Social realist theory
The morphogenetic approach

Building on her previous contribution to Culture and Social Theory, Margaret Archer here develops her morphogenetic approach and applies it to the problems of structure and agency. Structure and agency constitute different levels of social reality, each possessing emergent properties that are real, causally effective, and mutually irreducible. Through a systematic consideration of the temporal dimension of social phenomena and a strong concept of emergence, she seeks to provide the foundations for a non-conflationary theorization of the relationships between structure and agency that will help the social analyst to empirically study the accelerated processes of social change in contemporary society.