The diagram shows an Archerian morphogenetic cycle of social transformation, read through Bhaskar’s critical realism:
Social reality is understood as stratified and "emergent", not a flat field of events
People (agency), Structures (norms, institutions, tech) and Culture (ideational, language, comms) are generative "real" forces, representing "analytical dualism": structures and culture possess emergent properties irreducible to individual psychology, yet they depend on human activity for their reproduction
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:
a) Ontological depth: causal powers lie in underlying structures cultures and agency, not observable regularities.
b) Epistemic relativity: actors’ understandings are socio-historically situated; people are shaped by an institutionally and culturally pre-existing “action logic” (ideology).
c) Judgmental rationality: despite epistemic relativity, agents can reason about better and worse interpretations and courses of action.
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.