There were a range of points at which questions of the digital were addressed in her work, particularly in the later volumes developed collaboratively within the Centre for Social Ontology (CSO). But the tendency here was for ‘the digital’ to be subordinated to the questions of social change were the object of the CSO’s first two projects: The Morphogenic Society and the Future of the Human. It was addressed as an element in a broader process of change, rather than a vector of change in its own right. Nor will I argue for an Archerian digital sociology, as if there is a specifically realist approach to digital sociology latent within her work. Instead my ambition is far more modest. I will identify the points in Archer’s substantial body of work where Archer addresses questions of the digital: two with a micro-sociological focus and two with a macro-sociological focus. The degree to which these accounts were elaborated varies, with two being the focus of late papers, one being a concept she frequently invoked without ever explicitly addressing and the other being an elaborated concept to which the relationship with the digital was never explicitly addressed. In exploring these fragments in term I will argue that they are mutually consistent, unsurprisingly so given the intensely systematic character of Archer’s thought, without constituting a theoretical whole. This distinction raises a broader point about her body of work which has relevance for the collective project expressed by this volume.
These engagements with the digital are elements of a broader project rather than focal points in their own right. Rather than limiting Archer’s relevance for digital sociology, I will argue this partial character actually creates the space for digital sociologists to work with these ideas in varied and multifaceted ways. They suggest micro/macro linkages, modes of historicisation and connections between familiar and emerging technologies which could be drawn upon in a range of ways. They offer morphogenic conditions for scholarly reflexivity, encouraging it to develop according to its own parameters within the spaces which are left opened within the corpus. There is a lot of space to think creatively about how to connect Archer’s work to questions of the digital, reflecting how it was not a primary focus of her consideration but something which at most got caught in the slipstream of other inquiries. In contrast the systematic character of Archer’s work more broadly, though producing an epistemic integrity which is hugely desirable, creates a different relationship to the corpus. Archer (1988: 177) suggested that “the more complex the internal structure becomes, the more difficult it is to assimilate new items without major disruptions of the delicately articulated interconnections”. In other words, the more densely interconnected a body of work is, the more difficult it is to elaborate and refine it with regards to novel items.
This creates a tendency to relate to it as something which must be accepted or rejected in full because the logical interconnections make it different to affirm or reject one element, without taking a parallel stance in relation to the many other elements to which those items are internally connected. This is a trend which I suggest can be seen clearly in the literature, even if I cannot substantiate the claim here without turning the present article into something entirely different. There is a tendency to uncritically adopt Archer’s categories, sometimes with a superficial grasp on their sense in a way compounded by points for further development within them, which inhibits their elaboration over time. The parallel tendency is to react to Archer’s work as something which needs to be rejected tout court on the basis of a specific disagreement or, as we will see, a mis- or partial reading. In suggesting this is a problem for Archer’s legacy I’m not advocating a free for all in which the integrity work is abandoned so scholars might scavenge from it with the pragmatism of magpies. While I’m not personally frustrated by attempts to ‘hybridise’ or ‘synthesise’ her work in the way that she herself was, I share her perspective that these tend to be strategic attempts to enact synergies in the cultural system which are mainly imagined. It’s not that synthesis is inherently wrong but rather that Archer’s work doesn’t easily lend itself to such intellectual moves by virtue of its systematicity, imbuing these attempts with a slightly forced and sometimes self-serving character.
The explanatory nature of her project mitigates this tendency because it was ultimately intended as a framework for thinking about the implications of social novelty. The fact it is saturated by these empirical reference points ensures that it doesn’t become a conceptual hall of mirrors, providing points of entry which make engagement possible. Consider the vast literature which has emerged in recent years deploying Archer’s account of reflexivity in order to explore a remarkable range of substantial topics. This makes it accessible in the sense of being applicable to an almost infinite range of contexts. But it is an extremely densely connected body of work nonetheless, with problems flowing from this which feel even more significant when considered in terms of her intellectual legacy. There are misreadings which thrive because elements of that project are taken in isolation from each other. For example Atkinson (2010) castigates Archer as the fourth individualization theorist alongside Bauman, Beck and Giddens without citing any text before Archer (2000). King (2010) similarly imputes an epistemic break in her work in parallel to the turn towards personal life within Anthony Giddens, without acknowledging that the multi-scalar ambitions of her project (macro, meso and micro) were present from her work in the sociology of education onwards, with individual reflexivity posited as the mediatory mechanism far in advance of the reflexivity trilogy (Archer 1995: 209). What King (2010) calls a move from a “structural orientation in the 1980s to a pre-occupation with reflexive individual agency in the late 1990s and early 2000s” more accurately reflects a clearly stated theoretical position that the ‘structural’ and ‘reflexive individual agency’ cannot be adequately considered in isolation from each other. The work exceeds the interpretive horizon used to critique it in ways that Archer herself found (justifiably) frustrating and which ought to concern her intellectual collaborators to the extent they are concerned about the sustainability of her legacy. But equally the notion that someone needs to read thousands of pages before legitimately offering an appraisal of her work obviously fails as an intellectual strategy to safeguard the integrity of her corpus. There is a problem here which risks leading to the ossification and neglect of this remarkable body of work, even if it is one which his the mirror image of the epistemic qualities which makes the corpus so remarkable in the first place.
The point I’m making here is less to critique the oversights of these authors as much as to consider the density of Archer’s corpus and how it instills a certain vulnerability to such oversights. If you read these books closely as an interconnected project, the systematicity of them is obvious. They are a single inquiry pursued over the course of her career rather than a fragmented series of projects embodying a shifting series of interests. For avoidance of doubt I am not suggesting this was planned at the outset, as opposed to being a process of refining the conceptual questions and following the threads which led from one project to the next. This tendency to approach one book in the terms established by the previous book is the primary mechanism which accounts for the conceptual density of her work. The consistency is not absolute. For example Piiroinen (2014) is correct to suggest there is a subtle shift in the meaning of ‘analytical dualism’ as Archer’s (1988, 1995) approach becomes more avowedly critical realist. Furthermore, her engagement with Donati’s (2010) relational sociology and subsequent work together tracks a shift in how she conceived of relationality (Donati and Archer 2015). There are undoubtedly others which jointly illustrate how the conceptual density I am imputing to her corpus, the remarkable systematicity of her life’s work, should not be understood as a claim of absolute self-consistency. But the degree of interconnection, as well as the overall parameters of her project which emerge as a function of it, mean the work needs to be addressed in an interconnected way in order to adequately understand it. The problem is this takes time to do well and it can be difficult for people to know where to get started. In an academy marked by an escalating rate of publication, it is far too easy to skip over this work in order to keep up with the escalating expectations of those around you (Carrigan 2016, Vostal 2015).
My suggestion is the systematicity of Archer’s work creates the risk, at least in the aforementioned context, that it is treated in a fragmented or shallow way. It is categorised as critical realism, Catholic social theory or a mystifying individualism in a way which precludes meaningful epistemic engagement with it (Bacevic 2023). This systematicity creates a parallel tendency for readers who have fulled engaged to feel as a consequence of that engagement they either have to accept it as a totality or reject it. Once they have traced out the interconnections, it is difficult to gain a critical distance from it on order to develop one’s own reflexive stance in relation to it. MacIntyre’s (1981: 257) suggests that a ‘living tradition’ is an “historically extended, socially embodied argument, and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition”. The nature of Archer’s work creates challenges for establishing such a scholarly tradition, inclined to work within the M/M framework in confronting social and cultural change, in the process developing the approach through such confrontation. This means finding places to stand within the framework which permit of such an undertaking, by virtue of being less densely elaborated and offering the space for development. The empirical applications which have proliferated in recent years, particularly with regards to reflexivity, suggest this is tradition which is alive and well. But I want to highlight other routes in Archer’s work, which neither ‘apply’ nor ‘rethink’ but rather find strands and synergies which can be pursued in Archerian ways.
In this sense my chapter is trying to demonstrate a way of engaging with Archer’s substantial corpus that works within it without being restricted by it. If we seek to preserve the M/M framework in amber then its intellectual vitality will rapidly drain away, until it becomes a rigid set of steps for thinking sustained only by self-conscious adherents. But if our engagements are not grounded in a working understanding of the systematic character of the approach, attempts to ‘refine’ and ‘hybridise’ will be scattergun interventions that drain the intellectual vitality which initially motivated us. A less elaborate way of framing this would be to ask how we think with Archer, rather than trying to think as Archer or (intentionally or otherwise) think against her. I have chosen to explore this with questions of the digital because they are the ones I’m most suited to address as a result of the biographical factors described above. But the approach I sketch out here could be used to engage constructively with other aspects of her work, particularly those were there was comparatively less systematicity in the original text and thus more room to intellectually manoeuvre. I have argued there will be a significant challenge in ensuring Archer’s work becomes a ‘living tradition’, neither reproduced in its entirety out of respect for authority nor picked apart in partial and contradictory ways. Identifying how we might approach writing on her work in a reflexive way is one means to mitigate this challenge.
For sake of brevity I will assume an existing familiarity with Archer’s work. The elements I explore in this chapter figure predominately in her later work, though the interconnected nature of her corpus means they need to be understood in terms of the wider project. There was one set of questions concerning structure and agency, even if those terms were ones she only came to later, developed from frustration with her PhD research which informed the subsequent trajectory of her work in more or less explicit ways (Carrigan 2016). I would suggest the morphogenetic approach can be understand, at least at the level of intellectual biography, as a formalisation of these concerns i.e. how do we explain social and culture change in a way adequate to the reality of both structure and agency? There were distinct objects of inquiry to which this was applied and/or through which it was developed (education systems, social ontology, reflexivity, the morphogenic society, the future of the human) but there was a unified thread, both in the analytical imperative underlying it and her own recounting of this over time (Archer 2024). The systematic character of Archer’s work can often be an obstacle towards comprehension of it, lending it to misreadings in a way compounded by an unwillingness to accept the scope of what she did. For a broader encounter I suggest the collected papers contained in Brock, Carrigan and Scambler (2016) and the interview about her trajectory in Morgan and Archer (2021).
Mark Carrigan 