ABSTRACT
Although all structural properties found in any society are continuously activitydependent, analytical dualism allows ‘structure’ and ‘agency’19 to be separated and their interplay examined in order to account for the structuring and restructuring of the social order or its component institutions. This is possible for two reasons. Firstly, ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ are different kinds of emergent entities,20 as is shown by the differences in their properties and powers, despite the fact that they are crucial for each other’s formation, continuation and development. Thus, an educational system can be ‘centralized’ whilst a person cannot, and humans are ‘emotional’, which cannot be the case for structures. Secondly, and fundamental to how this explanatory framework works, ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ operate diachronically over different time periods because: (i) structure necessarily pre-dates the action(s) that transform it and (ii) structural elaboration necessarily post-dates those actions, as represented in Figure 1.1. It aims to make structural change tractable to investigation by breaking up the
temporal flow – which is anything but ‘liquidity’ – into three sequential phases: <Structural Conditioning/ Social Interaction/ Structural Elaboration>. This carves out one morphogenetic cycle, but projection of the lines forwards and backwards connects up with anterior and posterior cycles. Two such cycles are analysed in the current study: the one prior to the emergence of State educational systems and the one posterior to them (the book ends with the state of educational affairs in 1975). The delineation of Cycle I and II followed the preliminary judgement that the advent of a State system represented a new emergent entity, whose distinctive relational properties and powers conditioned subsequent educational interaction (processes and patterns of change) in completely different ways compared with the previous cycle, in which educational control derived from private ownership of educational resources. The establishment of such morphogenetic ‘breaks’ – signalling the end of one cycle and constituting the beginning of the next – is always the business of any particular investigator and the problem in hand. Figure 1.2 illustrates how the explanatory framework is used throughout the book
and should disabuse the prevalent mistaken view that the morphogenetic approach dated from 1995.21
