Abstract
In Volume II, I advanced the generative mechanism of late modernity as constituted by neo-capitalist market competition and the diffusion of digital science needing to work together, and resulting in intensified social morphogenesis. Digital scientists were concerned with the diffusion of their innovations and the economic vanguard with their own profitability. Their synergy pulled social morphogenesis in two different directions: a reinforcement of (win-lose) competition on the part of the economy and the promotion of new (win-win) opportunities (the Cyber-Commons) on the part of digital innovators. This explanation is more complex than empiricist accounts of the ‘rise of information society’.
Major changes in the social order simultaneously have repercussions upon agency through being differentially beneficial or prejudicial to existing social groups. This prompts their re-organization, regrouping some and de-grouping others, into new Corporate and Primary Agents through the concurrent ‘double morphogenesis’. This chapter examines the two processes together, showing that as the generative mechanism engages, Corporate Agency, in its attempt to sustain or transform the social system, is ineluctably drawn into sustaining or transforming the categories of Corporate and Primary Agents themselves. It is their interactions that explain why globally the T2–T3 phase is prolonged and their outcomes will be decisive for whether or not T4 is eventually reached and merits being called a Morphogenic society.
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Notes
- 1.
As in the French Loi Falloux (1850), under which the Church regained the freedom to open schools after almost half a century of prohibition.
- 2.
Walter Buckley defines ‘morphogenesis’ as ‘those processes which tend to elaborate or change a system’s given form, structure or state,’ as contrasted with morphostatic processes ‘that tend to preserve or maintain a system’s form, organization, or state.’ (1967, p. 58).
- 3.
‘It is nearly impossible for human portfolio managers and traders to implement a strategy involving so many securities and trading so frequently without making use of quantitative methods and technological tools such as automated trading platforms, electronic communications networks, and mathematical optimization algorithms’ (Khandani and Lo 2007, p. 7). The authors conclude that ‘It is no wonder that the most successful funds in this discipline have been founded by computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers not by economists or fundamental stock pickers’ (p. 12).
- 4.
Article 27 reads: ‘everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author’.
- 5.
- 6.
In the first semester of 2014, Michel Bauwens was research director of the floksociety.org research group, which produced the first integrated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador, in order to create a ‘social knowledge economy’, with 15 associated policy papers. One version of the plan is available at http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan
- 7.
One of my PhD students, Pamela Higham has explored this by e-interviewing for the female condition PCOS and for Psoriasis, where some of those meeting on the forum also graduate to holidaying together. When a woman with PCOS has an appointment upcoming with a new specialist, members send encouraging messages and want to know the outcome.
- 8.
‘The Internet is tailor made for a populist, insurgent movement’, wrote Joe Trippi (2004).
- 9.
Archived from the original http://www.blogpulse.com/ on 04.06.2012.
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Archer, M.S. (2015). How Agency Is Transformed in the Course of Social Transformation: Don’t Forget the Double Morphogenesis. In: Archer, M. (eds) Generative Mechanisms Transforming the Social Order. Social Morphogenesis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13773-5_7
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