Margaret Scotford Archer

Salvador Giner

Contemporary Europe: Class, Status and Power

Margaret S. Archer

Important new work of social theory and challenge to Anthony Giddens from author of Culture and Agency.

The Morphogenetic Approach

Realist Social Theory

Revised edition of 1988 book, highly influential in debates about role of culture in social theory.

The Place of Culture in Social Theory

Culture and Agency

What do young people want from life? This book shows how the 'internal conversation' guides individual choices.

The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity

Douglas V. Porpora

Andrew Collier

The book explores religious experience as a justifiable reason for religious belief, demonstrating that the three pillars of Critical Realism - ontological intransitivity, epistemic relativity and judgemental rationality - can be applied to religion.

Critical Realism and God

Transcendence

Andrea Maccarini

This title reflects the general theme of the 2010 IACR annual conference that was held in Padova, Italy, the aim of which was to provide a fresh view on some cultural and structural changes involving Western societies after the world economic crisis of 2008, from the point of view of Critical Realism. Global society is often regarded as disrupting identities and blurring boundaries, one which entails giving up ideas of structure and fixity. Globalization supposedly introduces a "liquid" era of fluidity where everything is possible, and anything goes. Nevertheless, its current dynamics are developing into a harder reality: wars, economic crisis, the haunting risk of pandemics, the ever worsening food supply crisis, and the environmental challenge. These social facts call for a dramatic shift in the optimistic cosmopolitan mood and the thought that we can build and rebuild ourselves and our world as we please, at least for the most developed countries. The challenges we face produce new forms of social life and individual experience. They also require us to develop new frameworks to analyze emergent contexts, institutional complexes and morphogenetic fields, and new ways to understand human agency and the meaning of emancipation. The book broadly falls into three parts: The first, "Social Ontology and a New Historical Formation", deals with mainly social ontological issues, insofar as they are connected to social scientific and public issues in the emerging society of the XXI century. The second, "Being human and the adventure of agency", is concerned with the way human beings adapts to the "new world" of "our times", and comes up with innovative models of agency and socialization. The third, "The constitutionalization of the new world", explores critical realist perspectives, as compared to system-theoretical ones, on the issue of global order and justice. In all of this, the challenge is to engage with this "new world" in a meaningful way, a task for which a realist mind set is badly needed. Critical realism provides a strong theoretical framework that can meet the challenge, and the book explores its contribution to making sense of, and coming to terms with, this historical formation.

Agency, Institutions, Historical Formations

Engaging with the World

Atheism as a belief does not have to present intellectual credentials within academia. Yet to hold beliefs means giving reasons for doing so, ones which may be found wanting. Instead, atheism is the automatic default setting within the academic world. Conversely, religious belief confronts a double standard. Religious believers are not permitted to make truth claims but are instead forced to present their beliefs as part of one language game amongst many. Religious truth claims are expected to satisfy empiricist criteria of evidence but when they fail, as they must, religious belief becomes subject to the hermeneutics of suspicion. This book explores religious experience as a justifiable reason for religious belief. It uniquely demonstrates that the three pillars of critical realism - ontological intransitivity, epistemic relativity and judgemental rationality - can be applied to religion as to any other beliefs or theories. The three authors are critical realists by philosophical position. They seek to establish a level playing field between religion and secular ideas, which has not existed in the academic world for some generations, in order for reasoned debate to be conducted.

The central problem of social theory is 'structure and agency'. How do the objective features of society influence human agents? Determinism is not the answer, nor is conditioning as currently conceptualised. It accentuates the way structure and culture shape the social context in which individuals operate, but it neglects our personal capacity to define what we care about most and to establish a modus vivendi expressive of our concerns. Through inner dialogue, 'the internal conversation', individuals reflect upon their social situation in the light of current concerns and projects. On the basis of a series of unique, in-depth interviews, Archer identifies three distinctive forms of internal conversation. These govern agents' responses to social conditioning, their individual patterns of social mobility and whether or not they contribute to social stability or change. Thus the internal conversation is seen as being the missing link between society and the individual, structure and agency.

Margaret Scotford Archer

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