[Social Morphogenesis and the Prospect of the Morphogenic Society, Margaret Archer, pp.1-22]
p.2 Our focus on 'social morphogenesis' has two implications. First, in concentrating upon morphogenesis we have elected to deal with 'those processes which tend to elaborate or change a system's given form, structure or state' in preference to morphostatic processes 'that tend to preserve or maintain a system's form, organization of state' (Buckley 1967, 58).
p.4 we accept that the nature of social reality is such that its explanation requires the identification of the distinctive causal powers exercised at any given place or date.
p.4 for any process to merit consideration as a generator of social change it must necessarily incorporate structured human relations (context-dependence), human actions (activity-dependence) and human ideas (concept-dependence)... A more familiar way of putting the above is that every theory about the social order necessarily has to incorporate SAC; structure, agency and culture. [JLJ - this statement has implications for game theory, but it is waaay ahead of its time. I predict that this approach will be the core theory which describes how computer agents "play" games. The relations-actions-ideas concept is the core of game playing. If only Archer knew how well her ideas apply to game theory.... shhh don't tell her.]
[Morphogenesis and Social Change, Douglas Porpora, pp.25-37]
p.26 for the morphogenetic approach as for Marx, structure refers to human relations among human actors - relations like power, competition, exploitation, and dependency.
p.28 for me, the [morphogenetic] approach simply articulates Marx's (2000) famous quip that 'men [and women] make their history but not under circumstances of their own making'. [Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. The title of this work relates the 1851 coup of Louis Napoleon to the coup of 18 Brumaire, Year VIII (9 November 1799) by his uncle Napoleon Bonaparte.]
p.28 Essentially, the morphogenetic approach signifies the understanding that people always act out of structural and cultural circumstances, which their very actions then proceed to modify or sustain.
p.28 according to the morphogenetic approach, there are dual sources of motivation, i.e., both structural and cultural. Structural motivations derive from the interests built into social positions, and cultural motivations derive from people's value commitments and ultimate concerns.
As people act within their structural circumstances over time T2, they alter or sustain those circumstances in the process Archer calls structural elaboration (Fig. 2.1). The same applies to cultural conditions. They are altered or sustained by human actions. The results at time T3 are the altered and sustained circumstances that comprise the antecedent conditions for any further analysis of action. [JLJ - I would suggest that Archer use a subscript here to indicate points in time, as in T1, or just T1. Perhaps this superscript notation is the standard way sociologists denote time, and I am just plain ignorant]
p.29 the morphogenetic approach brings together as analytically distinct concepts structure, culture, and human agency. Perhaps, to be added to this list should also be things, both natural and humanly made, since... new or transformed things also play a role in social change.
p.33 How do you explain social change without analytically distinct structures, without actors, without agency? You don't. [JLJ - or rather, this point begins the debate. I'm sure there are answers, but just not printed here. Social change begins with people deliberating their needs and pondering how they can act in society to satisfy those needs. But they quickly find that they are not the center of the universe, that they must work with others and their needs. Society lets the needs of the individual be heard through small community institutions and large public bodies that derive their powers from the people. Social change is explained in the activities of the people and in the institutions maintained by these people.]
p.35 Archer is suggesting a new designation for the present moment: Morphogenetic society. [JLJ - perhaps sociology (and sociologists) should do more than consider odd-sounding names for eras.]
[Morphogenesis, Continuity and Change in the International Political System, Colin Wight, pp.85-101]
p.98 Structures provide both a constraining and enabling context providing (or impeding) access to resources and rationales for interactions between people.
p.99 A basic premise of the morphogenetic approach is that a phenomenon (in this case social change in a global context) is best understood as a complex structural complex of interrelated parts. Hence, to explain and understand social change, we need to consider the global as a structured systemic totality.
[Self-Organization: What Is It, What Isn't It and What's It Got to Do with Morphogenesis, Kate Forbes-Pitt, pp.105-124]
p.118 Self-organization comes about because of local nonlinear interactions between elements that bring about larger 'structure' (specifically, for complexity, 'shape') of which the individual elements are 'unaware' and which is not externally controlled or directed... this 'organized' state of the system... arises spontaneously.[JLJ - yes, and with implications for game theory]
p.118-119 [Pierpaolo Donati] To my mind, society does not host relations, it is not space-time where relations happen, it is relations... The starting point I assume here is that the object of sociology is neither the so-called 'subject', nor the social system, nor equivalent couplets... but is the social relation itself
p.120-121 Archer has consistently argued within the morphogenetic explanatory framework for the reality of 'systems' emergent from social relations... predicated upon real and causal social relations and relations between relations.
p.122 Whatever the doubts that have been aired, morphogenesis and its synergy with relational sociology do provide a set of fundamentals that allow consideration of how an analysis using them might be brought closer to the complex systems' characterization of self-organization.
[Self-Organization as the Mechanism of Development and Evolution in Social Systems, Wolfgang Hofkirchner, pp.124-143]
p.136 the maintenance of a system functions such that the system (via downward causation exerted by the structure of the system) makes its elements (via upward causation that lets the structure emerge) (re-)produce the system itself.
[Morphogenic Society: Self-Government and Self-Organization as Misleading Metaphors, Margaret Archer, pp.145-164]
p.147 I will begin with what seems to be the central proposition at stake; namely, that the form of the social is always and everywhere the product of 'structure', 'culture', and 'agency' in relation with one another... leave out 'structure' and the contexts people confront become kaleidoscopically contingent; omit culture and no one has a repertoire of ideas for construing the situations in which they find themselves; without agency we lose activity-dependence as the efficient cause of there being any social order.
[Authority's Hidden Network: Obligations, Roles and the Morphogenesis of Authority, Ismael Al-Amoudi, pp.187-204]
p.190-191 As Foucault maintains:
What defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action which does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts upon their actions: an action upon an action, on existing actions or on those which may arise in the present or the future. A relationship of violence acts upon a body or upon things; it forces, it bends, it breaks on the wheel, it destroys, or it closes the door on all possibilities... if it comes up against any resistance it has no other option than to try and minimise it. On the other hand a power relationship can only be articulated on the basis of two elements which are each indispensable if it is really to be a power relationship: that the "other" (the one over whom power is exercised) be thoroughly recognized and maintained to the very end as a person who acts; and that, faced with a relationship of power, a whole field of responses, reactions, results, and possible interventions may open up (Foucault 1983, 220).
[Morphogenesis and Social Networks: Relational Steering Not Mechanical Feedback, Pierpaulo Donati, pp.205-231]
p.210 In order for system theory to be sensitive to interactions, it is necessary for the social relation to be described as a reality that emerges from a structured set of interdependent interactions, something that Luhmann does not do.
p.214 A social relation is an emergent effect of a reciprocal action (ego-alter inter-action) between actors/social objects who occupy different positions in a societal configuration... The actors are presumed to realize exchanges between each other... within a certain relational context of power... If stabilized over time, such reciprocal action (inter-action) produces an emergent effect that consists of a structure of interdependence (relational configuration, in Norbert Elias's terms: Elias 1978).
p.219 Relational steering is here conceived as a way to produce MG by means of those operations (relational mechanisms) which I call 'relational feedbacks'.
Relational feedbacks can be defined as those feedbacks which: (i) are non-automatic; (ii) are generative in the sense of giving birth to a new, relatively stable, relational configuration; (iii) they are special positive feedbacks, which operate according to a many-valued and transjunctional logic, not according to a mechanical binary (positive/negative) logic; (iv) imply a social network of agents (partners); (v) so that the feedback loop is regulated mainly by redefining the goals and/or rules of the network step-by-step.
