ABSTRACT
This chapter has maintained the need for analytical dualism in examining educational change. It has shown how this methodological device is workable because of the sui generis nature of structural forms and their temporal materialisation. Put simply, analytical dualism is predicated upon two propositions, namely that (a) structure necessarily pre-dates the action(s) that result in its reproduction or transformation; and (b) structural elaboration necessarily post-dates the action(s) that created it. This is the temporal mainstay of the morphogenetic approach, whose analytical teeth are the three-part sequential cycles of structural conditioning → social interaction → structural elaboration. The mutual influencing of structure and agency over time is precluded by Giddens’ structuration theory, since the ‘duality of structure’ insists upon their temporal simultaneity. Whilst an emphasis upon ‘duality’, rather than ‘dualism’, is commendable, structuration theory is too hasty in its aim to avoid reification of social structure and the putative reification that attaches to an analytically dualistic analysis of social reality. To employ the methodological device of analytical dualism is not to reify social structure. Instead, it is to honour the relative autonomy of structural properties that causally condition agency, which again is only possible because structure and agency stand in temporal relations of priority and posteriority. The cyclical sequencing procedure of the morphogenetic approach will be fleshed out in Part II. However, as mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, structural analysis must be complemented by culture, and how their respective morphogenetic/static dynamics gel with agency. The next chapter will argue that parallel propositions can be made for culture.
