p.65 What is to be developed in this book is a theoretical approach which is capable of linking structure and agency... The central argument is that structure and agency can only be linked by examining the interplay between them over time, and that without the proper incorporation of time the problem of structure and agency can never be satisfactorily resolved.
p.70-71 In brief it is necessary to separate structure and agency (a) to identify the emergent structure(s), (b) to differentiate between their causal powers and the intervening influences of people due to their quite different causal powers as human beings, and, (c) to explain any outcome at all, which in an open system always entails an interplay between the two. In short, separability is indispensable to realism.
If the realist seeks to explain at all then his or her explanations have to distinguish between generative mechanisms and intervening factors - amongst which people always figure. It follows that a distinction between structure and agency is necessary to the realist enterprise in social theory.
p.71 Bhaskar maintains when arguing that in social theorizing
'the relations one is concerned with here must be conceptualized as holding between positions and practices... and not between the individuals who occupy/engage in them'. [JLJ - when I attack my opponent in a game of chess, I am not speaking of a real-world action that I take against my physical opponent seated across from me (I am not attacking him
personally). It is my game position that is attacking his game position. Curiously, after a well-fought game, the winner and loser typically shake hands - there is no personal attack meant.]
p.73 Action itself is undeniably continuous, but the nature of activities is not, being discontinuous with past activities because of the new relational constraints and enablements which now unavoidably help to shape it.
p.75 Hence my adoption of the unlovely term 'morphogenesis', to capture both the possibility of radical and unpredictable re-shaping (which renders misleading all those traditional analogies - of society being like a mechanism, organism, language or cybernetic system), and the fact that the genesis of this re-shaping lies in the interplay between structure and agency - a process which can only be examined because of their temporal separability and an outcome which can only be explained by means of analytical dualism. Our open society is like itself and nothing else, precisely because it is both structured and peopled.
p.111 [Sewell, Theory of Structure] 'Structure, then, should be defined as composed simultaneously of schemas, which are virtual, and of resources, which are actual'. What follows from this are two of the most contentious propositions, namely that 'it must be true that schemas are the effects of resources, just as resources are the effects of schemas'.
p.130 When realists speak in these terms [JLJ - constraining and enabling forces] they are talking of conditional influences, not determinants of action
p.143 Proposition 1, is that social structures, 'unlike natural mechanisms... only exist in virtue of the activities they govern, and cannot be identified independently of them'... Benton...left a loophole for activity-dependence, through allowing for those activities necessary to sustain the potential for governance.
p.152 the pre-structuring of actors' contexts and interests is what shapes the pressures for transformation
p.152 Bhaskar recognizes... that mediating concepts are called for to explain how structure actually does impinge upon agency (who and where) and how agents in turn react back to reproduce or transform structure... Bhaskar claims that 'we need a system of mediating concepts... designating the "point of contact" between human agency and social structure...'
p.153 Bhaskar claims that it 'is clear that the mediating system we need is that of positions... occupied... by individuals, and of practices... in which, in virtue of their occupancy of these positions (and vice versa), they engage. I shall call this mediating system the position-practice system'.
p.165 Society is that which nobody wants, in the form in which they encounter it, for it is an unintended consequence. Its constitution could be expressed as a riddle: what is it that depends on human intentionality but never conforms to their intentions?
p.166 'Morphogenesis' refers to 'those processes which tend to elaborate or change a system's given form, state or structure'.
p.183 Basically analytical dualism is possible due to temporality. Because 'structure' and 'agency' are phased over different tracts of time, this enables us to formulate practical social theories in terms of the former being prior to the latter, having autonomy from it and exerting a causal influence upon it.
