Society is like nothing but itself. It does not resemble any of the analogues to which it has historically been likened: the mechanism, the organism, the cybernetic system, or language. It has no pre-set form or goals. What form it does assume and what goals are pursued arise from the doings of human agents – singular, aggregate or collective – although this ‘shape’ very rarely conforms to the aims, objectives and desiderata of any particular group. The shaping of the social order and each of its constitutive institutions and cultural complexes is the product of compromise, concession, unintended consequences and contingency – it is morphogenetic.
Morphogenesis refers to those processes that amplify deviations from a given form or state (through positive feedback) and morphostasis to those that are structure-restoring or -reproducing (through negative feedback).Footnote 1 Morphogenesis itself is also one possible form taken by the social order, which becomes more marked the further early types of societies are left behind, though the generic process owes nothing to evolution. The Morphogenetic Approach is the explanatory framework that I have developed over forty years to account for this substantive process of transformation. As an explanatory framework, the Morphogenetic Approach is intended to be of practical and interdisciplinary use for the analysis of stability and change at all levels – micro-, meso- and macroscopic – of the social order.
It should not be held to be a ‘theory’ for it does not purport to explain anything.Footnote 2 Instead, it is meant to be of assistance to those who do have a clear research question by helping them to go about answering it. Therefore, I have no objection to it being assigned to ‘methodology’. Half a century ago, ‘theory and methods’ went together and were the mainstay of undergraduate social science degrees and doctoral courses. Indeed, their linkage was important in underwriting the hegemony of empiricism. Interestingly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, it still dominates in the public presentation of medical research findings across the media and in discussions of public policies (as distinct from how the research itself was conceptualized, which necessarily was not based upon constant conjunctions). Depressingly, many of the field trials (as reported) relied upon correlation coefficients in their many variants. More generally, young academic contributors to The Conversation have been drilled into adding the mantra ‘but a correlation is not a statement of causality’. However, it takes more than a slogan to displace an ingrained social ontology because replacing it is immediately at issue. This is relevant because it was precisely the position I found myself in when writing Social Origins of Educational Systems in the late 1960s.Footnote 3
In 2012, after the Centre for Critical Realism had generously recommended its re-publication as a ‘Realist Classic’, I was mentally resistant to retaining the original introductory chapter replete with its ontological half-insights (e.g. on emergent properties and powers but also on institutional contradictions and complementarities). Thanks to an overall reliance on the generosity of various ‘methodological collectivists’, including David Lockwood, Ernest Gellner,Footnote 4 Walter Buckley, Alvin Gouldner and Shumel Eisenstadt, I did keep it, just as a public reminder of how hard theoretical work was when the two dominant forms of social ontology were methodological individualism and holism. All the same, I wrote a second Introduction to the new edition, specifying the difference a Critical Realist ontology had made. Nevertheless, there are two sentences I particularly like from the original: ‘however complex our final formulations turn out to be, education is fundamentally about what people have wanted of it and have been able to do to it’; and ‘Secondly, and for the present purposes much more importantly, our theories will be about the educational activities of people even through they will not explain educational development strictly in terms of people alone.’Footnote 5
However, in the last two decades of the twentieth century and most markedly in the humanities, the balance shifted dramatically from assigning excessive authority to the author to according the reader exclusive interpretative authority. This can be epitomized as placing the author in the Derridian hors-texte which, for all his later equivocations, never involved a restoration of authorial privileges. From this perspective, authors were seen as loosing texts on the public and, in so doing, their personal intentionality was transformed into a conduit for social forces: that is, subordinate to expressions of their class position, symptomatic of their engendered standpoint, or subsumed into that ill-defined but capacious portmanteau, the hegemonic discourse. With the author now ‘shut up’ and ‘shut out’, the text itself supposedly became the property of the demos (let a thousand interpretations bloom without questions about their legitimacy because ‘correctness’, ‘accuracy’ and ‘substantiation’ were the tainted currency of modernity). Yet, as we well know, proceedings were far from being democratic, let alone approaching the Habermasian ‘ideal speech situation’ or the Gadamerian ‘fusion of horizons’. Instead, rhetorical persuasion ruled, where the rules of the game were Feyerabend’s ‘anything goes’.
Undoubtedly, excessive claims had been made in the past for first-person epistemic authority, including that of the author – infallibility (Descartes), omniscience (Hume), indubitability (Hamilton) and incorrigibility (Ayer). Nevertheless, it is possible to defend authorial authority without making any such claims and thus to preclude textual understanding from becoming an exercise conducted wholly in the third-person. The defence is a matter of ontology, which is prior to any epistemological question of sharing or of third-person interpretation.
Conscious states, such as those involved in an author developing a theory, can only exist from the point of view of the subject who is experiencing those thoughts. In other words, the intention in writing a book has what John SearleFootnote 6 terms a first-person ontology. This means intentions have a subjective mode of existence, which is also the case for desires, feelings, fantasies etc. That is, only as experienced by a particular subject does a particular thought exist. Just as there are no such things as disembodied pains, there are no such things as thoughts that are independent of subjectivity. Both pains and thoughts are first-person-dependent for their existence.
However, you might object that, whilst I cannot share my toothache with you, what am I currently doing (in writing) but sharing my thoughts with you? In fact, I do not agree that it is possible to share my thoughts with you. Instead, what I am doing is sharing my ideas with you, as Popperian World 3 objects,Footnote 7 ones that will become even more permanently part of World 3 once they are published. What I cannot share with you is something William James captured very well, the reflexive monitoring that is going on here and now as my thoughts are turned into the complete sentences that you will read several months hence. Internally, I am engaged in self-monitoring activities, which are an inextricable part of my thoughts, such as mundanely checking that a singular subject is accompanied by a singular verb or distilling an insight into words that seem to capture it adequately. This ontological point has far-reaching implications. Quite simply and very radically, it means that we cannot have a sociology exclusively in the third-person; one in which the subject’s first-person subjectivity is ignored. That is as true for any author as it is for any respondent in a sociological inquiry.
The subjective ontology of thought(s) has epistemological consequences, one of which concerns the nature of epistemic sharing possible between an author and his or her readers. Without making any of the excessive claims mentioned above, I can still claim self-warranted authority in the first-person because my thoughts are known directly to me and only indirectly, through fallible interpretation, to a third-person commentator. Following Patrick Alston, ‘I enjoy self-warrant whenever I truly believe I am thinking x; ipso facto, I am justified in claiming to know my state of belief, even if that state of belief turns out to be untrue.’Footnote 8 Thus, I may be wrong in my beliefs concerning my authorial intentions but not about them. Moreover, those are the beliefs upon which I acted in conceiving of the Morphogenetic Approach, reflexively deliberating on how best to explore it, and determining the form and sequence of books in which to present it.
Being human – and therefore fallible – I admit to irritation when reviewers exercise a dictatorship of the third-person. In the first-person I have warrant to know and say what I was trying to do in proceeding from (a) to (b) to (c) and only I can know that I still have (d) in mind. Of course, that trajectory (sequence of books) may be ill-conceived or even misguided, as each and every reader has the right to judge it, but that is not the same thing as claiming to know my thoughts better than I do or substituting their interpretations for my intentions. Since self-warrant is something I claim and defend for every (normal) human subject in his or her intentional acts, it is ‘only human’ that I do object when a reviewer asserts that I have ‘been blind to the interpersonal’ (in early works), have ‘forgotten about structure and culture’ (in later works) or have now ‘become absorbed in the intrapersonal’ (as if this will be the case in future works).
However, none of the above deprives (third-person) critics and commentators of a generous role within the context of discovery and not merely one confined to the context of justification. For example, they may know more about the formation of my intentions (and particularly their context) than I was aware of myself; they might accurately fault the (sociological) beliefs that grounded my project; and it is highly probable that they would be able to design a more economical trajectory for its development. That is one of the points and benefits of third-person critique. All I am seeking is acceptance of my self-warrant to explain the ‘how’ and the ‘why’ of the actual trajectory taken. This, the author alone can give because in reality and in real time the development of an explanatory programme is not pre-defined from the start. Rather, each book sets the problems to be tackled in its successor(s) and thus inscribes the next section of the pathway, without one having any clear idea about how many more sections will be required before reaching that rather indefinite goal, the ‘finished project’. Of course, the account furnished is a reflexive personal judgement, which is necessarily fallible.
All social theorizing takes off from a springboard that is itself theoretical. That springboard is akin to what Gouldner called the ‘domain assumptions’ we make and to Merton’s image of our clambering on the shoulders of giants. Rather than labouring all of this in personal terms, I think it suffices to say that the philosophical under-labouring supplied by Critical Realism provides the backcloth for all my works, except for the first – whose aporias the realist philosophy of social science filled in. These commonalities between Critical Realism and the Morphogenetic Approach can be summarized as (i) promoting relationality (namely that sociology’s very claim to existence derives from the fact that its key concepts are relational in kind, often referring to emergent yet irreducible properties capable of exercising causal powers); (ii) that the historical configurations and courses taken by social structures are morphogenetic in nature (conforming to none of the traditional analogies – mechanical, organic, linguistic or cybernetic – but being shaped and re-shaped by the interplay between their constituents, parts and persons, thus meaning that society is open-ended and not ‘finalistic’ in its elaboration); (iii) that the Wertrationalität is crucial to the sociological enterprise if it is to serve a humanizing cause. This exceeds an abstracted defence of humanism (which reduces to ideology) and advances an image of the social commensurate with human thriving. It is central to society’s members, who should never be seen as mere exponents of instrumental rationality, as is the case for homo sociologicus and his siblings; to social institutions, which are both sources and bearers of value orientations; and to social theorists themselves who, far from celebrating the death of man, the de-centring of the subject or the dissolution of the human person into uncommitted and socially non-committal acts of self-reinvention, should uphold the needs and potentials of human beings. Indeed, such human concerns define value relevance for sociology itself.
At the Start
From the start, each book set the problems to be tackled by its successor and thus defined the next section of the pathway without my having any clear idea about how many more sections would be required before reaching that rather indefinite goal, the ‘completed project’. Of course, the account furnished is a reflexive personal judgement, which is necessarily fallible. Re-reading its 800-plus pagesFootnote 9 I realized that every key element of the M/M approach was already there and replete with practical illustrations that have been used ever since. Please have a glance at Figure 1.1, which appeared in the first edition of the book and already depicts two full morphogenetic cycles.
Figure 1.1. Illustrative use of the Morphogenetic Approach in the book
All social theorizing takes off from a springboard that is itself theoretical. That springboard is what Gouldner called one’s ‘domain assumptions’. It also entails what Merton termed ‘clambering on the shoulders of giants’. Rather than labouring all of this in personal terms, I think it suffices to say that Critical Realism provided the philosophical backcloth for all my works except this first one. In a nutshell, the commonalities between Critical Realism, as a philosophy of science, and the Morphogenetic Approach, as a theoretical approach within sociology, can be summarized in the following three points: (i) that relationality is central (sociology’s very claim to existence derives from the fact that its key concepts are relational in kind, often referring to emergent yet irreducible properties and powers);
(ii) that the configurations and courses taken by social structures are morphogenetic in nature, being shaped and re-shaped by the interplay between their constituent parts and persons. Thus the social order is open-ended and not ‘finalistic’ in its elaboration over time;
(iii) that the sociological enterprise is evaluative (emancipatory) if it is to serve a humanizing cause. It follows that society’s members should never be seen as mere exponents of instrumental rationality, as is the case for homo economicus and his siblings; it applies to social institutions, which are both sources and bearers of value orientations; it requires of social theorists themselves that they should uphold the needs and potentials of human beings, rather than celebrating the death of man, the de-centring of the subject or the dissolution of the human person into uncommitted acts of self-reinvention.
In Social Origins of Educational Systems (1979), the Morphogenetic Approach can be found not only outlined but already put to work. That is, working at disengaging where State Educational Systems came from and what new causal powers they exerted after their elaboration. Crucially, the emergent systems differed according to their centralized or decentralized organizational structures. This raised a major philosophical problem. It was being claimed that educational systems possessed properties emergent from the relations between their parts – summarized as centralization and decentralization – that exercised causal powers. However, these two properties could not be attributes of people, who cannot be centralized or decentralized, just as no system can possess the reflexivity, intentionality and commitment of the agents whose actions first produced and then continuously sustained these forms of state education.
The issue was immediately assimilated by leading social theorists to ‘the problem of structure and agency’, although this is only part of a broader problem about whether or not sociology needs to endorse a stratified social ontology. This kind of ontology entails that the properties and powers pertaining to a ‘higher’ stratum are dependent upon relations at a ‘lower’ stratum, whilst the former are irreducible to the latter. Its direct implication is that the ‘problem of structure and agency’ cannot be solved (or, as some put it, ‘be transcended’) by eliding the two into an amalgam, through holding them to be mutually constitutive.Footnote 10 It is also why the ‘problem of structure and agency’, as part of a broader ontological issue, cannot be dismissed as ‘tiresome’ or ‘old fashioned’. This problem consists in what Dahrendorf rightly called ‘the vexatious fact of society’: we the people shape it, whilst it re-shapes us as we go about changing it, individually and collectively, a process I term the ‘Double Morphogenesis’. The problem does not vanish because we become vexed by it and tried to turn our backs upon it. Yet, its intransigence does explain why many social theorists were indeed experiencing vexation, at the end of the 1970s. They did so precisely because existing philosophies of social science could not articulate a stratified ontology of society. Instead, they proffered only reductionist approaches – methodological individualism and methodological holism/collectivism – as unsatisfactory in principle as they were unhelpful in practice.
Hence my next pair of books, on culture and structure respectively – Culture and Agency (1988)Footnote 11 and Realist Social Theory (1995)Footnote 12 – had two aims: to develop a stratified social ontology along the lines of transcendental realism (Bhaskar’s seminal Possibility of Naturalism was also published in 1979)Footnote 13 and then to advance this in the form of a framework that was of practical use to those working on substantive sociological problems. Hence, the Morphogenetic Approach acquired its full philosophical underpinnings. These account for the mature morphogenetic framework standing in contradistinction to any form of social theory that endorsed the conflation of structure and agency or, more properly structure, culture and agency: ‘upward conflation’ (methodological individualism), ‘downward conflation’ (methodological holism, whether Marxist or functionalist in orientation) and ‘central conflation’ (the then fashionable structuration theory of Giddens).
Resisting the Three Forms of Conflation
In their introductory chapters, both books announced their principled resistance to conflationary theorizing. Yet why promote the term ‘conflation’ rather than adhering to the old terminology of ‘determinism’? Had I been writing a little earlier when the problem was conceived in terms of ‘the individual versus society’ this would not have been necessary. Sociological theorists then divided quite neatly into those subscribing to ‘downward reduction’ in which social structure basically worked ‘down’ to shape the individuals falling within its ambit; as in vulgar Marxist accounts based on materialism or Parsonian normative functionalism grounded in the idealism of the central value system. Conversely, methodological individualists endorsed a social ontology in which the ultimate constituents of society were individual people and the task was to explain how their combinations (generally meaning no more than aggregation) worked ‘upwards’ to shape the contours of the social order. Therefore, both these types of conflation also entailed epiphenomenalism; the determined element was fundamentally held to be passive (being formed rather than in any way being formative) and lacking in any causal powers to make a difference, being ‘dependent variables’.
However, the problem was that there were not just two but three ways of endorsing conflation – not merely upwards or downwards but in the middle. For decades epiphenomenalism had exercised some of the best philosophers of social science because the supposedly inert and determined element repeatedly gave testimony of not merely being interconnected with the independent variable, the determining side of the divide (this was after all what they were maintaining), but rather that there was an interplay between them, impossible unless causal properties and powers were granted to both.Footnote 14 What I called ‘central conflation’, namely Giddens’s ‘third way’, claimed to transcend the dualism between structure and agency by replacing it with duality in which the two were considered mutually constitutive and thus necessarily linked. The core notion that agents could not act without drawing on structural properties whose own existence depended upon their instantiation by agents – structure being presented as the ‘medium and outcome of practices’ – proved extremely popular amongst social scientists in the 1980s and 1990s, but I think I have written enough against this approach to avoid repetition here.Footnote 15
My attraction to Critical Realism was for its advocacy of a stratified social ontology that eschewed conflation by accentuating the importance of emergent properties at the levels of both structure and agency, but held these causal powers to be distinct from and irreducible to one another. Thus, please forget all those invented biographies according to which I ‘fell under the influence’ of Roy Bhaskar, who always detested being portrayed as a ‘guru’. On the contrary, I read a lot of CR publications in the 1980s and finally met and became friends with Roy in the early 1990s, a friendship that continued until his death.Footnote 16
What made this an egalitarian relationship was that Roy fully embraced the role of being the ‘philosophical under-labourer’ for CR, despite many rebuffs from Britain’s more stolid Departments of Philosophy. Reciprocally, my own interests were in developing useful and useable social theory, where there was plenty to do. In formal terms, the traction provided by the stratified social ontology and its recognition of emergent properties was the following:
Properties and powers of some strata are anterior to those of others precisely because the latter emerge from the former over time, for emergence takes time since it derives from interaction and its consequences which necessarily occur in time [my italics].Footnote 17
Nevertheless, as I had realized in the 1980s, Critical Realism had as yet no conception of culture and was also simply better at conceptualizing ‘structure’ than ‘agency’. Nonetheless, it saluted the existence of both. To me, the supreme theoretical contribution of CR was the insistence that all social action took place in a structural context (it was structurally dependent) as there is no such thing as contextless action, in which actors and agents needed some idea of what they were doing (concept-dependence), and intentional agents (agential-dependence) without whom nothing would happen.
However, this very welcome social ontology set as many problems as it solved for the working social scientist.Footnote 18 Specifically, ‘culture’ remained the poor relation in terms of its conceptualization. Yet culture is structured too and to incorporate it into the M/M approach required that it be viewed as articulated in different ways rather than accepting the homogeneous notion inherited from anthropology that it consisted of shared beliefs, norms and practices common to all members of any ‘society’ from the tribe onwards.Footnote 19 That was the main theoretical challenge of Culture and Agency: to remove it from Cinderella status by working on the distinction between the ‘Cultural System’ level at any given place and period (distinguishing its internal contradictions and complementarities) and the ‘Socio-Cultural’ level (where different groups drew upon components of the CS to advance or defend their objective interests against others pursuing incompatible ends).
What this announced – though not too many appreciated its implications, the exception being Doug Porpora – was that time was up for the binary ‘structure and agency problem’. The problematic theoretical issue had become triadic. This derives directly from taking the three points of the CR manifesto seriously: that for any process to capture the generative process of social stability and change it needs to include structured social relations (context-dependence), human ideas (concept-dependence) and human actions (activity-dependence).
Thus, I coined an acronym in 2013, namely that any adequate theory about the social order has to come in a SAC, incorporating structure, agency and culture.Footnote 20 ‘The problem in hand will govern which of the three is accorded most attention and the acronym SAC is thus not a rank ordering of priority between the three elements. This is a logical point; if some things are deemed indispensable to something else, it makes no sense to ask if one is more indispensable than the other(s).’Footnote 21 Nevertheless, to conflate culture and structure is no solution to theorizing the interplay among the triadic elements.
Continuing the theme of what the realist social ontology leaves social scientists to fill in, we come to the constitution of agency itself. CR concentrated upon agents mainly as responsible for introducing social transformation or perpetuating social reproduction, all structures being continuously activity-dependent. Realism had too little to say about ‘persons’: about who they were in their rich but concrete singularity and about what moved them to act, be this individual or collective action. This aporia in realism proved particularly dangerous at a time when social theory welcomed that vacuum. Sociological imperialism had gathered strength and, especially in the form of Social Constructionism, presented the ‘person’ exclusively as society’s gift: in Rom Harré’s words, persons were ‘cultural artefacts’.Footnote 22 Hence, Being Human (2000)Footnote 23 was not a turn away from structure and culture. It was a turn towards the reconceptualization of human beings, people who were inescapably born into a social context ‘not of their making or choosing’ and ineluctably confronted cultural structures in most of their doings – two different kinds of structures that Culture and Agency argued should not be taken to be homologous, much less homogeneous, throughout the course of history.
Being Human could fairly be called a polemical book. It sought to resist sociological imperialism and its representation of persons as remorselessly and exhaustively social. Instead, it began by emphasizing that constituted as human beings are and the world being the way it is, interaction between the two is a matter of necessity. This means that each and every one of us has to develop a (working) relationship with every order of natural reality: nature, practice and the social. Distinctions between the Natural, Practical and Social Orders are real, although it is usually the case that they can only be grasped analytically because they are subject to considerable empirical superimposition (as with the artificial swimming pool, its instructor and the swimmer-to-be with his/her hopes and fears). Nevertheless, that does not preclude the fact that human subjects confront dilemmas, which are different in kind, when encountering each of the three orders. Neither does it diminish the imperative for human survival to establish sustainable and sustaining relations with each. Nor is it incompatible with the fact that human beings, characterized by what Charles TaylorFootnote 24 calls the ‘significance feature’, invest more of themselves in one order than in others – even though this must mean the subordination rather than the exclusion of other orders.
In other words, we all have concerns in every sphere of natural reality but we prioritize our concerns – loving ‘in due order’, to use St Augustine’s words.Footnote 25 Indeed, it is precisely our particular constellation of concerns that defines each of us as a particular person, with strict personal identity. In short, ‘who we are is what we care about’.Footnote 26 And the greatest of these concerns, in relation to our personal thriving and for explaining in which social roles we invest ourselves (thus acquiring social identities), are our ‘ultimate concerns’.
However, even our ‘ultimate concerns’, those which we care about most, do not automatically define courses of action for us. Each person has to engage in practical reasoning about ‘what is to be done’ in order that his or her life promotes their ‘ultimate concern’ but also accommodates their other concerns, which cannot be repudiated. In short, they have to work out a modus vivendi, commensurate with their values but also sustainable as a lived reality. As social beings we have to find a place for ourselves in society – ideally, one which is expressive of who we are by virtue of the roles we actively personifyFootnote 27 rather than executing their requirements robotically. In trying to find such a place, persons necessarily confront structural and cultural properties as constraints and enablements, as vested or objective interests, as motivating or discouraging influences – ‘thrown’ as they are into their natal contexts and venturing as they do (and have to) into further contexts beyond family bounds.
Reflexivity as Mediating Social Forms
That is the link between Being Human and the following book, Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (2003).Footnote 28 Being Human is the pivotal work. It ‘descends’ to the personal level in order to conceptualize unique human persons – the ultimate moving agents of all that is social, though not the only ‘powerful particulars’ constituting society. Thereafter, the theoretical trajectory begins its re-ascent into the social world of positions, roles, organizations, institutions and, eventually, the global social system.
The social order is different in kind from its component members. On that we can all agree, even if it is conceptualized by some as being no more than the aggregate effect of people’s conceptions and doings. The crucial difference is that no social system or social organization truly possesses self-awareness, whereas every single (normal) member of society is a self-conscious being. Thus, however differently the social maybe be conceptualized in various schools of thought – from an objective and emergent stratum of reality to a negotiated and objectified social construct – the social remains different from its component members in this crucial respect of lacking self-consciousness. It follows that a central problem for social theorists must be to provide an answer to the question ‘What difference does the self-awareness of its members make to the nature of the social?’
Historically, the answers given have varied from ‘all the difference’, as the response shared by idealists, to ‘no difference at all’, as the reply of hard-line materialists. Today, although the variety of answers has increased, the question remains intransigent but cannot be evaded. For example, Social Constructionists cannot dodge the issue by regarding all societal features as products of ‘objectification’ by its members. This is because each and every person can mentally deliberate about what is currently objectified in relation to himself or herself (in principle they can ask the reflexive question, ‘Should I take this for granted?’). Conversely, no objectified ‘entity’ can be reflexive about itself in relation to individuals (it can never, as it were, ask ‘Could this construct be presented more convincingly?’). The unavoidability of this issue means that the argument about ‘objectivity and subjectivity’ is as fundamental as the argument about ‘collectivism and individualism’. Not only are these two issues of equal importance but also they are closely intertwined.
The ‘problem of structure and agency’ has a great deal in common with the ‘problem of objectivity and subjectivity’. Both raise the same issue about the relationship between their component terms, which entails questioning their respective causal powers. Once we have started to talk about causal powers, it is impossible to avoid talking about the ontological status of those things to which causal powers are attributed or from which they are withheld.
However, again a popular response to these two recalcitrant problems was the (conflationary) suggestion that we should transcend both of them by the simple manoeuvre of treating them as the two faces of a single coin. Transcending the divide rests upon conceptualizing ‘cultures’ and ‘agents’ as ontologically inseparable because each enters into the other’s constitution. Therefore, they should be conceptualized as one mutually constitutive amalgam. In a single leap-frog move, all the previous difficulties can be left behind. This manoeuvre has direct implications for the question of ‘objectivity and subjectivity’. If ‘agency’ and ‘culture’ are conceptualized as being inseparable because they are held to be mutually constitutive, then this blurring of subject and object necessarily challenges the very possibility of reflexivity itself. If the two are an amalgam, it is difficult to see how a person or a group is able to reflect critically or creatively upon their social conditions or context.
Conversely, by upholding the distinction between objectivism and subjectivism we can acknowledge that agents do indeed reflexively examine their personal concerns in the light of their social circumstances and evaluate their circumstances in the light of their concerns. Only if agents are sufficiently distinct from their social contexts can they reflect upon them as subject to object. They do so by deliberating subjectively, under their own descriptions, about what courses of action to take in the face of constraints and enablements; about the value to them of defending or promoting vested interests; about their willingness to pay the opportunity costs entailed in aspiring to various goals; and about whether or not circumstances allow them to become more ambitious in their life-politics or induce them to be more circumspect.
This is what Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation is about, namely conceptualizing the interplay between personal subjective properties and powers, and objective social properties and powers. Specifically, it is argued that personal reflexivity mediates the effects of objective social forms upon us. It gives an answer to the question ‘How does structure influence agency?’ Bhaskar had rightly insisted that ‘the causal power of social forms is mediated through human agency’,Footnote 29 although he did not unpack what constituted mediation. My contribution was to propose that reflexivity performs this mediatory role by virtue of the fact that we deliberate about ourselves in relation to the social situations that we confront, certainly fallibly, certainly incompletely and necessarily under our own descriptions, because that is the only way we can know anything. To consider human reflexivity playing that role of mediation also means entertaining the fact that we are dealing with two ontologies: the objective pertaining to social emergent properties and the subjective pertaining to agential emergent properties. What is entailed by the above is that subjectivity is not only (a) real, but also (b) irreducible, and (c) that it possesses causal efficacy.Footnote 30
However, some have contested ‘mediation’ itself and the role assigned to it in agents’ variable responses to their cultural and structural contexts. Yet without allowing for the personal powers of actors and agents, it is impossible to explain the variability of their action in the same circumstances. Nevertheless, Manicas asks ‘Why postulate the existence of structure or culture as causally relevant if, to be causally effective, these must be mediated by social actors?’Footnote 31 Since he leaves the question there, it can be presumed that he holds it to be unanswerable. However, culture and structure could only be held causally irrelevant if what was being mediated was held to be invented then and there by actors whose personal powers were entirely responsible for it. This ‘ban’ upon ‘mediation’ is just as untenable as holding that the outside wires bringing electricity to my house are entirely responsible for the working of my electrical appliances and that the existence of the national grid is causally irrelevant.
This reflects a Giddensian instantiation of cultural properties by agents before they are allowed any place in explanation; far from impinging upon agents, it is human subjects who bring them into play. Much the same can be said of John Searle’s notion of ‘the Background’ which agents voluntaristically draw into an account to disambiguate statements that require contextualization. Similarly, Manicas relegates cultural and structural properties to being ‘materials at hand’, without the capacity to exert causal powers, but also without any explanation of why some of these are within easy reach of certain actors but out of reach for others.Footnote 32
It is probably helpful to specify what kinds of subjective properties and powers are presented as constitutive of the internal conversation as a mediatory process. I have termed it this way (like Peirce) to designate the manner in which we reflexively make our way through the world. This inner dialogue about ourselves in relation to society and vice versa is what makes (most of us) ‘active agents’, people who can exercise some governance in their own lives, as opposed to ‘passive agents’ to whom things merely happen.
Being an ‘active agent’ hinges on the fact that individuals develop and define their ‘ultimate concerns’ – those that matter to them most – and whose precise constellation makes for their concrete singularity as persons. No one can have an ultimate concern without doing something about it. Instead, each subject seeks to develop a course (or courses) of action to realize that concern by elaborating a ‘project’, in the (fallible) belief that to accomplish the project is to realize one’s concern. If such courses of action are successful, which can never be taken for granted, each person’s constellation of concerns, when dovetailed together, becomes translated into a set of established practices. This constitutes their personal modus vivendi. Through this modus vivendi, subjects live out their personal concerns within society as best they can. In shorthand, these components can be summarized in the formula <Concerns → Projects → Practices>. There is nothing idealistic here, because ‘concerns’ can be ignoble, ‘projects’ illegal and ‘practices’ illegitimate.
These are the kinds of mental activity that make up the strange reality of reflexivity, as part of broader human subjectivity. To accept reflexive activities as real and influential entails the endorsement of plural ontologies. In principle, this should not be a problem. The reality of what I have called the ‘internal conversation’ (also known as ‘self-talk’, ‘rumination’, ‘musement’, ‘inner dialogue’, ‘internal speech’, ‘intrapersonal communication’ etc.) does not mean that when we deliberate, when we formulate our intentions, when we design our courses of action or when we dedicate ourselves to concerns, such mental activities are like chairs or trees. Yet, this has nothing to do with whether or not they are real because reality itself is not homogeneous. The whole of natural reality cannot be confined to and defined in terms of the Enlightenment notion of ‘matter in motion’. Indeed, in post-positivistic science, physical reality is made up as much by quarks and genomes as it is by magnetism and gravity or by rocks and plants.
Abandonment of that Enlightenment assumption paves the way to the acceptance of plural ontologies. It is now more than fifty years since Popper distinguished his Three Worlds as ontologically distinct sub-worlds: the world of physical states, the world of mental states and the world of objective ideas. What is important about this for the present argument is that Popper put his finger on the genuine oddity about World 2, the world of mental states, namely that it is objectively real and yet it has a subjective ontology, as John Searle was later to agree.
What the internal conversation describes is how and why each and every person deliberates reflexively, in their own fallible terms, about their personal concerns in relation to their social context and about their contexts in the light of their concerns.Footnote 33 In the process, they are shaping themselves and contributing to (re-)shaping the social world. The process of reflexivity is not seen as one homogeneous mode of inner deliberation but as exercised through different modalities – ‘Communicative’, ‘Autonomous’ and ‘Meta-Reflexivity’ – whose dominance for particular persons derives from their relationship to their natal context in conjunction with their personal concerns.
The above exploratory notions were ventured in Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation on the basis of interviewing a mere twenty subjects picked only for their social diversity. A larger sample (of 174) was then traced systematically in the book Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility (2007). As generative mechanisms, different dominant modes of reflexivity have internal consequences for their practitioners and distinctive external consequences for the social order. Internally, the connections were traced between practice of the different modalities and individual patterns of social mobility by interviewing subjects about their life histories: Communicative Reflexivity is associated with maintaining social immobility, Autonomous reflexivity with pursuing upward social mobility, and Meta-Reflexivity with a restless social volatility.
Externally, the effects are that the Communicatives make a huge contribution to social stability and integration by their evasion of constraints and enablements, through endorsing their natal contexts, seeking to replicate them, and through actively constituting a dense micro-world that reconstitutes their ‘contextual continuity’ and projects it forward in time. Overall, that makes their contribution to the social order one of morphostasis. Conversely, Autonomous subjects act strategically, seeking to avoid society’s ‘snakes’ and to ride up its ‘ladders’, thus augmenting the ‘contextual discontinuity’ which went into their own making and increasing social productivity through their energetic exertions. Meta-reflexives are society’s subversive agents, immune to both the bonuses associated with social ‘enablements’ and the penalties linked to ‘constraints’, thus resisting the main engines of social guidance/control through their willingness to pay the price of subversion themselves. In turn, through living out the ‘contextual incongruity’ that formed them, their consistent endorsement of a ‘vocation’ meant that their main contribution was to ensure that counter-cultural values retained their salience in the social order, at precisely the time when the global hegemony of capitalism seemed unassailable. In brief, the practitioners of Autonomous and Meta-Reflexivity as their dominant mode are the agents promoting morphogenesis, as opposed to endorsing ‘business as usual’.
We should, however, resist treating this as a typology. It is not because we all employ all modes, probably every day, depending upon the skills we command and the situational demands we confront. To stress this I gave an invented example of someone unused to toothache and unacquainted with dentistry who practised all four reflexive modes before agreeing to the extraction of the tooth.Footnote 34 One of my fears when working on this trilogy was that I would open an in-flight magazine at a page titled ‘Discover your own mentality’.
The Reflexive Imperative (2012) goes further, to maintain that millennial change is increasingly re-shaping and distancing the social order from the parameters of modernity. The global creation and geographical redistribution of new opportunities (almost occluded by the then current, unilateral preoccupation with risk in society), coupled with migration, increasing education, and the proliferation of novel skills, re-bound upon the nature of reflexivity itself. These prompt a shift away from the ‘Communicative’ mode, buttressing the aspirations and practices of times past, because social reproduction becomes just as reflexive an enterprise as those that promote yet further transformations – and one that is harder to realize. Together these changes swell the ranks of those practising the ‘autonomous’ mode, propitious to the new global Leviathans: transnational bureaucracy and multinational enterprises. Most important of all, nascent globalization disproportionately increases ‘Meta-Reflexivity’, practitioners of which can also be seen as patrons of a new civil society expressive of humanistic values.
However, the shift towards the ‘socio-logic of opportunity’, which prompts this intensification of reflexivity and change in its dominant modes, 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 actionFootnote 35 – a decline that becomes precipitous once (partial) morphostasis gives way to the untramelled morphogenesis characterizing the shift towards one global system in the new millennium – or so it was argued in The Reflexive Imperative.Footnote 36
However, this trio of books on intrapersonal deliberations about society will still leave the morphogenetic project unfinished. They will have dealt with the aggregate effects of the dialectic between changing human subjectivity and the objective transformation of society alone – if modernity gives way to untrammelled morphogenesis and its generative mechanism, namely for variety to produce yet more variety. Yet, it is imperative that such aggregate effects be connected to the collective action of groups and their consequences as Corporate agents. The two need to be interlinked, precisely because, unlike Ulrich Beck, I do not consider that the social structure of the future diminishes to ‘institutionalized individualism’ and neither do I accept, as Zygmunt Bauman argues, that ‘liquidity’ is displacing structuring – much less that it can pretend to represent the form of trans-modern society. There never is an unstructured social world and there never is a (normal) human person without reflexively defined projects.
Even that is not quite ‘The End’. Globalization undoubtedly accompanies 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’. In so doing, Critical Realists would regard this as an observation (and extrapolation) confined to the empirical level. What it crucially omits are the new structures generating the detectable flows at a deeper ontological level. If the new millennium has truly begun to sever its links with modernity, including all those adjectives (post-, late, high, second-wave, as well as the ubiquitous ‘beyond’) that merely signal adhesion to it, then we need to identify what is generating a true disjunction.
This was explicitly examined in the research project From Modernity to the Morphogenetic Society?, as an historically unique époque in which morphostatic and morphogenetic cycles no longer circulate simultaneously, with the former restraining the latter and protracting variants upon the themes of modernity. It is the project for which I was appointed to found the Centre for Social Ontology (CSO) at the Swiss Federal University in Lausanne (EPFL) in 2010. Since then, our group of collaboratorsFootnote 37 have produced a book-a-year on ‘Social Morphogenesis’ addressing the above question mark. But still, five volumes later,Footnote 38 we did not feel justified in announcing the advent of a new social formation – three years before the contingent occurrence of the current pandemic.
Had we concluded otherwise, that could indeed have been ventured as the end of the trajectory whose course I have been describing here. The CSO moved to the Université de Grenoble Alpes in 2018, where Ismael Al-Amoudi took over as Director. Our writers’ collective wanted to stay together because of our enjoyable productivity (which continued with four books on human essentialism and artificial intelligence). However, we are all currently in our internationally varied versions of lockdown. The likelihood is that, rather than adding to the expected avalanche of books on the pandemic, we will seek to theorize the various manifestations and impacts of a concept that Critical Realism has always acknowledged, but said very little about, namely the unpredictable interventions of contingency in the historical panorama of societal change. And if we do go down this road, it may only be to anticipate Armageddon a little ahead of our fellow global citizens. Then we would not be confronting morphostasis or morphogenesis but facing morphonecrosis.Footnote 39
