any questions

Events

The Relational ‘We’ in Personal Morphogenesis – February 3rd

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Beth Weaver (Strathclyde)
Tuesday, February 3rd
5:00 PM to 6:30 PM, R1.15
Ramphal Building, University of Warwick

This paper discusses my empirical application of a relational realist analytic framework to illuminate the role of social groups or collectives, as social relations, in shaping and affecting outcomes for individuals and for groups. Using the morphogenetic sequence developed by Archer, to illustrate the conceptual schema progressed by Donati (2011), this framework affords equal recognition to individual actions, social relations and social systems. To empirically capture the relational ‘we’ in social morphogenesis, however, requires taking the social relation as a central unit of analysis. This means empirically conceptualising the social relation as both context and as interaction, and it means analysing the shifting dynamics and influences on the form and shape of a given social relation. Such an analysis can reveal what triggers reflexivity, what different forms of reflexivity entail, and how social relations can shape and influence outcomes for individuals and groups as well as how such processes shape and alter the relations themselves. Using examples from my own research examining the dynamics of desistance from crime, I will show how both individual and relational contributions are interconnected, and how the manner of relating and the reciprocal orientation of individuals-in-relation towards the maintenance of a given social relation are significant in understanding the relational ‘we’ in social morphogenesis.

Beth Weaver is a Lecturer at the Glasgow School of Social Work, University of Strathclyde. Prior to entering academia, she worked in the areas of youth and criminal justice social work in Scotland and latterly as a MAPPA Coordinator. 

Events, Podcasts

Dave Elder-Vass on Prosumption, Appropriation and the Ontology of Economic Form

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This seminar with Dave Elder-Vass (Loughborough) took place on Tuesday, January 27, 2015. You can listen to a recording of it here:

Prosumption – the unpaid performance of productive work by ‘consumers’ who thus help commercial businesses to generate a profit – is perhaps the most studied of the many hybrid forms of economic practice that have proliferated in the digital economy. A number of critical accounts have analysed prosumption in terms of Marx’s labour theory of value, suggesting for example that as prosumers do useful work for free they are infinitely exploited by the firms that profit as a result. But such accounts analyse the digital economy in terms that were derived from the nineteenth century factory – and terms that were highly questionable even in that context.

The spectacular mismatch between this model of capitalism and the case of prosumption exposes the inadequacy of the standard monolithic conception of capitalism as a homogeneous and universal contemporary economic form – a conception that at a certain level is also shared by the marketised discourse of mainstream economics. We need a new ontology of economic form that goes beyond the totalising concepts of mode of production and market economy and instead provides us with tools for understanding the sheer diversity of forms of economic practice in the contemporary economy. This paper offers the concept of appropriative practices as a contribution to such an ontology and applies it to the case of prosumption.

Dave Elder-Vass is a senior lecturer in sociology at Loughborough University, where he teaches a variety of core sociology modules. He also offers an MA module on Digital Economies and an innovative undergraduate option that consists entirely of debates between students on popular recent books. He is available to supervise PhD students, particularly those with an interest in social theory, critical realism, digital social developments or economic sociology.

Previously, he spent three years as a British Academy post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, after completing his PhD at Birkbeck, University of London. Before returning to the academic world he was a senior IT executive in a major UK retail business.

Events

Roy Bhaskar, 1944-2014

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roybhaskar

Roy Bhaskar died at his home in Leeds at about 6 pm GMT on Wednesday 19 November 2014.

‘It is not that there are the starry heavens above and the moral law within, as Kant would have it; rather, the true basis of your virtuous existence is the fact that the starry heavens are within you, and you are within them.’  (Roy Bhaskar, The Philosophy of MetaReality, p. 351)

The International Association for Critical Realism has established an online condolence book here: http://site.uit.no/iacrroy/