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Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, by Margaret S. Archer. New York: Cambridge University Press. 354 pp. NPL cloth. ISBN: 0-521-48176-7. NPL paper. ISBN: 0-521-48442-1.
This book must be seen in the context of the rise in British sociology of a realist philosophy of science and a realist social theory. For a while it was eclipsed by the brilliance of the Giddens shooting star, and since Giddens also calls himself a realist, the two approaches were sometimes seen as identical. In fact they are very different, and one of several treasures in Margaret Archer's book is a systematic critique of structuration theory.
There are two varieties of realism, Roy Bhaskar's critical realism and Margaret Archer's morphogenetic realism; both give priority to ontology rather than the epistemology generally privileged by positivism, and both argue that our methods of understanding the world and the forms of the theory we use are based on the nature of the realities we are trying to understand, Sociology has to deal with different realities: at the very least, social...