Chapters abstracts for my new book

I’m so excited this is finally going into production 🤗

Chapter 1: What does it mean to live in a digital age?

This chapter introduces the central dilemma of conceptualizing sociotechnical change without resorting to platitudinous claims about ‘living in a digital age’. It explores how everyday experiences with digital technology have altered social life, using illustrative real-world examples while still retaining a conceptual focus. The chapter argues that while digital technologies have transformed information access and social interaction, we need a more robust analytical framework than technological determinism or epochal generalization. It establishes the book’s aim to investigate the ontological status of personhood amid digital transformation, proposing a sociological recovery of agency as central to understanding contemporary sociotechnical change.

Chapter 2: Personal Reflexivity and Social Change

This chapter critically examines influential accounts of ‘late modernity’ from theorists like Giddens, Bauman, and Beck, particularly their claims about detraditionalization. It demonstrates how these approaches recognize the crucial relationship between personal reflexivity and social change but ultimately fail to develop adequate conceptual tools for analyzing this relationship empirically. The chapter reveals how Giddens’s structurationist approach, despite its sophistication, creates an oscillation between voluntarism and determinism that cannot properly account for the variable ways in which agents relate to their social environments. This critical analysis lays groundwork for a more robust account of reflexivity that can better grasp how digital mediation transforms everyday experience.

Chapter 3: The Realist Account of Reflexivity

This chapter introduces Margaret Archer’s realist theory of reflexivity as an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between personal and social change. It outlines Archer’s ‘three-stage model’ of structure and agency, contrasting it with ‘two-stage models’ that black-box reflexivity. The chapter explores how reflexivity operates through internal conversation, manifesting in four distinct modes (communicative, autonomous, meta-reflexive and fractured) that condition how individuals navigate social constraints and enablements. Focusing on the relational and cultural dimensions of reflexivity, it demonstrates how ideas and relationships shape our deliberative processes and life projects, creating a foundation for understanding how digital platforms might transform these fundamental aspects of agency.

Chapter 4: Biography as an Ontological Category

This chapter develops biography as a critical ontological category for social analysis, moving beyond the limitations of concepts like Giddens’s ‘fateful moments’. It draws on Archer’s morphogenetic approach to conceptualize biography not as a sequence of discrete turning points but as a temporally extended process through which persons become who they are. Through critical engagement with biographical research, the chapter demonstrates how treating biography as ontologically robust provides a more secure foundation for understanding social change. It concludes by proposing two essential concepts (psychobiography and personal morphogenesis) as tools for analyzing how individuals navigate social transformation through ongoing cycles of change and stability.

Chapter 5: Personal Morphogenesis

This chapter elaborates the concept of personal morphogenesis as a framework for understanding how people change over time through their engagements with the social world. It explores how personal morphogenesis unfolds through three temporal relations: past conditioning (‘Me’), present action (‘I’), and future orientation (‘You’). Drawing on Derek Layder’s concept of psychobiography, the chapter demonstrates how social contexts and reflexive responses accumulate over time to shape who we become. Rather than reducing the individual to an individualistic frame, this approach recovers the person as a stratified entity whose biographical emergence is central to understanding social change, establishing a conceptual foundation for analyzing how platforms shape this process.

Chapter 6: Sociotechnical Transformation

This chapter traces the historical development of digital technologies from early utopian visions to contemporary critical perspectives on platforms. It examines how the initial rhetoric of technological utopianism has given way to growing concerns about surveillance, manipulation, and digital power. The chapter offers a periodization of digital change from Web 1.0 to social platforms to generative AI, highlighting how technological shifts have transformed user experiences and infrastructural arrangements. It pays particular attention to the rise of “big data” as both technological development and ideological project, revealing how the epistemic claims of data science have contributed to an evisceration of human agency in platform contexts.

Chapter 7: Personal Reflexivity

This chapter analyzes how digital platforms transform personal reflexivity through three key mechanisms: the multiplication of communication channels, the digitalization of the archive, and the problem of cultural abundance. It demonstrates how these changes create conditions of distraction and cognitive triage, making sustained reflection increasingly difficult in platform environments. The chapter introduces an adverbial approach to understanding platform effects, focusing on how reflexivity becomes distracted rather than what people reflect upon. By examining the proliferation of digital interruptions and cultural options, it reveals how platforms shape the temporal structure of reflexive deliberation, with significant consequences for personal identity and life projects.

Chapter 8: Collective Reflexivity

This chapter investigates how platforms transform collective action and social movements through two key mechanisms: the ease of mobilization and the rise of computational politics. It develops the concept of ‘fragile movements’ to describe how platforms enable rapid assembly while undermining the organizational capacities needed for sustained collective action. Alongside ‘distracted people’ these ‘fragile movements’ create a problematic dynamic where democratic steering of sociotechnical change becomes increasingly difficult. The chapter examines how collective reflexivity, the capacity of groups to deliberate about shared concerns, is simultaneously enhanced and compromised by platform mediation, with profound implications for normative transformation in digital societies.

Chapter 9: Platformised Socialisation

This concluding chapter synthesizes the book’s arguments to address how socialization processes are transformed under platform conditions. It challenges simplistic notions like ‘digital natives’ while acknowledging the profound ways platforms reshape how people become who they are. The chapter examines how the cultural context for socialization changes through platform mediation, particularly in how potential and possible selves are encountered and constructed. It concludes by situating the analysis within broader questions of epochal change, arguing that while platforms fundamentally alter the parameters within which human agency unfolds, they do not create wholly new types of people. Instead, they reconfigure the temporal and relational dimensions of personal becoming in ways that demand new conceptual tools for social analysis.

#archer #humanAgency #MorphogeneticApproach #PlatformAndAgency #reflexivity #socialRealism

Following our recent symposium we are inviting short blog posts (750-1500 words) reflecting on the intellectual legacy of Margaret Archer. These will be published on the Critical Realism Network blog. Here are some examples of themes these posts could address:

1. Archer’s Place in Sociological Theory:  the ways in which Archer’s ideas have been received, challenged, and transformed within the discipline. 
2. Archer’s Work within the Larger Dialogues of Critical Realism: the ways in which Archer’s ideas have contributed to and challenged the critical realist tradition. 
3. The Global Reception of Archer’s Work: the ways in which Archer’s ideas have been received, interpreted and adapted in different places. We want to explore both Archer’s role in the internationalization of British sociology, as well as the reception of her work in different countries of the Global North and Global South.
4. Archer’s Work Beyond Critical Realism: the ways in which Archer’s work has been influenced by and has influenced traditions, debates and issues beyond critical realism, such as pragmatism, moral philosophy and the philosophy of science.

We welcome submissions from scholars at all stages of their careers, including graduate students and early-career researchers. We also encourage interdisciplinary perspectives and contributions from scholars working in related fields, such as philosophy, anthropology, and political science.

If you’re interested in submitting a post, please contact Mark Carrigan with your idea initially.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/08/%f0%9f%93%8dcall-for-blog-posts-the-legacy-of-margaret-archer/

#criticalRealism #margaretArcher #MorphogeneticApproach #socialMorphogenesis #socialRealism

This is a useful concept from Andrew Dryhurst in a recent paper in JCR. I’ve been prone to arguing for the same framing by talking about the need to historicise AI, in terms of a broader history of digitalisation then platformisation. I think Dryhurst’s framing here helps me account for how a particular framing of AI emerges both from failing to historicise it, as well as contributes to making it more difficult to do so in the future:

Traditionally, a large amount of philosophical functionalism has pervaded the AI space (Bryson Citation2019; Searle Citation1984), which has served to underpin an instrumentalist understanding of AI technology in much of the social science literature on the topic. Instrumentalism here refers to AI being understood as a tool and solely in terms of what it does. This is of course necessary at a certain level, given the wide-reaching scope of AI-use cases, the diversity of models and training sets, and the opacity that frequently surrounds AI’s societal deployment (O’Neil Citation2017). Nevertheless, instrumental notions of AI are inescapably presentist in their analytical scope, and it is important to consider that different AI are themselves embedded in an enormous variety of material relations and processes. AI are constructed and deployed by agents who are imbued with their own structural and institutional contexts, interests, ideals, and situational logics. A particular company’s AI systems are necessarily intertwined with the dynamics of (inter)national regulations, supply chains, and (national) accumulation regimes, as well as corporate agents’ reflexive and culturally conditioned actions in and through time. That is, AI are open complex systems embedded in other open complex systems.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14767430.2023.2279950#abstract

I think you can make this point without the CR vocabulary but it is a very important point which is very powerfully made here:

there is a research gap to be filled through tracing AI’s conceptual and material development in relation to the morphogenetically derived systemic imperatives traversing the political economy of the Internet and its history. For example, the ubiquitous deployment of AI models across all aspects of society presupposes questions about attribution concerning the datasets that are fed into different models; the transparency of data collection and processing; and the complex regulatory challenges that widescale AI deployment creates

And this is exactly what I’m interested in addressing, particularly the notion of models as cultural technologies, even if I arrived there through a slightly different route:

Similarly, the recursive and emergent consequences of people’s interactions with powerful AI models across industry and society make the models akin to cultural substrates from which particular worldviews may be inscribed and cultivated. To paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, the model may well be the message (Bratton and Agüera y Arcas Citation2022). All of these connote significant economic and social outcomes, and also exemplify a situation where the rise of powerful AI companies, possessive of their own intellectual property, datasets, and modelling practices, ought clearly to be situated within the accumulation imperatives and systemically persistent dynamics shaping the Internet’s development in capitalism because they are intertwined with and shaped by AI’s regulation and deployment as well.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/01/against-an-instrumentalist-understanding-of-ai-critical-realism-and-conceptualising-artificial-intelligence/

#artificialIntelligence #digital #morphogenesis #MorphogeneticApproach #ontology #philosophyOfTechnology #platformisation #platfromCapitalism

I just heard Doug Porpora give a great explanation of Archer’s morphogenetic approach as an approach to thinking about social change. The problem is that, as he put it, people get bogged down in all the t’s which litter these diagrams:

In contrast suggests Doug, rightly I think, the claim she is making is extremely straight forward. All action takes place in a context, which has structural and cultural aspects to it. How people act then contributes to either transforming or reproducing that context. It’s a post-Marxist formulation of Marx’s famous proposition from The Eighteenth Brumaire that men make history but they do not make it in conditions of their choosing, with a view to operationalising it at the level of social explanation.

It does this with what Doug describes the broadest ontology possible, in contrast to approaches which try and restrict the ontological repertoire e.g. praxis theorists building culture into action or structurationists redefining structure as culture. In this sense I think we can frame Maggie’s work as aligning with two important impulses in contemporary social theory she was (simplistically) seen as being hostile to: the post-Deleuzian affirmation of heterogeneity and the ANT insistence on opening up black boxes. The former because of this aforementioned ontological broadness, the latter because it went hand-in-hand with insisting we examine the independent variability (as she would put it) of these elements rather than assuming their connection by ontological fiat.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/08/01/a-simple-way-to-understand-margaret-archers-morphogenetic-approach/

#dougPorpora #margaretArcher #MorphogeneticApproach #socialRealism

August 3rd, 10am-5pm at the University of Warwick

Margaret Archer’s work has had a profound impact on social theory, challenging and reshaping our understanding of agency, structure, culture and their interplay in producing social change. Her contributions to the discipline have been wide-ranging, from critical interventions in conceptual debates to discussions about the nature of our times. Archer’s engagements with other thinkers, both within and outside the critical realist tradition, have shaped contemporary sociological debates.

Karim Knio – The Immanent Causality Morphogenetic Approach (TBC)

Juan David Parra – Archer’s Morphogenesis and the Political Economy of Education Systems

Krzysztof Wielecki – The presence of Margaret Scotford Archer in Polish sociology

Lakshman Wimalasena – Reflexivity in Practice: Advancing the Working Experience through a Reflexive [Co-Design] Intervention

Richard Remelie – Measuring reflexivity

Ka Lok Yip – Archerian Realism and Phenomenology: Friends or Foes?

Anzhela Popyk – Structure and Agency: Transnational and School Transitions of Ukrainian Forced Migrant Adolescents in Poland

Catherine Hastings – Developing critical realist empirical research using Archer’s explanatory framework

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/07/18/%f0%9f%93%8djoin-us-on-august-3rd-to-celebrate-the-intellectual-legacy-of-margaret-archer/

#criticalRealism #margaretArcher #MorphogeneticApproach #socialRealism

It should be accessible to most universities via the Cambridge University Press website.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/04/02/%f0%9f%93%8dout-now-margaret-archers-morphogenesis-answers-its-critics/

#criticalRealism #margaretArcher #MorphogeneticApproach

Tickets available here: https://www.britsoc.co.uk/events/key-bsa-events/one-day-symposium-on-the-legacy-of-margaret-archer/ abstract submission details below:

We are delighted to announce a one-day symposium dedicated to exploring and celebrating the legacy of Margaret Archer, one of the most influential sociological thinkers of our time. The aim of the symposium is to engage with and critically assess Archer’s contributions to social theory, her influences and engagements outside critical realism, the global reception of her work, and her place within the larger tradition of critical realism.

Margaret Archer’s work has had a profound impact on social theory, challenging and reshaping our understanding of agency, structure, culture and their interplay in producing social change. Her contributions to the discipline have been wide-ranging, from critical interventions in conceptual debates to discussions about the nature of our times. Archer’s engagements with other thinkers, both within and outside the critical realist tradition, have shaped contemporary sociological debates.

We invite papers that critically engage with Archer’s work on the following themes:

1. Archer’s Place in Sociological Theory: 

We encourage papers that explore the ways in which Archer’s ideas have been received, challenged, and transformed within the discipline. 

2. Archer’s Work within the Larger Dialogues of Critical Realism:  

We invite papers that critically assess the ways in which Archer’s ideas have contributed to and challenged the critical realist tradition. 

3. The Global Reception of Archer’s Work: 

We encourage papers that explore the ways in which Archer’s ideas have been received, interpreted and adapted in different places. We want to explore both Archer’s role in the internationalization of British sociology, as well as the reception of her work in different countries of the Global North and Global South.

4. Archer’s Work Beyond Critical Realism: 

We welcome papers that explore the ways in which Archer’s work has been influenced by and has influenced traditions, debates and issues beyond critical realism, such as pragmatism, moral philosophy and the philosophy of science.

We welcome submissions from scholars at all stages of their careers, including graduate students and early-career researchers. We also encourage interdisciplinary perspectives and contributions from scholars working in related fields, such as philosophy, anthropology, and political science.

The conference will take place on August 3rd, 2024, at The University of Warwick. The deadline for submission of 300 word abstracts is April 30th, and notifications of acceptance will be sent out by May 15th.

Please note we will seek to accommodate online talks but there will be a limited number of places available for this. Specify in your application if you want to participate remotely. If we don’t receive this notification we will assume you intend to present in person.

We look forward to welcoming you to this exciting conference and to engaging in lively discussions about the legacy of Margaret Archer’s work.

To contact the organisers (Sebastian Raza and Mark Carrigan) or to submit your abstracts please use this form. Please note this is not a registration form for the event. It will be a ticketed event advertised through the British Sociological Association website from May onwards.

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/02/26/call-for-papers-one-day-symposium-on-the-legacy-of-margaret-archer-august-3rd-university-of-warwick/

#criticalRealism #margaretArcher #MorphogeneticApproach