Engaging with the world : agencies, institutions, historical formations

230 Pages·2013·1.9 MB·English

by  Archer

Engaging with the World
This title reflects the general theme of the 2010 IACR annual conference, held in Padua,
Italy, which aimed to provide a fresh view on cultural and structural changes involving
Western societies after the world economic crisis of 2008 from the point of view of
critical realism.
Global society is often regarded as disrupting identities and blurring boundaries,
something that entails giving up ideas of structure and fixity. Globalization supposedly
introduces a ‘liquid’ era of fluidity in which everything is possible, and anything goes.
Nevertheless, its current dynamics are developing into a harder reality: wars, economic
crisis, the haunting risk of pandemics, the ever-w orsening food supply crisis and the
envir onmental challenge. These social facts call for a dramatic shift in the optimistic cosmo-
politan mood and the thought that we can build and rebuild ourselves and our world as we
please, at least for the most developed countries. The challenges we face produce new
forms of social life and individual experience. They also require us to develop new frame-
works to analyse emergent contexts, institutional complexes and morphogenetic fields,
and new ways to understand human agency and the meaning of emancipation.
The book broadly falls into three parts. The first, ‘Social ontology and a new historical
formation’, deals mainly with social ontological issues, in so far as they are connected to
social scientific and public issues in the emerging society of the twenty- first century. The
second, ‘Being human and the adventure of agency’, is concerned with the way human
beings adapt to the ‘new world’ of ‘our times’, and come up with innovative models of
agency and socialization. The third, ‘The constitutionalization of the new world’, explores
critical realist perspectives, as compared to system- theoretical ones, on the issue of global
order and justice.
In all of this, the challenge is to engage with this ‘new world’ in a meaningful way, a
task for which a realist mindset is badly needed. Critical realism provides a strong theo-
retical framework that can meet the challenge, and the book explores its contribution to
making sense of, and coming to terms with, this historical formation.
Margaret S. Archer is Professor of Social Theory at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale
de Lausanne (Switzerland) and Director of its Centre d’Ontologie Sociale. She was Pro-
fessor of Sociology at the University of Warwick from 1979 to 2010. The most recent of
her numerous books is The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity (Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2012).
Andrea M. Maccarini is Professor of Sociology at the University of Padova (Italy) and a
member of the IACR Council. He is the Italian representative at OECD – CERI (Centre
for Educational Reform and Innovation) and chair of the Italian Sociological Association
– Education section. He has published several books and articles. For Routledge, he was
co- editor of Sociological Realism (2011).
Ontological explorations
Other titles in this series
From One ‘Empire’ to the Next
Radha D’Souza
Science for Humanism
The recovery of human agency
Charles R. Varela
Philosophical Problems of Sustainability
Taking sustainability forward with a critical realist approach
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Dialectic and Difference
Dialectical critical realism and the grounds of justice
Alan Norrie
Interdisciplinarity and Climate Change
Transforming knowledge and practice for our global future
Edited by Roy Bhaskar, Cheryl Frank, Karl Georg Høyer, Petter Naess and
Jenneth Parker
Conversations about Reflexivity
Edited by Margaret S. Archer
Relational Sociology
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Pierpaolo Donati
Sociological Realism
Edited by Andrea M. Maccarini, Emmanuele Morandi and Riccardo Prandini
The Economics of Science: A Critical Realist Overview
Volume 1: Illustrations and philosophical preliminaries
David Tyfield
The Economics of Science: A Critical Realist Overview
Volume 2: Towards a synthesis of political economy and science and technology
studies
David Tyfield
Dynamic Embodiment for Social Theory
‘I move therefore I am’
Brenda Farnell
Eurocentrism
A Marxian critical realist critique
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Engaging with the World
Agency, institutions, historical formations
Edited by Margaret S. Archer and Andrea M. Maccarini
Engaging with the World
Agency, institutions, historical formations
Edited by Margaret S. Archer
and Andrea M. Maccarini
First published 2013
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
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© 2013 selection and editorial material, Margaret S. Archer and Andrea
M. Maccarini; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Margaret S. Archer and Andrea M. Maccarini to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and
78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data
Engaging with the world : agencies, institutions, historical formations /
edited by Margaret S. Archer and Andrea Maccarini.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Social history. 2. Critical realism. 3. Globalization. I. Archer,
Margaret Scotford, editor of compilation. II. Maccarini, Andrea, editor
of compilation. III. D’Souza, Radha. From one “empire” to the next.
IV. Title.
HN18.3.E54 2013
306.09–dc23
2012031937
ISBN: 978-0-415-68710-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-06692-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Times New Roman
by Wearset Ltd, Boldon, Tyne and Wear
Contents
Notes on contributors ix
Introduction: engaging with the world: critical social science
in the wake of the ‘big crisis’ of ‘our times’ 1
ANDREA M. MACCARINI
PART I
Social ontology and a new historical formation 9
1 Prolegomenon: the consequences of the revindication of
philosophical ontology for philosophy and social theory 11
ROY BHASKAR
2 A morphogenetic- relational account of social emergence:
processes and forms 22
ANDREA M. MACCARINI
3 Reflexive social subjectivities 50
RICCARDO PRANDINI
4 Realist engagements in critical hermeneutics 78
FRÉDÉRIC VANDENBERGHE
PART II
Being human and the adventure of agency in the
twenty- first century: towards a sociology of engagement 101
5 Reconceptualizing socialization as reflexive engagement 103
MARGARET S. ARCHER
viii Contents
6 Engagement as a social relation: a leap into trans-m odernity 129
PIERPAOLO DONATI
7 The human being invested in social forms: four extensions
of the notion of engagement 162
LAURENT THÉVENOT
PART III
The constitutionalization of the new world: realism and
global order 181
8 The new world order: what role for critical realism? 183
DOUGLAS V. PORPORA
9 Complex governance and Europe’s model of subsidiarity 198
HELMUT WILLKE
Index 216
Contributors
Margaret S. Archer is Professor of Social Theory at the Ecole Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) and Director of its Centre d’Ontologie
Sociale. She was Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick (UK)
from 1979 to 2010. The most recent of her numerous books is The Reflexive
Imperative in Late Modernity (2012).
Roy Bhaskar is the originator of the philosophy of critical realism, and the
author of many acclaimed and influential works, including A Realist Theory
of Science, The Possibility of Naturalism, Scientific Realism and Human
Emancipation, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom, Plato Etc., From Science to
Emancipation and (with Mervyn Hartwig) The Formation of Critical Realism.
He is an editor of Critical Realism: Essential Readings and Interdisciplina rity
and Climate Change, and was the founding chair of the Centre for Critical
Realism. He is currently a World Scholar at the University of London
Institute of Education.
Pierpaolo Donati is Professor of Sociology at the University of Bologna (Italy)
and Director of its Ceposs (Centre for the Study of Social Policy). He is a
past president of the Italian Sociological Association and a member of several
scientific academies. He is the author of hundreds of books and articles. For
Routledge, he has recently published Relational Sociology: A New Paradigm
for the Social Sciences (2011).
Andrea M. Maccarini is Professor of Sociology at the University of Padua
(Italy) and a member of the IACR Council. He is the Italian representative at
OECD – CERI (Centre for Educational Reform and Innovation) and chair of
the Italian Sociological Association – Education section. He has published
several books and articles. For Routledge, he was co-e ditor of Sociological
Realism (2011).
Douglas V. Porpora is Professor of Sociology at Drexel University, Philadel-
phia. A member of the IACR council, he is editor (with Alex Gillespie) of the
Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour. He is the author of many books
and articles, among them Post- Ethical Society (forthcoming), a study of the
American public sphere in relation to war and human rights.
x Contributors
Riccardo Prandini is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of
Bologna (Italy) and editor of the journal Sociologia e Politiche Sociali (Soci-
ology and Social Policy). He is the author of numerous scientific publications
in the fields of social ontology, social theory and family studies. For
Routledge, he was co-e ditor of Sociological Realism (2011).
Laurent Thévenot is Professor of Sociology at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sci-
ences Sociales, Paris and a founding member of Groupe de Sociologie Poli-
tique et Morale. He is also senior researcher at the Center for Research in
Economics and Statistics, Paris, and co-founder of the Economie des conven-
tions trend. He is the author of On Justification: Economies of Worth, (2006
[1991] with Luc Boltanski), Rethinking Comparative Cultural Sociology:
Repertoires of Evaluation in France and the United States (2000, with
Michèle Lamont) and L'action au pluriel: sociologie des régimes
d'engagement (2006).
Frédéric Vandenberghe works at the intersection of philosophy and sociology.
His main research interests are related to German social philosophy, Anglo-
Saxon social theory and French sociological theory. Previous works include a
book on the sociology of Georg Simmel (La sociologie de Georg Simmel,
Presses Universitaires de France, 2002) and a book on posthumanism and
biocapitalism (Complexités du posthumanisme, L’Harmattan, 2007).
Helmut Willke holds a chair in State Theory and Global Governance at the
Department of Sociology of the University of Bielefeld, Germany. He has
published eighteen books, and in 1994 was awarded the (German) Leibniz
Prize. His research areas are systems theory, system governance, global
governance and knowledge management.