A guest post by Aristide Bertrand
The CSO, an international and interdisciplinarian research centre founded by Margaret Archer in 2011, is proud to present a tentative complete bibliography of her works in English.
In keeping with Margaret Archer‘s wishes, the Centre for Social Ontology (CSO) has compiled and curated a tentatively complete inventory of her abundant publications in English (as well as some in French) on a dedicated webpage.
We hope our scholarly communities will better appreciate the breadth and depth of her contributions spanning 57 years, from her 1967 PhD thesis The educational aspirations of English working class parents to her 2024 posthumous book Morphogenesis answers its critics.
Aristide Bertrand, a PhD candidate in organisation studies in his final year, explains:
“As the secretary of the CSO between the summer of 2022 and the summer of 2025, it has been my honour to be entrusted with such an endeavour by the CSO’s then director, also my PhD supervisor, Ismael Al-Amoudi; with occasional advice from other CSO members, in particular Mark Carrigan.”
“None of the usual bibliographical sources was quite sufficient in itself. All of them entailed many omissions. In particular, I was startled by how inaccurate Google Scholar could be, for it was plagued with misattributions and misdating – a timely reminder not to trust technology blindly. Therefore, we were adamant that a ‘handmade’ bibliography, despite all its human errors, would provide us with a much better basis for an ‘Archerian catalogue’. In order to keep this task manageable though, I included neither translations of her works, nor works of hers originally published in languages other than English or French, at this stage. Thus, please feel welcome to suggest any addition or report any mistake so that the webpage may only improve!”
Having recently included new members, the CSO is more than ever committed to social justice and human flourishing, while considering society as an open system whose future may be influenced by sociological awareness and purposeful collective action. Since 2025, the CSO has been headed by Andrea M. Maccarini, Professor of Sociology at the University of Padova (Italy, EU) and board member of the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR).