For a critical realist one of the gravest intellectual sins is voluntarism. It’s usually a critical epithet rather than a detailed diagnosis, referring to a tendency to ascribe social outcomes to voluntary action in a way which overemphasises individual choice. It implies an undersocialised view of the self, which imagines that people as unencumbered in the action they can take in a way which is fundamentally sociologically implausible. I’ve seen Margaret Archer’s account of reflexivity be accused of being voluntaristic but every example of this is based on obvious, often lazy, misreadings of what she actually wrote. It’s a given in critical realism that we seek to avoid voluntarism, even as we conversely try and avoid a deterministic and overly socialised view of the self.

It hit me recently that I’ve been prone to voluntarism in how I conceive of digital technology. My first instinct when I engage with a new technology is to explore what can be done with it, with an optimistic orientation towards the intellectually and culturally enriching uses which can be made of it. This then becomes a focal point for me to think sociologically about how that technology is being used with higher education and wider society, as well as how it could be used in the future. The problem is that I start with a speculative mode of creative exploration which is itself reliant on a particular social structure (being a digital sociologist with a practical focus) which I don’t account for in my ensuing narrative of creative possibility.

There’s a relation here which is a sociotechnical expression of what Bourdieu called the scholastic fallacy, which smuggles in a voluntaristic relation to technology that I don’t account for in my overall approach. This leaves me oscillating between creative enthusiasm and sociological pessimism in a way which is just as confusing to myself as it is to other people. The problem is not my optimistic orientation towards technology as a practitioner, as much as it is my failure to fully recognise the specificity of that relation in the sociological generalisations which ensue.

This feels like a fundamental analytical flaw in how I approach technology. It’s extremely generative in my work as a practitioner, because it leaves me comparing creative possibilities alongside the organisational structures which facilitate or frustrate them. But it filters my analysis through an unacknowledged orientation to technology which is profoundly atypical.

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