Morphogenesis versus Structuration: On Combining ... - Moodle

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Morphogenesis versus structuration 469 1oo in tos 90 15% 80 70 60 50 40 30 INITIAL Sm 20 YEARS 1 FIGURE II TOTAL POPULATION 2 3 4 accumulation, demographic distribution), but this does not affect the basic point that all structures manifest temporal resistance and do so generically through conditioning the context of action. Most often perhaps their conditional influence consists in dividing the population (not necessarily exhaustively) into social groups working for the maintenance versus the change of a given property, because the property itself distributes different objective vested interests to them at T2 (rather than abilities as in the example used). This would be the case where properties like citizenship, political centralization or wage differentials were concerned. Furthermore, what the diagram serves to highlight is that the initial structural influence does not peter out immediately, even given a collective determination to transform it (indeed here the major burden of illiteracy is only dispersed towards the end, in the last or penultimate time interval). In other words it takes time to change any structural property and that period represents one of constraint for some groups at least. No matter how short, it prevents the achievement of certain goals (those which motivate attempts to change it). Structural influences extend beyond T2 and it is essential to know whether this is because they (temporally and temporarily) resist collective pressures to change, remain because they represent the vested interests of the powerful, or are in fact 'psychologically supported' by the population. To regard every institutional regularity as the result of 'deep sedimentation' is to assimilate them all to the latter category. Yet without these distinctions it remains inexplicable when (or whether) the property will be transformed.
470 Margaret S. Archer (b) Action On the one hand, action initiated at T2 takes place in a context not of its own making. In our example, those who were literate initially were not responsible for their distribution in the population; this group property resulted from the restrictive educational policies of others, probably long dead.49 Here it appears impossible to follow the methodological individualist and assert that any structural property influential after T2 is attributable to contemporary actors (not wanting or not knowing how to change it), because knowledge about it, attitudes towards it, vested interests in retaining it and objective capacities for changing it have already been distributed and determined by T2. Yet without analysing these we cannot account for when the 'longue duree' is broken, who is primarily responsible for it, or how it is accomplished (by collective policy, social conflict, incremental change etc.).5° On the other hand, between T2 and T3 agency exerts two independent influences, one temporal, the other directional. It can speed-up, delay or prevent the elimination of prior structural influences. In our example, (i) popular commitment to self instruction could reduce the time taken to eliminate illiteracy, thus improving on all three curves (though not obliterating them entirely because of the need for personnel to prepare, disseminate and guide in the use of materials); (ii) lack of enthusiasm or ability to teach amongst literates and lack of willingness to participate and learn amongst illiterates can delay the process5I and damage the project. (Determinism is not built-in to the morphogenetic perspective.) Simultaneously agents, although partly conditioned by their acquirements (whose contents they did not themselves define) can exercise a directional influence upon the future cultural definition of 'literacy' thus affecting the substance of elaboration at T4. (Voluntarism has an important place in morphogenesis but is ever trammelled by past structural and cultural constraints and by the current politics of the possible.) (c) Structural Elaboration If action is effective then the transformation produced at T4 is not merely the eradication of a prior structural property (illiteracy) and its replacement by a new one (literacy), it is the structural elaboration of a host of new social possibilities some of which will have gradually come into play between T2 and T4. Morphogenetic analysis thus explains the timing of the new facilitating factors and can account for the inception, in this instance, of say a national postal service, mail-order businesses, bureaucratization and less obvious but more significant developments like international communication with its ramifications for religion, technology, political ideology etc. From the 'structuration' perspective, these remain the capricious exploits of indeterminate 'moments'. Simultaneously, however, structural elaboration re-starts a new morphogenetic cycle, for it introduces a new set of conditional influences upon interaction which are constraining as well as facilitating.
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