Abstract
This series of books examines a single question: ‘Will Late Modernity be replaced by a social formation that could be called Morphogenic Society?’ Social theorists of different persuasions have accepted that ‘morphogenesis’ has rapidly increased from the last decades of the Twentieth century (and some have presumed this means that processes of ‘morphostasis’ are in proportionate decline). Indeed, this view has been elevated to the status of ‘acceleration theory’ (Rosa 2003; Rosa and Scheuerman 2009), which was seriously critiqued in our last Volume 2014). Fundamentally, the proposition about the possible advent of a (global) Morphogenic Society concerns the transformation of a social formation. It is not synonymous with a tally of amounts or speed of social changes, always supposing the quantum of change could be counted and that ‘speed’ could be measured and be meaningful without reference to directionality. Instead and by definition, any social formation has a particular relational organization between its parts. No metrics putatively gauging the amount of change can capture this form of organization because empiricism necessarily ignores that which crucially differentiates one social formation from another. Yet, that is precisely our concern.
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- 1.
Defined as ‘those processes which tend to elaborate or change a system’s given form, structure or state’. (Buckley 1967: 58).
- 2.
In Volume II we maintained that this is not automatically the case, if only because new stabilization processes can come into being (2014, ‘Introduction: “Stability” or “Stabilization” – on which would Morphogenic Society depend?’, 1–20).
- 3.
For example, Ancient Indian society, as described by Weber, was not changeless but entailed an increasing ‘density’ of Caste rules and the Hindu cultural conspectus that elaborated on its ‘concomitant complementarities’ (Archer 1988: 209–19) and thus accentuated a distinctive directionality that reinforced its relational organization between kinship, caste and khama.
- 4.
Where arguments are often stated – or more often the practices of social scientists imply them – that these disciplines should be at least as preoccupied with the non-explanatory tasks of description, prediction and control. See Julian Reiss (2007).
- 5.
What neo-Pragmatism will get out of this redefinition of action (‘action should be conceptualized in terms of social practices’ (2009: 358)), is to become part of a flourishing new tendency (the practice-turn has been severely and brilliantly criticized in Porpora’s latest book, forthcoming 2015, Cambridge University Press), and perhaps to lead it if Bourdieu can only be deposed.
- 6.
Kilpinen noted Joas’s ‘curious reluctance to assimilate the ideas of C.S. Peirce’ (1998: 41).
- 7.
‘you are well aware that the exercise of control over your own habits, if not the most important business in life, is at least very near to being so’ (cited in Davis 1972: 111).
- 8.
Colapietro maintains of Peirce: ‘When I enter into the inner world, I take with me the booty from my exploits in the outer world, such things as my native language, any other languages I might know, a boundless number of visual forms, numerical systems and so on. The more booty I take to that secret hiding place, the more spacious that hiding place becomes… the domain of inwardness is not fixed in its limits; the power and wealth of signs that I borrow from others and create for myself determine the dimensions of my inwardness’. (1989: 115–6).
- 9.
Gross attempts to do this through adapting Tilly’s (1995: 42) ‘repertoires of contention’ to be ‘understood as a set of habits or practices enacted collectively by members of a group to make political claims and attempt to resolve problems they may be facing, from political disenfranchisement to economic marginalization’ (2009: 371).
- 10.
He maintains that unlike those that are materially grounded, ‘By contrast, the conceptual and semiotic systems have compositions, environments and structures but no mechanisms. The reason is that changeability (or energy) is the defining property of matter’ (2004a: 191–2).
- 11.
This debate about the social ontology and causal powers of culture has recently been re-run between me and Dave Elder-Vass (2011).
- 12.
Gorski seems unduly influenced by the erroneous commentary provided by Elder-Vass (2010), who fails to appreciate that ‘structural conditioning’ is not an exclusively historical (diachronic) phenomenon since there is never an unstructured world (‘all the lines are continuous’) nor is there ever an absence of structural conditioning (Archer 1995: 76). My ‘analytical dualism’ forms part of the explanatory programme, it is a very useful contrivance for practical theorists attempting to explain something in particular, i.e. break it up into analytical phases to explain the problem in hand, but it is never – even temporally – ontological or philosophical dualism (See also Archer Chap. 7 in this volume).
- 13.
Introduced by Ernst Bloch (1959).
- 14.
Thus matters could go either way and the following sentence could have been written by either of us: ‘rentier capitalism of the Microsoft type obstructs the questioning of intellectual property rights. On the other hand, the rise of mass self-communication enhances opportunity for change’ (p. 104).
- 15.
Lazega writes: ‘These technologies could be considered to be cultural/structural indicators of generative mechanisms reconfiguring late modernity’ (p. 116).
- 16.
This uses only the macro and the micro levels and one puzzling result is that ‘social relations’ are detached from agents/actors and placed above the macro-line. Although everything is macro towards some things and micro towards others, it seems conceptually odd to dissociate ‘agents’ from their relations, which are (partially, at least) constitutive of them, even for the analytical purposes this serves. Hofkirchner certainly avoids endorsing Giddens’ ‘central conflation’, but omits the complications that incorporating the meso-level would entail for his elegant modelling. Lazega’s message is that he also excises a stratum where much of the action takes place.
- 17.
As the late David Lockwood maintained (1964), certain forms of social relations are implicit in particular modes of production.
- 18.
Hence the familiar tropes about ‘runaway society’, ‘risk society’ and the ‘juggernaut out of control’, all of which are drawn from the experiential level.
- 19.
See Andrew Sayer (1992: 89–113) for a clear explanation of ‘necessary relations’ be they symmetrical or asymmetrical.
- 20.
‘In particular, from the outset, and regularly since, the idea of granting legal-person status to profit-seeking communities has been severely resisted’ (p. 205).
- 21.
As Marx wrote in the The German Ideology (McLellan 1977: 181): ‘the various stages and interests are never completely overcome, but only subordinated to the prevailing interest and may trail along beside the latter for centuries afterwards’.
- 22.
Note that the title of Ernst Bloch’s seminal work (1959), The Principle of Hope, stresses the last feature.
- 23.
As opposed to the ‘transactionalism’ of Emirbayer’s (1997) ‘relationist’ sociology, which remains tied to the negotiated exchange of equivalents, but is therefore still contestatory, and remains purely aggregative.
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Archer, M.S. (2015). Introduction: Other Conceptions of Generative Mechanisms and Ours. In: Archer, M. (eds) Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order. Social Morphogenesis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13773-5_1
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