For structure: Its reality, properties and powers: A reply to Anthony King

Sociological Review

Volumn 48, Issue 3, 2000, Pages 464-472

  Archer, Margaret S ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0034238215     PISSN: 00380261     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-954X.00226     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. Anthony King, 'Against structure: a critique of morphogenetic social theory', Sociological Review, 47:2, 1999, focusing on my Realist Social Theory: the Morphogenetic Approach, CUP, 1995. Henceforth, RST in the text.
2. Anthony King, 'Against structure: a critique of morphogenetic social theory', Sociological Review, 47:2, 1999, focusing on my Realist Social Theory: the Morphogenetic Approach, CUP, 1995. Henceforth, RST in the text.
3. I am grateful to acknowledge the support provided by a three year ESRC Research Fellowship, during which time this article was prepared.
4. For a good array of the main contributions to the original debate, see John O'Neill (Ed), Modes of Individualism and Collectivism, Heinemann, London, 1973.
5. H.R. Wagner, 'Displacement of Scope: A Problem of the relationship between small scale and large scale sociological theories', A.J.S., LXIX:6, 1964: 583.
6. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1989: 28.
7. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, Macmillan, London, 1979: 70.
8. King erroneously states that Bhaskar approves of Giddens's formulations in structuration theory. However note the following: 'The social cube should be thought of as a cubic flow, differentiated into analytically discrete moments … as rhythmically processual and phasic to the core. This is the feature which, as Margaret Archer has convincingly demonstrated, distinguishes it from structuration, or more generally from any "central conflation", theory'. Roy Bhaskar, Dialetic: the Pulse of Freedom, Verso, London, 1993: 160.
9. 'Fundamentally, what distinguishes an "emergent property" is its real homogeneity, namely that the relations between its components are internal and necessary ones rather than seemingly regular concatenations of heterogeneous factors - of unknown provenance, undetermined internal influence and uncertain duration. In contradistinction, the primary distinguishing feature of any emergent property is the natural necessity of its internal relations, for what the entity is and its very existence depends upon them. To focus on the internal and necessary relations between components as constitutive of an emergent property is to set them apart from relations which are external and contingent. In the latter case, two entities or items can exist without one another and it is thus neither necessary nor impossible that they stand in any particular relation to one another, for the nature of either does not depend upon this' RST:173.
10. May Brodbeck, 'Methodological Individualisms: definition and reduction' in Brodbeck (ed.) Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Macmillan, New York, 1971.
11. J.W.N. Watkins, 'Methodological Individualism and Social Tendencies' in May Brodbeck (ed.) Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Macmillan, New York, 1971.
12. Watkins, 'Methodological Individualism and Social Tendencies', in May Brodbeck (ed.) Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Macmillan, New York, 1971: 271.
13. C.f. Roy Bhaskar, Reclaiming Reality, Verso, London, 1989: 38.
14. P.L. Berger and T. Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, Doubleday, New York, 1966: 101.
15. D. Silverman, The Theory of Organizations, Heinemann, London, 1970: 213.
16. P.S. Cohen, Modern Social Theory, Heinemann, London, 1968: 93.
17. H. Blumer, 'Society as Symbolic Interaction', in A.M. Rose (ed.), Human Behaviour and Social Processes: An Interactionist Approach, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1962: 160.
18. Margaret S. Archer, Culture and Agency: the place of culture in social theory, CUP, 1989. This book and its successor. Realist Social Theory, clarify the difference between cultural and structural constraints and enablements. They deal respectively with Cultural emergent properties and Structural emergent properties.