Social Morphogenesis

230 Pages·2013·3.91 MB·English

by  Margaret S. Archer (auth.)

Social Morphogenesis
Margaret S. Archer
Editor
Social Morphogenesis
123
Editor
Margaret S. Archer
Collège desHumanités
EPFL Ecole PolytechniqueFédérale deLausanne
Lausanne
Switzerland
ISBN 978-94-007-6127-8 ISBN 978-94-007-6128-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-007-6128-5
SpringerDordrechtHeidelbergNewYorkLondon
LibraryofCongressControlNumber:2013931201
(cid:2)SpringerScience?BusinessMediaDordrecht2013
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Contents
1 Social Morphogenesis and the Prospects of Morphogenic
Society. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Margaret S. Archer
Part I Social Morphogenesis and Societal Transformation?
2 Morphogenesis and Social Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Douglas V. Porpora
3 The Morphogenetic Approach and the Idea of a Morphogenetic
Society: The Role of Regularities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39
Andrea M. Maccarini
4 Emergence and Morphogenesis: Causal Reduction
and Downward Causation?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61
Tony Lawson
5 Morphogenesis, Continuity and Change in the International
Political System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Colin Wight
Part II Social Formations and Their Re-formation
6 Self-Organization: What Is It, What Isn’t It and What’s
It Got to Do with Morphogenesis? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Kate Forbes-Pitt
v
vi Contents
7 Self-Organisation as the Mechanism of Development
and Evolution in Social Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125
Wolfgang Hofkirchner
8 Morphogenic Society: Self-Government and Self-Organization
as Misleading Metaphors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Margaret S. Archer
Part III Social Networks: Linkages or Bonds?
9 Network Analysis and Morphogenesis: A Neo-Structural
Exploration and Illustration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167
Emmanuel Lazega
10 Authority’s Hidden Network: Obligations, Roles
and the Morphogenesis of Authority. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187
Ismael Al-Amoudi
11 Morphogenesis and Social Networks: Relational Steering
Not Mechanical Feedback. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205
Pierpaolo Donati
Chapter 1
Social Morphogenesis and the Prospects
of Morphogenic Society
Margaret S. Archer
This book is about theorising a possible transition from the social order of late
modernity. What we examine is the generative mechanism of ‘social morpho-
genesis’, held to account for the increasing rapidity of social change. In itself,
rapidsocialchangedoesnotnecessarilysignal,muchlessconstitute,anewtypeof
social formation. What intrigues us is whether or not this increasingly important
process could be responsible for generating a different kind of social formation—
MorphogenicSociety—albeitonewiththepotentialforassumingamultiplicityof
specific forms. None of us is committed to announcing the advent of the Mor-
phogenic Society, but regard it as worth exploring. All of us are wary about the
array of social forms that have hastily been advanced as superseding modernity.
Thus, we do not precipitously announce a new ‘Beyond’. Instead, the book deals
with ‘social morphogenesis’ as a process rather than an end product. Clearly, this
processdoesnotnecessarilygeneratemacroscopicsocialtransformationbecauseit
hasbeenwithusforcenturies,althoughalways,untilnow,incounterbalancewith
morphostatic mechanisms. Whilst we will certainly question the justifiability of
thinking and theorising about Morphogenic Society, nevertheless, the question
mark remains throughout.
M.S.Archer(&)
Centred’OntologieSociale,EcolePolytechniqueFédéraledeLausanne,
Station10,Lausanne1015,Switzerland
e-mail:margaret.archer@epfl.ch
M.S.Archer(ed.),SocialMorphogenesis,DOI:10.1007/978-94-007-6128-5_1, 1
(cid:2)SpringerScience+BusinessMediaDordrecht2013
2 M.S.Archer
1.1 Part 1. Social Morphogenesis and Societal
Transformation?
The ten contributors to this volume are working together in an unusual way:
addressing this question mark collaboratively, exploring rather than proclaiming
and voicing our own reservations, hesitations, objections and differences in
interpretation and conviction. In other words, we reverse the usual sequence of
‘publication’followedbycriticalreview.Noonehasyetadvancedorismarriedto
atheoryofthecomingofMorphogenicSociety.Instead,throughauto-critique,we
try to anticipate the criteria such a theory would have to meet; the objections and
alternativesitwouldhavetoovercome.Atmost,explicitspeculationsareventured
aboutthepossibilityofthissocialformation.However,westillliveinthecrisisof
late modernity, a formation that appears to be gasping without any guarantee that
this is its last gasp. Rather, we concentrate on the process of ‘social morpho-
genesis’becauseonlyifwecanarticulateagenerativemechanismofsocialchange
is there any convincing basis for beginning to theorise about radical social
transformation.
Our focus upon ‘social morphogenesis’ has two implications. First, in con-
centrating upon morphogenesis we have elected to deal with ‘those processes
which tend to elaborate or change a system’s given form, structure, or state’ in
preferencetomorphostaticprocesses‘thattendtopreserveormaintainasystem’s
form,organization,orstate’(Buckey1967,58).Whataccountsforthisconsensus,
especially given that none of us would hold that morphostasis has yet been dis-
placed? (As Wight properly maintains in Chap. 5, that which is unchanged is the
benchmark for what has changed). Part of the answer lies in a shared conviction
about the growing rapidity of social change over the last quarter of a century,
although the proposition that change is speeding up is remarkably difficult to
demonstrate empirically. Partly too, we are all—though not in the same way—in
quest of a generative mechanism accounting for it. In other words, we agree that
satisfactory explanation cannot be at the level of experience (the empirical level)
or at the level of events (the actual level) but needs to identify a real mechanism
whoseexercise,evenintheopensystemthatisthesocialorder,isresponsiblefor
theintensificationofsocialchange.Inotherwords,weshareacollectiveantipathy
towards empiricist explanations and we hold that the vast literature on globali-
sation—an outcome broadly coterminous with the tendencies upon which we
focus—has been incurably ‘actualist’. These two points will be examined in turn.
First,beforeexaminingwhetherornotsuchchangeandthemechanismgenerating
itjustifyconsideringMorphogenicSocietyasasocialformationinstatunascendi,
it is necessary to probe the reasons for such rapidity of change.
1 SocialMorphogenesisandtheProspectsofMorphogenicSociety 3
The Rapidity of Social Change and Empiricism’s
Shortcomings
Most lay people in the developed world will agree that change has speeded up in
their lifetimes, but what reasons do they give for their assertion? Technological
innovations are favourite markers, especially for grandparents: flights for all,
mobile phones, the Internet (their own parents probably favoured inventions: the
car, the phone, the plane, television). Impressionistically, any marker will do and
today’s young people might cite the rise and fall of music groups, the arrival of
social interactionsites ortherapidsuccessionofnewapps. Nobodyiswrong,but
everybody is exercising selective perception. The selectivity of folk wisdom is
matched by academic approaches that are equally selective. This is the source of
the conundrum—and it is rooted in empiricism.
In brief, there seem to be four intractable problems attaching to any empirical
estimation of the rapidity of social change. First, what is included is necessarily
incompletebecausecertainchangeswillhaveoccurredwithoutyetproducingtheir
fullmanifestations,especiallygiventhelackofproportionalitybetweencauseand
effect. In other words, that legendary butterfly may just have flapped its wings in
Tokyo. That is the ontological problem. Epistemologically we may also be inca-
pableofknowingit.AsKarlPopperonceremarked,wecannotevenknowallthe
implications of any single proposition. Second, what we do know about recent
social change is a series of incommensurables, literally a list without common
measure,preventinganycomparisonorweightingoftheitemslisted.Forexample,
inEurope,proportionatelymorepeoplecame online andlessofthem gotmarried
in the last quarter of the century. However, we can neither say that these two
changes made equally important contributions to change in general, nor can we
assert the opposite. Third, change often involves displacement. As the average
hours spent watching television per capita have risen, those for listening to radio
have fallen; as the sale of machine made knitted goods increased, those with the
ability to knit has diminished. However, it cannot be concluded that a (hypo-
thetical)rateofdisplacementwouldbeabettermeasureoftherapidityofchange.
This is because we also know that ‘displacement’ is often artificial (planned
obsolescence) and may involve no significant change at all (cosmetics). Finally
and most importantly, what is deemed ‘a change’, that is an element contributing
to the judgement that there has been ‘rapid change’ overall, is inescapably value-
laden. It will be theory-laded too because to focus upon any kind of substantive
change(economic,political,demographic,culturaletc.)wouldinvolvetheoretical
assumptions about its ‘centrality’—alone or in some combination—that may be
challenged as unjustified or unjustifiable. In sum, the rapidity or otherwise of
social change remains an inherently contested concept in the empirical domain.
The point is not merely that everyone knows whatever they do know about
social change from a particular perspective (their job, their gender, the various
positions that they occupy). It is that if we accept that each perspective is ‘news
from somewhere’, we must also agree that there is, indeed, no ‘news from
4 M.S.Archer
nowhere’. Since reports are always expressed from a perspectival vantage point,
this means that empirical and experiential access to the real state of affairs is
necessarily incomplete. Were it possible to combine every existing perspective
that would not be to combine every perspective possible. This is not a methodo-
logicalproblemaboutrepresentativeness.Itwouldremainifeveryoneintheworld
contributed their perspectives, because their composite would not be a readers’
digest of unvarnished news but merely ‘global perspectivism’.
‘Global perspectivism’ necessarily means that the same defects also dog the
empirical indices or metrics, which are intended to capture indirectly that which
cannot be obtained directly from the sense data people supply from different
vantage points. The various metrics that are used in reporting the news and on
whose basis national governments and supranational agencies take decisions—
such as indicators of ‘economic growth’, ‘unemployment’, service delivery in
health or education—suffer from the same empiricist defects of necessary
incompleteness and consequent bias. These indices are simply crunched-up ver-
sions of observations, but they are nonetheless perspectival and this cannot be
rectified by eliminating deliberate manipulation or distortion, despite their fre-
quency in politics and economics.
This is one of the main reasons why we turn, instead, to examine generative
mechanisms, rather than directly inducing them from manifest outcomes as is the
empiricist practice. Although not all contributors would describe themselves as
critical realists, we accept that the nature of social reality is such that its expla-
nation requires the identification of the distinctive causal powers exercised at any
given place or date. This is the case for those processes that account for its
contoursatanyparticulartime,thosethatmaintainaparticularsocialconfiguration
inbeingforsometime,andthosethattransformitsparticularkindovertime.The
differencebetweenthesemechanismsandthosefoundinthenaturalorderderives
from the nature of the fundamental constituents of these two orders of reality.
Their difference also explains why ‘morphogenesis’ means something very
different in biology (Davies 2005)—being an entirely non-conscious process—
thanitdoesinsocialscience.(Theonlythingtheyshareisacommonetymology).
Social reality—any section of it—is intrinsically, inherently and ineluctably
‘peopled’.Itsontologicalconstitutionisutterlyactivity-dependent,despitethefact
that people’s thoughts and actions give rise to factors that are ‘not people’—the
most important of these being culture and structure.
Becauseofthisthereseemstobegeneralagreementthatforanyprocesstomerit
considerationasageneratorofsocialchangeitmustnecessarilyincorporatestructured
human relations (context-dependence), human actions (activity-dependence) and
human ideas (concept-dependence). Necessarily, the three make social theorising
non-naturalistic.
A more familiar way of putting the above is that every theory about the social
order necessarily has to incorporate SAC: structure, agency and culture. The
probleminhandwillgovernwhichofthethreeisaccordedmostattentionandthe
acronym SAC is thus not a rank ordering of priority between the three elements.