Morphogenesis versus Structuration: On Combining ... - Moodle

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Morphogenesis versus structuration 471 T4 is thus the new T1, and the next cycle must be approached afresh analytically, conceptually and theoretically. Giddens is completely correct that laws in the social sciences are historical in character (i.e. mutable over time), but whereas his endorsement of this view rests principally on the reflexive knowledge and behaviour of actors,52 mine resides on changes in the social structure itself which require us to theorize about it in different ways since our subject matter has altered. A new explanandum calls for a new explanans, though this does not rule out the possibility that the latter can be subsumed under a more general law. Paradoxically for all Giddens's stress upon the importance of time, it is the past in the present and the future in the present which matter for him; the present being a succession of 'passing moments' in which, quoting William James approvingly, 'the dying rearward of time and its dawning future forever mix their lights'.53 This continuous flow defies periodization. Consequently he has to stress the quintessential polyvalence of each 'moment', both replicatory and transformatory (reproduction always carries its two connotations). Yet he is nevertheless driven to recognize the existence of 'critical phases' in the long term and to accord (excessive) theoretical significance to them (as times of institutional spot-welding). What is lacking in Giddens's work is the length of time between the 'moment' and the 'critical phase' -in which the slow work of structural elaboration is accomplished and needs theorizing about. III SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND THE INDIVIDUAL/SOCIETY DICHOTOMY Giddens's basic aim here is to bring together the development of the individual as a social product and the generation of society by human agency, within a single theoretical framework. Essentially this means giving a 'parts-whole' account which explains the articulation of the two components. Giddens 's account accepts the 'problem of scope ': 54 he rightly rejects homology as a solution, denying that the system is small scale interaction writ large, or that the small is a miniaturized version of the large. His distinction between social and systems integration widens this rejection to include any view which presumes that what integrates the individual into society automatically explains what integrates society itself-thus illegitimately conflating social integration with systemic integration. Such views foreclose the possibility of society consisting of groups in tension, yet he argues that those who have accepted such tension as their premise (like Merton) have then wrongly relinquished an understanding of the totality as in some way implicated in the parts.Ss It is this implicative 'parts-whole' relationship that he seeks to develop. Already two controversial points should be noted.
472 Margaret S. Archer On the one hand he implies that all current theories endorsing intergroup tension at the level of social integration also share the defects of Mertonian functionalism at the systemic level, i.e. they cannot handle the mutual implication of parts and whole. This might be challenged from a number of different perspectives, but what is of particular relevance here is that it would be rejected by those who expressly broke with functionalism to achieve an implicative but non-homological 'parts-whole' account-like Gouldner, Blau, Etzioni or Buckley-namely just those theorists who began to explore morphogenesis in the context of general systems theory. (Interestingly, given the sweep and erudition of Giddens's work, these are the sociologists who never receive sustained attention.) On the other hand, although Giddens accepts a 'problem of scope' he does not see this as intimately allied to transcending micro-macro dualism in sociological theory. On the contrary, instead of conceptualizing scope as the problem of charting a methodological path leading from the smallest scale interaction to large-scale complex systems, Giddens transmutes the notion of successive concrete levels of increasing size into one of abstract 'dimensions', which affect all sizes of group and operate simultaneously. Thus the 'crunching-up', which has already been discussed, of transformation and recursiveness (equally salient and etemally operative) and of moment and totality (no sequence only simultaneity), is now joined in his 'dimensional approach' by a compacting of the micro- and the macro-, which are not teased out in scale or time. Can this yield an adequate, let alone a superior account of the 'parts-whole' relationship Giddens's articulation between the two is achieved through his concepts of 'modalities' and 'structural principles' which are intimately related to one another. We have seen that the three modalities- 'interpretative scheme', 'norm' and 'facility'-serve to articulate interaction and structure. Through being drawn upon by actors in the production of interaction whilst also constituting the structural media of systems, 'the "modalities" of structuration represent the central dimensions of the duality of structure'.S6 All three dimensions are combined in different ways to produce the range of social practices generated within the intersecting sets of rules and resources that ultimately express features of the totality. How then are we to grasp the observable regularities (the 'visible pattern') produced through this dimensional interplay (Giddens of course rejects the procedure of separating out 'upward' and 'downward' influences or disentangling interconnections between 'context' and 'environment'.) His answer is given at length because of the need to dwell on his precise formulation. 'Each of the three sets mentioned above thus has to be interpolated as elements of cycles of social reproduction producing systemness in social relations. In the context of such interpolation, we can identify structural elements that are most deeply
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