Archer M (2016) Reconstructing Sociology The Critical Realist Approach

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Journal of Critical Realism
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Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist
Approach
Margaret S. Archer
To cite this article: Margaret S. Archer (2016) Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist
Approach, Journal of Critical Realism, 15:4, 425-431, DOI: 10.1080/14767430.2016.1191809
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DOUGLAS V. PORPORA
Drexel University
Email: porporad@drexel.edu
DOI 10.1080/14767430.2016.1190168
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
References
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for the Theory of Social Behaviour 8 (1): 1–28.
Donati, Pierpaolo. 2004. “The End of Classical Libealism in the lib/lab Interplay: What After?” In Present and
Future of Liberalism, edited by E. Banús and A. Llano, 169–212. Pamplona: Eunsa.
Donati, Pierpaolo. 2010. Relational Sociology: A New Paradigm for the Social Sciences. New York: Routledge.
Emirbayer, Mustafa. 1997. “Manifesto for a relational sociology.” American Journal of Sociology 103 (2): 281–
317.
Emirbayer, Mustafa Emirbayer and Victoria Johnson. 2007. “Bourdieu and Organizational Analysis.” Theory
and Society 37: 1–44.
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Lamont, M., and A. Swidler. 2014. “Methodological Pluralism and the Possibilities and Limits of Interviewing.”
Qualitative Sociology 37 (2): 153–71.
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Society.” Italian Journal of Sociology of Education 8 (1): 31–55.
Patterson, Orlando and Ethan Fosse. 2015. The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Porpora, Douglas. 1997. “The Caterpillar’s Question: Contesting Anti-humanism’s Contestations.” Journal for
the Theory of Social Behaviour 27 (2–3): 243–63.
Porpora, Douglas, Alexander Nikolaev, Julia May and Alexander Jenkins. 2013. Post-Ethical Society: The Iraq
War, Abu Ghraib, and the Moral Failure of the Secular. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Powell, Christopher and Francois Dépelteau. 2013. Conceptualizing Relational Sociology. New York: Palgrave
MacMillan.
Qi, Xiaoying. 2013. “Guanxi, Social Capital Theory and Beyond: Toward Globalized Social Science.” British
Journal of Sociology 64 (2): 308–324.
Sayer, Andrew. 2011. Why Things Matter to People: Social Science, Values, and Ethical Life. New York:
Cambridge.
Swidler, Ann. 1986. “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies.”American Sociological Review 51 (2): 273–86.
Swidler, Ann. 2001. Talk of Love: How Culture Matters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Reconstructing Sociology: The Critical Realist Approach. By DOUGLAS V. PORPORA. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. viii, 242. ISBN 978-1-107-51471-3 (pbk),
US $34.99.
This is a book that is needed, especially by doctoral students and early career researchers. Its
motto could be ‘the philosophy of social science is not optional’. Nor should it be inserted
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mailto:porporad@drexel.edu
mailto:porporad@drexel.edu
once the substantive research is finished, with a theoretical introduction and methodological
appendix simply serving as book ends. For some, the worse news is that social ontology is not
optional either; metatheory is not an unwanted distraction from the ‘real’ research. Why? It is
unavoidable that each researcher brings their ontology to the investigation of any topic. This
can be implicit or explicit, but it is one or the other because all research conceptualizes the
social — or any part of it — in a particular way, welcoming certain concepts and ignoring
or rejecting others, viewing causality from a specific perspective and presenting the results
accordingly. Thus as Doug Porpora puts matters from the start: ‘Do we need a philosophy
of science or metatheory? Well, yes. The fact is you already have one. The question is
whether you have the right one’ (p. 7).
Knowingly or unknowingly all our work is theory-laden and perspectival; it is never what
Thomas Nagel called ‘unvarnished news’. The ontologies we harbour or adopt regulate what
we allow into our work and what we keep out of it, and the finished product is branded by its
ontological assumptions. Thus, it is much better to know what one is doing and to have
reasons one finds good and defensible for doing it that way; ignorance is not innocence
and the end-product will not be ‘news from nowhere’. Robust eclecticism is simply not on
because many or most social ontologies are incompatible and reconciling divergent
meta-theories is either impossible or a major metatheoretical task in its own right. It’s
much better to know where one stands, why one takes such a stance and that, however incho-
ate it may be, its opponents are already massed.
Porpora’s book acknowledges all of this, and in relaxed prose (not to be confused with easy
reading because it demands thoughtfulness at every step). He provides an excellent text that
works equally well at two levels. First, it accepts that social theory is in a mess today and that
getting to grips with its warring factions requires a reliable guide through the philosophical
thickets from which the wars began and continue. In this role he is admirable and the first
‘half’ of the book unrolls this historical panorama on a need-to-know basis, pointing out
the key topographical features, the bifurcating pathways and the yawning pitfalls with
which every sociologist should be conversant. The fact that many are not accounts for
much of the mess.
Second, Porpora practices what he preaches. He tells readers his own vantage point in criti-
cal realism and that his purpose is to advance this philosophy of social science against other
contenders. Doing so entails engaging full-frontally with many of today’s best known social
theorists, but instead of aggression the only weapon he wields (very courteously) is logic.
Much rests on his own original thinking, which is often arresting and usually very effective,
but he is ever-ready to acknowledge that critical realism is a collective enterprise and to give
credit to his fellow workers in developing the realist approachto sociology. Indeed, the struc-
ture of the ‘second half’ of the book is based on my own acronym SAC, meaning that any ade-
quate sociological theory must incorporate structure, agency and culture, rather than any of
these concepts being conflated with one another.
To appreciate Reconstructing sociology, the reader has to accept that this is a work in, for
and about sociology. It is not an attempt to introduce Roy Bhaskar to American academe,
which is a different task. Some may even complain that Bhaskar does not gain his fair
share of citations. They would likely be right if judging from the Google perspective. What
that metric would miss is that the whole text is steeped in Roy’s ‘Phase 1’where he confronted
the social order most closely.
Moreover, the reader does need to take on board that the book is addressed in the main to
American sociologists because it was funded by the John Templeton Foundation to encourage
the diffusion of critical realism in North America. European social theory is not ignored, but
sometimes there are surprises. Just as one becomes pretty certain of where a particular argu-
ment is heading, it is applied to theorists who are less familiar, e.g. John Levi Martin, Ann
Swidler or Christian Smith. Fine, thank you for the introductions, for ‘glocalism’ co-exists
with international sociology.
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I have one reservation here (that Porpora openly shares) and this is that in the US (and
Britain) adoption of Bourdieu is exclusively through translation. It is stale news by half a
century for most Europeans and lacks any account of why, in the late sixties, seventies and
eighties, some who had worked in his équipe broke with him for theoretical reasons —
myself included but, more importantly, Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot.
There is another cause for reserve in this respect, namely that Mustafa Emirbayer is taken as
the sole, uncontested representative of relational sociology. On the contrary, Pierpaolo Donati,
who characterizes his position as that of a ‘realist relational sociologist’ articulated this
approach first in 1991 (and many subsequent works). His failure to be recognized as the
founder was because he wrote in Italian. (I must declare an interest, having just co-authored
The Relational Subject with him in English.) However, more to the point is that Donati expli-
citly regards the ‘relation’ as real and emergent, having causal effects at all levels of the social
order, thus endorsing and employing a realist ontology. Consequently, he distinguishes his own
from Emirbayer’s approach, terming the latter ‘relationist’ because of the irrealism of relations
(that generate nothing), its neglect of structure and reliance in place of a theory of social change
upon an endless sequence of undifferentiated ‘transactions’ with indeterminate consequences.
Donati’s relational realism would have strengthened Porpora’s position, but the generic Amer-
ican sociologist would probably have failed to overcome the translation barrier.
The foundations of reconstruction
Porpora himself is (rightly) tough on American sociology for privileging empirical questions,
despite conceptual issues being prior and more important. If you want to investigate whether
or not religious people aremore conservative politically, he states, then you have to begin by con-
ceptualizing ‘religion’ and ‘conservatism’. This is his trademark. The first of the two sentences
immediately above is dense, the second could be understood in a schoolroom. The likelihood
that the first would prompt discussion and disagreement merely illustrates the importance of
how concepts are defined and used and that our presuppositions must be open to critique.
American sociologists are actualists, concentrating on ‘doing’ rather than ‘being’, averse to
unobservables, to entities and relations inaccessible as sense data. Analysis is fixated at the
level of the event; quantitative methodology is the Humean ‘constant conjunction’ in ever
more sophisticated mathematical forms; and their ‘meager understanding of causality’
(p. 35) remains confined to the covering law model. The tenacity of event-based empiricism
resists the fact that neither structure nor agency nor culture are events. Such actualism does
however account for their marked preference for habit, habitus and routinized action not
only for ‘explaining’ manifest regularities but because it allows the unobservable reflexivity
and purposiveness of human agents to be circumvented. Hence the attractions of ANT,
despite its foreign origins, because ‘[w]ith an actualism that reduces even inert objects to
doings, all that is solid melts into enactments’ (p. 70). ‘Conflation’ is obtruding more and
more as the cardinal sin of sociology in the USA and it will be encountered again and again.
However, before he details these encounters, Porpora rounds off what I am calling ‘Part 1’
with his usual warning: in itself, the critical realist philosophical ontology of the social
explains nothing and neither does my morphogenetic approach as an explanatory pro-
gramme, which he endorses and uses throughout the rest of the book. The working sociol-
ogist, with a specific thesis to venture, alone contributes to explanation. In other words,
not only did Bhaskar underlabour for social science but social scientists have to do their
own underlabouring before making any substantive sociological contribution. The following
stages are involved:-
SO → → → → → EP → → → → → PST
Social Ontology Explanatory Programme Practical Social Theory
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All theories have a social ontology, whether implicit or explicit, which effectively defines the
constituents of the social world. Therefore, the SO performs a role of conceptual regulation
because it governs those concepts that are deemed admissible in description as in explanation
— just as an atheist cannot attribute his well-being to divine providence. In itself, a social
ontology explains nothing, although it may exclude certain explanations, cast in ‘improper’
terms. In itself, an SO tells no-one how to go about explaining anything. This is why an expla-
natory programme is needed: the sketch that is Bhaskar’s transformational model of social
action (TMSA) is too sketchy to inform how to undertake any research project — where to
start, how to marshal the data, or what social processes account for ‘reproductive’ versus
‘transformative’ outcomes. Thus, the morphogenetic approach is the methodological comp-
lement of critical realism’s SO in furnishing the explanatory programme. It supplies guidelines
about how analytically to break up the material in hand to form the three temporal phases
making up a single morphogenetic cycle that is activity-dependent throughout, and ends in
either change or stasis that represents the start of the next cycle. However, it is the investigator
who contributes the problem and data to be explained and, if successful, produces a practical
social theory. The EP will have assisted in marshalling the SAC components to account for the
‘who’, ‘when’, ‘why’ and ‘what’ of change, but it is the PST that does the explaining. Through-
out the rest of the book Porpora supplies plenty of practical and experiential examples.
Yet none of this will avail if ‘structure’, ‘agency’ or ‘culture’ (or any pair of them) are elided
together. In attacking such conflation in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, Doug Porpora makes some of his
most incisive contributions, always defending the ontological difference between the three
components in terms of causal properties and powers pertaining to each, and hence the
need to examine their temporal interplay. The apparent irresistibility of conflation is presented
as the second generic defect (after its actualism) of sociology in the USA. Instead, critical rea-
lism’s SACaffirms a three-legged analytical stool: material relations (structure); culture; and
purposively motivated human agency. ‘Mainstream American sociology would prefer to limp
along on only two legs or, even worse, hop on one’ (p. 128). Since the protagonists of particu-
lar conflations usually present them as novel theoretical breakthroughs, Porpora’s consistent
objections to the practice (most blatant in the practice turn itself), details the resistance that
critical realism can expect to encounter.
The building materials for reconstruction
Structure
Porpora’s concept is a refinement of his well-known paper ‘The four concepts of social struc-
ture’ (Porpora 1989). Defined as ‘(material) relations among social positions and social con-
structs’ (p. 98; I will return to the latter phrase) structures are objective, relational,
interest-based and, crucially, they not only constrain and enable but also motivate people’s
intentionality and action. Each of these defining characteristics warrants a separate article,
but allow me to be brief, for each is indispensable and all are interconnected.
The objectivity of structure rests upon the ontology/epistemology distinction (people may be
in positions where they are exploited without necessarily recognizing it). Obviously enough,
critical realists may say, but how do ‘social constructs’ fit in since they are real without being
material? We could instance women doing the same jobs as men but being paid less, but in
that case the ‘female gender construct’ is not the material basis of their unjust pay but rather
its (lame) ideological justification. Similarly, to maintain that it is not always social positions
alone but also how these are interrelated ‘to social constructs like resources’ (p. 98, my empha-
sis) is puzzling because, although true of certain valued material resources such as (non-
industrial) diamonds, the constructed value of which is necessary for diamond mining and pos-
itions in it to develop, it is difficult to put such cases alongside ‘relations to the means of pro-
duction’. Or is it — was not there a time when even land had to come to be valued?
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Perhaps just toomuch is going on at once here, and then being compacted into the definition.
Suppose, instead, it were teased out into historical morphogenetic cycles. In cycle one, some-
thing quite objectively material had to be constructed (we could just say construed) as valuable
— land, cattle, diamonds or cowrie shells — on whatever grounds stuck locally. In cycle two,
those entities — by then considered as valuables — became, for instance, ‘bride prices’ and
‘dowries’, i.e. part of the constitutive rules governing ‘marriage’ in certain regions, or class
relations emerging from prior constitutive rules of property ownership. By the end of this
cycle, at T4, a social hierarchy would have been elaborated on the basis of extensiveness of
objective material ownership or its absence. Cycle three would examine the resultant interests,
motives and actions of groups so defined in retaining or improving on their positions.
When Porpora turns to these vested interest groups as relations between positions, he con-
fronts the resistance of American sociologists to understanding relationality as an ontological
category. Actualism confines causally powerful features to the level of events; hence capitalism
is about capitalists competing and never about themarket economy being intrinsically competi-
tive because of relations between production and consumption. Why so? Because relations are
not substantive but abstract, therefore to them (and Dave Elder-Vass has maintained the same
about proportional differences) these cannot be bearers of causal powers (as Rom Harré and
Charles Varela also assert). Why not? Porpora counters with his admirable see-saw example. If
Socrates is taller than Plato, where does that relation reside?Without location it lacks concrete
being and appears as merely supervening on the relata takenmonadically. Yet, put the twowith
their different weights on a see-saw, and which way it tips depends not on their individual
weights; what is causally efficacious is the relation. On the causal criterion of existence ‘the
relation exists not just as an abstraction but as something ontologically concrete’ (p. 116).
Without this admission, for Porpora’s opponents (such as Randall Collins and later John
Levi Martin) social structure remains nothing beyond recurring or regular patterns of inter-
action, lacking in causal powers. Structure is equated with behaviour and being epiphenome-
nal is directly conflated with agency, i.e. social structure is simply what we call regularities in
action patterns. In so far as relations are sometimes recognized as concrete (e.g. Martin in his
Social Structures discussing marriage), they are held dependent on mutual recognition and
thus are inter-subjective and hence again entail conflation. Matters worsen in current practice
theory where rules (such as those governing property ownership) are held to exist only in their
instantiation or enactments (Giddens’s ‘virtual existence’). Then, in a second conflation, when
culture is also elided, such theorists place themselves firmly in the ‘central conflationary’ cat-
egory and congratulate themselves on having ‘transcended’ the tripartite divide: ‘culture,
structure and agency all become one’ (Porpora 1989, 210).
As Porpora continues, ‘at that point, where only practice reigns, we are again back to an
actualist behaviourism’ (110). With it, major casualties are the ability to analyse the temporal
interplay between the three constitutive components and the capacity to incorporate real
material interests as pivotal between ontologically objective relations and motives for promot-
ing morphogenesis or defending morphostasis.Without an interest-based account (material or
ideational), any actual regularities detected at the empiricist level of the event must remain
mysterious — hence the resort of practice theorists to habitual action, which hardly accounts
for industrial action and the historic struggles to institutionalize trades unions, which is pre-
cisely how social structure is elaborated over time.
Agency
Where agency is concerned, Europe and the USA have concelebrated ‘the death of the subject’
with very few refusing to join in the protracted funeral with its liturgical stages of anti-
humanism, post-humanism, transhumanism and now human-enhancement. Initially, post-
humanism stressed the ability of people to reinvent themselves serially (their identities,
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biographies and memories, according to Beck); then came to regard all entities (sentient or
not) as ‘actants’, whose properties and powers are as deserving of consideration as human
ones; and finally, this ‘parity of importance’was reinforced by vociferous protagonists of ‘arti-
ficial intelligence’ and bio-technology.
In these recent guises, current anti-humanismopposes anything intrinsically human, denying
the human any ontological grounding, and thus undercuts the humanitarian impulse, still alive
andwell amongst ordinary people, who acknowledge that fellow humans suffer as they andwe
do from social injustice or that their lives and survival are at risk, as Andrew Sayer has defended
well.However, secular arguments based upon the evolutionary ‘great chain of being’notion are
no longer a naturalist alternative for the human subject, now that a new artificial link has been
added to the top of this chain. Similarly, neo-Augustinian or Spinozist arguments (such as
Andrew Collier advanced) making human beings of greatest worth, because of their more
advanced conatus, fall prey to enhancement no longer being intrinsically human, as it had
essentially remained despite spectacles and transplants.
Criticalrealists concur in rejecting such anti-humanism; as Porpora puts it, ‘critical realism
is a humanism’ (131). Swiftly dismissing Emirbayer and Mische’s ‘Manifesto for relational
sociology’, where relations are presented as everything but turn out to be nothing because
they are SAC-free, as ‘madness’ (133), Porpora reserves his fire for the zombies, mesmerized
by habits, habitus and routine action, who have increasingly replaced the intentional, purpo-
sive and goal-directed subjects, with feelings and ultimate concerns who could stand inMartin
Buber’s ‘I—Thou’ relationship with one another. Ontologically, such subjects are moral enti-
ties to whom ‘rights’ can properly be accorded, but they have few protagonists among soci-
ologists on either side of the Atlantic. In fact, Porpora restricts them to three who have
seriously addressed the concept of personhood (himself, Christian Smith and myself),
which I trust is for the sake of not cluttering his argument.
His main thrust is against practice theorists whose ‘depiction of human action as largely
unconscious, automatic and un-thought constitutes its brand of de-agentification’ (p. 151) is
the joint patrimony of Bourdieu andGiddens. His critique is quite different frommine, although
completely complementary; Porpora eviscerates ‘habit’ itself, whilst I dwell on its being super-
seded by reflexivity. His argument against mechanical execution of routine is original and could
be called ‘the intentional imperative’. It begins with a description of his own morning ‘routine’
from getting out of bed to obtaining his first mug of coffee, by way of elusive shaving cream,
misplaced coffee jar and clamouring cats. His message contra practice and pragmatist theorists
is that problematic situations are endemic to our daily routines, which can never be devoid of
reflection— such as where to put down one’s foot next. Not only do I fully agree, but think he
could have gone further to argue that we subjects form our own personal routines and monitor
our sub-optimal ergonomics in ways that everyone is aware of when they move house and that
parallel the venerable distinction between ‘role taking’ and ‘role making’. However, he has said
quite enough to justify his case that ‘[m]echanical action is less possible now than it ever was. Of
course, my contention is that mechanical action never truly was possible anyway’ (157) and is
thus universally defective for modelling human agency.
Culture
This is the boldest of these three chapters. Porpora defends culture against reduction to structure
(epiphenomenal representations) or agency (mind), insists that all three are analytically distinct
but causally interrelated and, if the latter, they must be ontologically distinct too. Nor is culture
‘everything’, blanketing the entire social order (in the ultimate expression of central conflation).
Instead, Porpora adopts my Popperian conceptualization of culture as the sum total of ‘intelli-
gibilia’ (all elements with the dispositional capacity to be understood), regards Popper’s ‘Three
Worlds’ not only as ‘a gem of a piece’ (161), anticipating critical realism’s causal criterion of
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existence, and letting bygones be bygones where The Open Society and its Enemies is con-
cerned. He undertakes to defend cultural objects as abstract entities existing outside time and
space, thus confronting the nominalist charge of reification head on.
First, Porpora maintains that a particular statue or performance of Hamlet are abstract
objects, which are embodied in concrete objects, with causal effects. Like Einstein’s theory
of special relativity being instrumental in creating the atomic bomb, theoretical and aesthetic
contents are real and must therefore have ‘an objective existence independent of our thoughts
or indeed anything written down’ (171). Second, if so, it follows that these contents can
harbour contradictions and complementarities, regardless of knowing subjects noticing or
caring; cultural contents are not sui generis homogeneous, we are not bound to automatic cul-
tural sharing by being critical realists or British, and ideational relations of incompatibility/
coherence may be discovered and exercise further causal effects. This is how we grade
student essays, in terms of objective relational considerations about how well their contents
hang together — marking them up and down accordingly. Third, culture does not dominate
the other components of SAC because, for example, relations such as power and inequality
have extra-discursive effects beyond meaning, hermeneutics or interpretation.
At this point, Porpora takes on a worthy opponent in Isaac Reed, who upholds the hege-
mony of culture by arguing that hermeneutic interpretation takes precedence over expla-
nation. Reed maintains that any actors’ reasons or motives make sense only against a
background cultural context, a meaningful landscape requiring prior understanding. Por-
pora’s argument is subtle, but to me his clinching point is that, unavoidable as backgrounds
always are to explanation (unlike Searle’s ‘background’ moved in and out like stage scenery),
and inevitable as is their interpretation, nothing dictates that these must be cultural rather
than structural or agential, as in the case of global warming or the current economic crisis.
That there is a background to be explained presents no problem to critical realism, and
that any given background is changing historically is just what the morphogenetic approach
helps to explain. Together they rob the cultural domain of claims for its universal precedence
and hermeneutic interpretation of its necessary priority in sociological analysis.
Conclusion
‘As a discipline born of positivism, the hostility to philosophy is deeply engrained in sociology’
(200) and critical realism is a meta-philosophy, not a sociological theory. Doug Porpora’s
excellent book shows in clear prose and close argument why sociology cannot thrive in arti-
ficial isolation from philosophy, for it will make and depend upon philosophical assumptions,
whether knowingly or not. The book is timely because it may mute the siren call of big data,
which sounds innocent and exciting, but merely uses enhanced computing capacity to herd
another generation back to sociology’s ancestral home: empiricism.
MARGARET S. ARCHER
University College London
margaret.archer@warwick.ac.uk
DOI 10.1080/14767430.2016.1191809
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
Reference
Porpora, Douglas V. 1989. “Four Concepts of Social Structure.” Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior
19 (2): 195–211.
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