Realist social theory : the morphogenetic approach /

Archer addresses one of the most crucial issues in the study of society, as well as one of the most vexatious challenges of the human condition: the problem of structure and agency. She begins by recounting individualist versus collectivist responses to the problem during the 1950s, and rejects both for falling, each in its own manner, on the petard of empiricism; the former through its reductionist tendencies and downward conflation and the latter for its reifying tendencies and upward conflation. Archer calls for a methodologically, ontologically, and theoretically compatible position that allows for the interplay of structure and agency without the fusion of one with the other. She proposes a morphogenetic approach, which adopts a methodological analytic dualism and recognizes the social world as ontologically stratified into structures and agents whose emergent properties are mutually irreducible, temporarily distinguishable, and linked in an ongoing interplay. The result is nonconflationary realist social theory that avoids the pitfalls of the individualists and collectivists, as well as their more contemporary elisionary and emergent cousins. Although intended for the practicing social analyst, the work is so technically demanding that it may be of interest only to the specialized academic. Recommended for graduates and faculty. M. F. Keen Indiana University at South Bend