Abstract

ARCHER, Margaret S.. The trajectory of the morphogenetic approach: An account in the first-person. Sociologia, Problemas e Práticas [online]. 2007, n.54, pp.35-47. ISSN 0873-6529.

This paper gives the author’s reflexive account of the trajectory taken since 1979 in developing the “morphogenetic approach”. Authorial intentionality is defended as possessing “self-warrant”, that is as first-person knowledge whose authority cannot be replaced by interpretations in the third person. The rest of the article traces book-by-book how I attempted (i) to capture the interplay between “structure and agency”, (ii) then advanced human reflexivity as the process mediating between the social and its component members, and, finally (iii) sketches how this concern with “objectivity and subjectivity” at the level of singular persons will then be connected up to the macroscopic transition to a novel (trans-modern) social configuration generated by morphogenesis untrammelled by morphostasis.

Keywords : morphogenesis; structure; agency; objectivism; subjectivism; reflexivity.

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