The diagram shows an Archerian morphogenetic cycle of social transformation, read through Bhaskar’s critical realism:

This distinguishes a "proper" social systems model from pop science advancing holism (downwards conflation, treating individuals as mere bearers of a “social whole”) or methodological individualism (scientific positivism), reducing causality to constant conjunctions, and society to the sum of individual choices.

On the left, the “Paradoxes” (belonging, organising, performing, learning, distribution) express necessary fractures in the social space, echoing Bhaskar’s four-planar social being: material transactions, interpersonal relations, institutional structures, and the inner being of persons. These fractures are real contradictions and tensions that "attract" social action.

T1 Structural Conditioning: pre-existing structures and cultures shape situational logics: vested interests, opportunity costs, narrative resources. Here Bhaskar’s three core principles are presupposed:

T2 Social Interaction: This is precisely what the “Struggle of Interests” box thematises. The social momentum at T2 is not mere behavioural interaction but a conflict of practical judgments under structural constraint: agents mobilise narratives, bargaining power and moral claims to contest or defend special interests. Judgmental rationality - and reflexivity - thus becomes the engine of morphogenesis: actors evaluate, criticise, and attempt to reduce perceived harms, rather than simply adapt.

T3 Structural Elaboration: the cycle yields either morphostasis (reproduction) or morphogenesis (transformation). Outcomes depend on how reflexive, interest-laden, norm-governed agency plays out, based on power.

There is no functional guarantee of equilibrium, contra systems holism, and no assumption of law-like regularities, contra positivism. Instead, the diagram encodes a "diachronic", realist account of emergence: social reality is continuously (re)generated through the interplay of enduring structures, culturally mediated meanings, and conflictual human projects.

#leadership

Sources:

Archer, M.S. (1995) Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Archer, M.S. (2000) Being Human: The Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Archer, M.S. (2003) Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Archer, M.S. (2012) The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bhaskar, R. (1975) A Realist Theory of Science. Leeds: Leeds Books.
Bhaskar, R. (1993) Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom. London: Verso.
Bhaskar, R. (1998) The Possibility of Naturalism (3rd edn.). London: Routledge.
Bhaskar, R. (1994) Plato Etc.: Problems of Philosophy and Their Resolution. London: Verso.

Fraser, N. (1997) Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition. New York: Routledge.
Fraser, N. and Honneth, A. (2003) Redistribution or Recognition? A Political-Philosophical Exchange. London: Verso.
Honneth, A. (1995) The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Norrie, A. (2010) Dialectic and Difference: Dialectical Critical Realism and the Grounds of Justice. London: Routledge.
Norrie, A. (2014) Justice and the Slaughter-Bench: Essays on Law’s Broken Dialectic. London: Routledge.
Norrie, A. (2017) A Political Theory of Justice. London: Routledge.

Buch-Hansen, H. and Nielsen, P. (2020) Critical Realism: A Brief Introduction. London: Routledge.
Buch-Hansen, H. (2023) Critical Realism: The Basics. London: Routledge.

Selective Q&A

Q — This may look like a “complex” description of our social reality, but to me it comes across as oversimplified. First, you mention four paradoxes. I’m not sure whether this is meant to be an exhaustive list or merely illustrative. I can think of several more—for example, the paradox of inclusion and exclusion. Second, you distinguish between “people” and “structures,” thereby splitting the paradox of the one and the many. Not splitting that paradox would be closer to Bourdieu’s position: the body (the individual agent) inhabits a social world (your structures), but that social world also inhabits the body through internalized norms and other cultural practices. Third, you seem to think of these broader social structures as material structures—this reflects a common fallacy in systems thinking. In the social realm there are neither boundaries nor layers; there are only interactions that generate further interactions. One may try to reduce the complexity of this view by introducing layers or boundaries or by splitting paradoxes, but doing so inevitably oversimplifies our understanding of the social.

A- Quick reflections; the paradoxes are not exhaustive. They build on Bhaskar's social cube — but the main point is that social reality is NECESSARILY fractured. I am not distinguishing between people and structures, but between agency and structures. And this is not directly related to the paradox of one and many, as the “one” is captured in culture, which here refers to a “repository of ideas” (Archer) and language providing categories. I am not with Giddens — there is a constructionist conflation of internalised structures (“the labyrinth is in the mouse”) — cf. Archer’s strong critique of structuration. And, no, structures are not “material” but semipermanent, as Tony Lawson points out. See also Buch-Hansen on the explanation of “structure” — which seems to always attract sociological warfare in spite of being a mere analytical device. Every formalisation of complexity implies reduction — hence the point is to provide a reasoned and effective reduction, and structures certainly fall under that category insofar as they allow the consideration of generative mechanisms that transcend individual agency.

Q- True, our understanding of reality is necessarily fractured. Where we disagree, however, is in your view that making sense of this fractured social world requires the kind of reductionism you seem to advocate. Of course, we must be reductionist to some extent,concept-building is one example. But in my view, your reductionism goes too far when you suggest that our understanding is best grounded in conceiving the social world as reified structures, such as boundaries, whether semipermanent or not. If there are ways to be less reductionist, we should prefer those. Bourdieu offers one such option; another would be G. H. Mead. I also believe we differ in our reading of Archer. To me, her notion of agency means precisely this: individual agency. In her words, “Agents possess emergent properties which are irreducible to those of either culture or structure, namely their powers of reflexivity, their ability to deliberate, and to shape courses of action.” I take this to mean that the “one,” as I referred to it above, is not captured within her cultural domain. This brings me back to the paradox of the one and the many—or, as Mead would put it, we are inevitably an “I” and a “We” - at the same time. That is the paradox.

A- No, I disagree. Legitimate analytical decomposition is not ontological reductionism. Analytical differentiation for explanatory purposes does not imply ontological flattening - analytical dualism is not a claim about metaphysical separations, but about explanatory adequacy. It is a methodological move to preserve emergent properties, avoid downward AND upward conflation, amd track distinct causal powers. To frame social reality as “only interactions generating interactions” is a classic interactionist flattening that denies emergent causal powers of structures, eliminates diachronic conditioning, collapses institutions into events, and conflates generative mechanisms with observed behaviour - precisely the downward conflation CR rejects. (Your arguments is actually Giddens-lite, not Bourdieu—Bourdieu never denied structural autonomy/habitus). The notion that “there are no boundaries or layers” is a constructivist intuition, not a defensible social ontology. In Archer, agency = emergent personal powers (reflexivity, deliberation over time), while culture = ideational system/resources with its own emergent properties.

PS: The real one–many problem, running from Parmenides and Plato through Plotinus, Aquinas, Hegel and into contemporary metaphysics — is the relation between the universal and the particular, or more fundamentally form, appearance and concept vs matter, ideal vs shadows. It has nothing to do with social inclusion/exclusion or the I/We structure of Mead. Those are empirical dualities, not metaphysical universals. This is why analytical separation is necessary: you cannot understand the many without the one, nor the universal without differentiating its particular expressions.

Q- “Analytical differentiation for explanatory purposes does not imply ontological flattening.” That is very true, but not in your case. I also think you are not preserving emergent properties; you confine them and thereby diminish them. That’s how you’re flattening social experience into a simplistic framework. Thinking of social interaction as an ongoing patterning of interactions sounds simpler than it is. It is an attempt to avoid spatial metaphors, which encourage the belief that we can stand outside social interaction, observe it objectively, or derive frameworks from it, as you do. We do not disagree that conceptual frameworks are necessary to make sense of social experience. However, I find concepts rooted in actual experience—and that preserve the lived paradoxes of practice, such as the structure/agency tension, which your framework collapses when it splits them—far more plausible than concepts that impose artificial layers, boundaries, or “upward” or “downward” thinking, all of which we never truly experience. Calling Bourdieu a structuralist tells only half the story. The crucial distinction between him and other structuralists, like Lévi-Strauss, is that he recognized that “structures” only come into being through human praxis. That praxis is shaped by struggles over different forms of capital, that is, power. In this sense, Bourdieu clearly did not see the habitus as an independent structure; it is a structure only insofar as it emerges from human praxis, the ongoing interactions I was trying to highlight in my previous post and here again.

A- yes - lived paradoxes are essential to social experience. This is precisely why I added them explicitly to the morphogenetic frame. But experience ≠ reality ≠ explanation. Experience is NOT the criterion for ontology. Here, again, you are treating analytical dualism as if it was an ontological split between domains, or a privileging of one standpoint, or a reification of “structures” as spatial containers. This is simply inaccurate. Analytical dualism is a methodological separation for explanatory adequacy, not an ontological fissure in reality. Structures do not exist “outside” interaction, but provide a way to analyse emergent properties that cannot be reduced to interactional events, causal conditioning that precedes situated action, and diachronic processes that cannot be captured by Mead-style interactionism. Differentiating agency/structure does not collapse the paradox. On the contrary: without analytical separation, the paradox cannot be seen at all. If everything is “just interaction”, there is no paradox—only flux. If one truly could not step outside interaction, then one couldn't critique frameworks or invoke alternative concepts. Pure phenomenology is methodologically solipsistic.

Q- True, you’re including some paradoxes in your framework, but not others, and you leave unexplained why you make this selection. Generally, it seems our notions of paradox differ. You appear to think paradoxes can be split into dualisms for analysis. I believe they cannot. Doing so leads to Cartesian both/and thinking and diminishes the tension that paradoxes create. To me, it is precisely that paradoxical tension that drives social evolution. If we fail to hold onto that tension and instead split paradoxes apart, we begin to imagine something outside our social reality, a standpoint we could assume, a kind of God’s-eye view, to relieve us of the very tension the paradox creates. You may argue that lived experience is insufficient to remind us that this tension cannot be resolved. Yet all theorizing must ultimately prove itself in our lived world. Your approach, however, describes the social in ways that have little connection to lived experience, which I find problematic. You also dismiss Bourdieu as a structuralist, which oversimplifies his work to the point of reversing what he was saying. Then you argue that Mead’s symbolic interactionism is not enough, but over the course of our conversation, that claim alone is not enough.

A- No, no, no. I appreciate Bourdieu's work on social field and his theory is compatible with our ontological stance - see Elder-Vass's detailed argument with Archer. The paradoxes are not a simple dualism but productive contradictions - see Tim Hargreaves' detailed juxtaposition of paradox vs dialectics, and Bhaskar's notion of absence. To say paradox must remain whole is reified anti‑reification. Phenomenological paradox (lived tension) is not the same as ontological contradiction or methodological dualism. A paradox “as lived” is an ambiguity of experience. A contradiction in ontology concerns causal relations in the world. A dualism in method is an analytical device for explanation. To claim that “splitting paradox dissolves its tension” is confusing experience of social life with explanatory requirements of social science. You are collapsing explanation into experience (“all theorizing must ultimately prove itself in our lived world”). This is an epistemic fallacy. Lived experience cannot reveal structural mechanisms. If we refuse decomposition on phenomenological grounds, we reduce sociology to psychology and erase emergent causation—a fundamental violation of explanatory adequacy.