Catherine Hastings, Macquarie University, Australia
An edited version of her presentation at the One-Day Symposium on the Legacy of Margaret Archer. August 3rd 2024, University of Warwick, England, UK
I am reflecting on Margaret Archer as a relative newcomer to her work and critical realism (CR). I started working with the philosophy six years ago during a PhD on the causes of family homelessness in Australia. I am not a philosopher. Instead, I am a researcher whose theoretical, empirical and applied social science approach is now embedded in and scaffolded by critical realist thought. I am interested in methodology and research design; that perspective informs my thoughts.
I will share my experience working with Maggie’s conceptual frameworks during my doctoral thesis research. I will also share how other people talk about the importance of her work to them, with insights gained through co-convening a ‘community of practice’ group for approximately 80 critical realist scholars in the Oceania/Asia region and conversations at the International Association for Critical Realism pre-conference workshops for postgraduate students.
Before I enrolled in my PhD in 2016, I worked for nearly a decade as an applied social research and evaluation consultant for social enterprise, government, and community (not-for-profit) legal centres. In retrospect, I operated within a relatively pragmatic research paradigm. I was sceptical of empirical data’s capacity to represent the entirety of a complex reality and frustrated by the assumptions of quantitative methods, particularly in the way I was taught them. Importantly, I was aware of a disconnect between the ‘answers’ to so-called ‘wicked’ social problems provided in the research literature and the types of advice or knowledge needed by policymakers, activists, and programme practitioners seeking societal change. Most significantly, in my PhD, I struggled to reconcile what the research literature said about the ‘structural’ versus ‘individual’ risks of homelessness.
Discovering critical realism changed everything for me. I found I could build from the critical realist ideas of Bhaskar, Archer, Sayer, Porpora, Collier and others to develop internally consistent and robust methodologies for social research, which corresponded to my social world experience and helped me formulate impactful findings.
But it is hard to do critical realist social science – I think for three reasons:
- The steep learning curve. It is simultaneously commonsense and straightforward (to me) but also has astounding depth, richness and complexity, which requires work to understand.
- There is no ‘critical realist methodology’. Researchers need to find their own way to bridge the gap between abstract conceptual and philosophical material, and an operationalised methodology for empirical data collection, analysis and representation.
- Theoretical causal explanation of a social phenomenon within a CR frame requires working with a complex, stratified, conjunctural, emergent conception of causality – it can be daunting.
Why have I started in this way in a reflection on Margaret Archer? Because so many critical realists use her work to help navigate all three of these hurdles.
Archer’s conceptual material works. Her various frameworks describing the interaction of social structures and human agency over time, enable and invigorate analysis. She provides rich conceptual material to inspire, support, and enrich theorising, helping us move from describing what we see to explaining the properties and causal explanation of a phenomenon.
In a post entitled ‘What is Critical Realism?’ on the American Sociological Association theory blog, Perspectives, Archer and the other authors said:
Many of the determinate and important features of the world are not empirically verifiable or quantifiable, and may, in fact, resist articulation into theory, language, numbers, models, or empirical scrutiny. In such cases, these things can only be reconstructed through retroductive or abductive inferences; arguments which move from a social phenomena to a theory which is able to account for that phenomena. To do this, we require a toolbox stocked with conceptual resources that are appropriate and sensitive to the particular nature of things in the social world. (My emphasis)
Maggie’s contribution to ‘stocking’ the critical realist toolbox has been immense. Her elaboration of the relationship of structure, agency and culture over time (the morphogenetic approach), her work on reflexivity, the ‘internal conversation’, the nature of personhood… all work as explanatory frameworks.
Archer’s work serves as a tool for analysis of the interplay of structure, culture, and agency over time, as well as emergent entities – how they emerge, intertwine, and redefine one another. For example, the morphogenetic sequence provides a framework for practical analysis of how human agency changes social structures and how the existence of social structures can be explained in particular times and places. In outlining the analytical phases of structural conditioning, social interaction, and structural elaboration (or change), she suggests questions as analytical prompts: What are the components of the thing I am studying? How have they changed? Who was responsible? What interactions brought it about? What was wanted or not wanted because of what is there? Who did what, with or against whom, and with what outcome? Who had the resources?
By following her thinking, she encourages the researcher to ask questions to identify how structures may be constraining and enabling agency and how agency may be shaping structural relations and their causal powers over time. Even as she elaborates her frameworks, she models the thinking required to use them as analytical tools.
Critical realism and Archer’s work enabled me to reconcile and combine the role of social and cultural structures in interplay with human agency in one explanatory framework in the context of my work on family homelessness. Archer encouraged me to think about the interaction of personal ‘concerns’ and social identities – the reflexive processes through which agency mediates structure. Her distinction of the differences between persons, actors, and agents also provided a compelling way to conceptualise how the roles people play as actors express their concerns and how structures, such as disadvantage, work to limit the capacity of agents to resist homelessness via a person’s ‘position on society’s distributions of scarce resources’.
Her insightful conceptual models are intensely practical.
Her rich descriptions inspire the imagination and creative analytical ‘juices’ – what else do I need to consider? What other facets of the phenomenon and its generation must I explore in my explanation? Her frameworks inspire the search for patterns in the data.
By extension, her theories guide the decision-making process for developing research methodologies. What conceptual questions or problems do I need my data to reflect to explain my research subject based on how I wish to work analytically with the material and how I want to use a specific framework? Therefore, how do I think—in advance and in response to theory and conceptual frameworks—about the design of data collection instruments, the process of analysis, and how I generate and represent findings?
It is increasingly possible to find accounts of how Archer influenced empirical research methodology – in the development of data collection tools (such as interview guides) and how engagement with her work has facilitated and stimulated data analysis and theory building.
I am working on a book to support researchers in understanding the potential implications of critical realism within an integrated empirical research project design. A design that supports them in developing the critical realist methodology responsive to and facilitating their study. I am interviewing CR-informed empirical researchers about how they ‘bridge the gap’ between CR philosophy and empirical research practice. Archer is featuring heavily in accounts. I look forward to being able to share more in the future.
At the recent IACR conference, someone referred to Archer’s frameworks as ‘a gift’. People in our CR community of practice describe having ‘lived with Maggie’ during their doctoral work because of the intensity of their engagement with her ideas. Having never met her in person, she became someone ‘real’, with whom they were in conversation. People describe how she helped them better connect to critical realism and provided impetus to and pathways through their research.
In summary, Margaret Archer’s work supports practical analysis of social problems – by providing ways to understand and analytically engage with the stratified nature of social order. She said in her writing that she wanted her work to be seen as ‘explanatory frameworks’ to guide practical sociological and social science research.
Her enormous intellectual and theoretical contribution is evident through her published work. However, I think her legacy can and will also be traced through a remarkable influence on critical realist emancipatory and explanatory social science.