Abstract
In this chapter a specific generative mechanism is advanced to account for the profound changes that have taken place since 1980. It derives from the enlarged pool of ‘contingent complementarities’ within the Cultural System and the exploitation of these complementary items to produce novel morphogenetic effects. The key institutions involved are, on the one hand, multinational and finance capitalism, and on the other, university based digital science. Symbiosis between them grows because market enterprises need to be increasingly competitive and digital science depends upon diffusion. Their synergy leads new variety to stimulate further variety. However, their situational logics are in mutual opposition: the zero-sum logic of market competition versus the diffusionists’ logic of opportunity fostering the ‘commons’, of which all are beneficiaries. This is the relational contestation of late modernity. The two logics promote divergent morphogenetic changes that steer the developing global social order in different directions. Market competition has resulted in the current crisis from which Third Sector initiatives cannot immediately extricated it – meaning we cannot yet speak of the advent of Morphogenic society.
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Notes
- 1.
To talk about ‘entities’ entails neither physicalism nor substantialism: ‘entia’ in Latin refer simply to what exists, thus including non-observables such as ‘beliefs’, ‘preferences’ or ‘theories’. Importantly, for the argument I am going to advance, this entails that ‘culture’, though ‘insubstantial’, stands alongside ‘structure’ as a real social entity.
- 2.
For a recent defence of this position against my co-author, see Archer and Dave Elder-Vass (2011).
- 3.
This is the case for Actor-Network theory, most versions of Complexity theory in the social sciences and it reaches its climacteric in a work such as that of Elliott and Lemert (2006), The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization, who leave no room between ‘global forces’ out there and psychic life ‘in here’. I owe this last example to Mark Carrigan.
- 4.
It should be noted is that although working in terms of strata and the relations between them is, in principle, uncontroversial for Critical Realists, it is nonetheless the case that most realist social theorists have remained preoccupied with the question of how structural or cultural emergent properties can exert a causal influence upon agents full stop.
- 5.
Max Weber, ‘Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very frequently the ‘world images’ that have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switchmen, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest.’ Cited in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (1967), From Max Weber, p. 280.
- 6.
Consider this, for example, in relation to our own discipline.
- 7.
I have maintained that structural and cultural formations can be described and analysed in the same terms because the same four types of second-order emergent properties obtain in culture as in structure, despite their substantive differences (‘necessary complementarities’, ‘necessary incompatibilities’, ‘contingent incompatibilities’ and ‘contingent complementarities’). Moreover, these ‘generate parallel forms of situational logics’ (Archer 1995: 217–8).
- 8.
It should be noted that I date the rise of multinational enterprises from the late 1960s and 1970s, which is rather earlier than does Tony Lawson (Chap. 2 in this volume). In consequence, I attach more importance to their combination with other (cultural) developments in the 1980s.
- 9.
Michael J. Mulkay (1972) recounts the growth of scientific knowledge exclusively in terms of developments within the universities.
- 10.
I term I use to avoid committing to the Information Age or Knowledge society.
- 11.
Castells writes: ‘In fact, it seems that the emergence of a new technological system in the 1970s must be traced to the autonomous dynamics of technological discovery and diffusion, including synergistic effects between various key technologies.’ (2010: 59–60).
- 12.
Adam Smith (1904), ‘The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects are, perhaps, always the same, or very nearly the same … generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.’ Wealth of Nations, (Cannan ed.), vol 2, bk 5, ch. 1, p. 267.
- 13.
Note the disproportionate attention given to individual murders and abductions by ‘respectable’ media channels (BBC Radio 4 News), serving much the same purpose of public distraction as the first gruesome news-sheets in the nineteenth century.
- 14.
The irony is that those least dependent upon state funding were so because they had embraced the market.
- 15.
This statements is based upon such a small and non-representative sample (Archer 2012) that it requires replication.
- 16.
The proposed Social Stock Exchange UK is defined as for-profit and indicates ‘colonization’ from the time of its conception: ‘The Big Society Investment Fund was set up by the Big Lottery Fund under the Dormant Accounts Act to make early investments prior to the establishment of Big Society Capital (previously known as the Big Society Bank)’ (2012).
- 17.
Trivial but telling, my younger son and his wife had to undergo a ‘home inspection’ before being allowed to rescue a mature cat with three legs.
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Archer, M.S. (2014). The Generative Mechanism Re-configuring Late Modernity. In: Archer, M. (eds) Late Modernity. Social Morphogenesis. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03266-5_5
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