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A simple way to understand Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach

I just heard Doug Porpora give a great explanation of Archer’s morphogenetic approach as an approach to thinking about social change. The problem is that, as he put it, people get bogged down in all the t’s which litter these diagrams:

In contrast suggests Doug, rightly I think, the claim she is making is extremely straight forward. All action takes place in a context, which has structural and cultural aspects to it. How people act then contributes to either transforming or reproducing that context. It’s a post-Marxist formulation of Marx’s famous proposition from The Eighteenth Brumaire that men make history but they do not make it in conditions of their choosing, with a view to operationalising it at the level of social explanation.

It does this with what Doug describes the broadest ontology possible, in contrast to approaches which try and restrict the ontological repertoire e.g. praxis theorists building culture into action or structurationists redefining structure as culture. In this sense I think we can frame Maggie’s work as aligning with two important impulses in contemporary social theory she was (simplistically) seen as being hostile to: the post-Deleuzian affirmation of heterogeneity and the ANT insistence on opening up black boxes. The former because of this aforementioned ontological broadness, the latter because it went hand-in-hand with insisting we examine the independent variability (as she would put it) of these elements rather than assuming their connection by ontological fiat.

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