ABSTRACT
Margaret S. Archer (2013 [1979]), ‘Thinking and Theorizing About Educational Systems’, in Archer, M.S. (2013 [1979]), Social Origins of Educational Systems. Routledge: London, pp. 1-53.
Archer is a systematic theorist who has carefully developed a series of fundamental concepts over the past thirty years, e.g., the morphogenetic sequence, analytical dualism, the internal conversation. In this revised introductory chapter to her first book the Social Origins of Educational Systems (1979) Archer revisits the arguments that led her to develop a unified morphogenetic social theory – the ‘MorphogeneticApproach’: a theoretical synthesis that tightly integrates the concomitant complementarities of themorphogenetic systems theory ofWalter Buckley, the neoWeberian analysis of Lockwood and (later) the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar to properly analyse the emergence, reproduction and transformation of cultural systems and social structures. Borrowing insights from Buckley’s cybernetic study of positive and negative feedback mechanisms, Archer composes an explanatory framework of systemic change through the analysis of ‘morphogenetic cycles’ over time. A morphogenetic cycle helps explain the dynamics (positive/negative feedback) between the system and socio-cultural interaction through a process of systemic conditioning, whereby the particular configuration of the system (at T1) conditions the practices of the life-world (at T2), which aim to reproduce or transform the system and lead eventually (at T3) to a new elaboration of the system, which will be contested and modified in a second cycle, and so forth. Thus, in examining the social origins of educational systems in France, England, Russia and Denmark, Archer produces an 800-page comparative analysis of the process through which educational policies (as structural configurations) effect pedagogical practices and how variability within and between systems emerge.
