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Social Origins of Educational Systems
First published in 1979, this now classic text presents a major study of the
development of educational systems, focusing in detail on those of England,
Denmark, France, and Russia – chosen because of their present educational
differences and the historical diversity of their cultures and social structures.
Professor Archer goes on to provide a theoretical framework that accounts
for the major characteristics of national education and the principal changes
that such systems have undergone.
Now with a new introduction, Social Origins of Educational Systems is vital
reading for all those interested in the sociology of education.
Previously published reviews:
‘A large-scale masterly study, this book is the most important contribution
to the sociology of education since the second world war as well as being a
substantial contribution to the consolidation of sociology itself.’
The Economist
‘I cannot improve on her own statement of what she is trying to do: ‘The
sociological contribution consists in providing a theoretical account of
macroscopic patterns of change in terms of the structural and cultural
factors which produce and sustain them’ . . . Unquestionably, this book is an
impressive work of scholarship, well planned conceptually and uniting its
theoretical base with a set of four thoroughly and interestingly researched
case-studies of the history of the educational systems of Denmark, England,
France and Russia.’
British Journal of the Sociology of Education
‘This magnificent treatise seriously explores many of the most recalcitrant
questions about institutional systems.’
Journal of Curriculum Studies
Margaret S. Archer is Professor of Social Theory at the Ecole Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and Director of its Centre d’Ontologie
Sociale. She was Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick from
1979 to 2010. The most recent among her numerous books is The Reflexive
Imperative in Late Modernity (2012).
Classical Texts in Critical Realism
Other titles in this series:
Philosophy and the Idea of Freedom
Roy Bhaskar
Reclaiming Reality
A critical introduction to contemporary philosophy
Roy Bhaskar
Plato Etc
The problems of philosophy and their resolution
Roy Bhaskar
Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation
Roy Bhaskar
A Realist Theory of Science
Roy Bhaskar
Dialectic
The pulse of freedom
Roy Bhaskar
Reflections on MetaReality
Transcendence, emancipation and everyday life
Roy Bhaskar
From Science to Emancipation
Alienation and the actuality of enlightenment
Roy Bhaskar
Social Origins of Educational Systems
Margaret S. Archer
Social Origins of
Educational Systems
Margaret S. Archer
First published 1979
By Sage Publications
This edition first published 2013
by Routledge
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Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2013 Margaret S. Archer
The right of Margaret S. Archer to be identified as author of this work has
been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced
or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means,
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or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Archer, Margaret Scotford.
Social origins of educational systems / Margaret S. Archer.
p. cm—(Classical texts in critical realism)
Originally published: 1979. With new introd.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Educational sociology. 2. School management and organization—Great
Britain—History. 3. School management and organization—France—History.
4. School management and organization—Denmark—History. 5. School management
and organization—Soviet Union—History. 6. Comparative education. I. Title.
LC191.A674 2013
306.43—dc23
2012034654
ISBN: 978-0-415-63903-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-58400-2 (ebk)
Typeset in Times by
RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Dedication
To the memory of my father
Ronald Archer
CONTENTS
Introduction
Acknow ledgement
Vlll
XXVI
1 Thinking and Theorizing About Educational Systems
1
Part I:
THE DEVELOPMENT OF STATE
EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS
2 Structure:
Education as Private Enterprise
53
3 Interaction:
Competition for Educational Control
89
4 Structural Elaboration:
The Emergence of State Educational Systems
143
Part II:
EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS IN ACTION
5 Structure:
State Systems and Educational Negotiations
217
6 Interaction:
In the Centralized System
271
7 Interaction:
In the Decentralized System
393
8 Structural Elaboration:
Two Patterns of Educational Change
613
Index
801
IN THE BEGINNING
This book is where the morphogenetic approach was first developed and
presented in 1979. Revisiting it gives me the opportunity to repay some
debts and also to re-endorse this explanatory framework by replying to
some of its critics. Let me briefly revert to the theoretical landscape in
which this approach to explaining the emergence of state educational
systems (SES) was conceived. In the social sciences, those were the days of
‘the two sociologies’,1 when explanations based upon action and chains
of interaction increasingly diverged from those that focussed upon systems and culminated in the endorsement of systemic autopoiesis without
actors. In the philosophy of social science, these two sociologies were
underwritten by methodological individualism and methodological
holism, in which the ultimate constituents of the social world were
respectively held to be ‘other people’ or ‘social facts’.2 Social Origins of
Educational Systems should be seen as a howl of protest against this
theoretical and philosophical background.
The original Introduction (Chapter 1) shows the importance I attached
to resisting both of these types of approaches, ones I later critiqued as
‘upward conflationism’ and ‘downward conflationism’.3 The following
Introduction
ix
quotation set the terms of the theoretical challenge to which the whole
book was the response:
It is important never to lose sight of the fact that the complex theories we
develop to account for education and educational change are theories about
the educational activities of people . . . [However] our theories will be about the
educational activities of people even though they will not explain educational
development strictly in terms of people alone.4
This is a statement about the need to acknowledge, to tackle and to
combine agency and structure rather than conflating them. It was made
difficult in two ways. On the one hand, there was no existing stratified
social ontology that justified different emergent properties and powers
pertaining to different strata of social reality, being irreducible to lower
strata and yet having the capacity to exercise causal powers. Instead,
notions of ‘emergence’ and of their causal powers5 met with resistance
and the charge of reification.
However, the properties and powers of SES are considered here to be
both real and different from those pertaining to educational actors—
even although deriving from them. The problem was twofold: how to
justify the existence of both sets of properties and how to theorize their
interplay. The articulation of a stratified social ontology for the social
order was the achievement of Roy Bhaskar’s Possibility of Naturalism,
also published in 1979.6 Retrospectively, the concurrence of our two books
was advantageous. because although Bhaskar’s social ontology would
have provided a more robust basis than the ‘sheepish’ methodological
collectivism7 upon which I perforce relied in this study, its absence at the
time induced me to develop a thoroughgoing explanatory framework
for analysing the interplay of structure and agency. This was the first
appearance of the morphogenetic approach, which I view as the
‘methodological complement’8 of the critical realist ontology that
developed simultaneously.
On the other hand, in 1979 the landscape tilted again with the publication of Anthony Giddens’ Central Problems in Social Theory.9 Its key
claim that ‘structure is both medium and outcome of the reproduction of
practices’10 was the most blatant statement in the English-speaking world
that the ‘problem of structure and agency’ should be ‘transcended’ by
treating the two components as interdependent and inseparable. In other
words, ‘central conflation’ had arrived and purported both to nullify
Bhaskar’s stratified social ontology and to render my morphogenetic
approach redundant. I will not recapitulate my criticisms of structuration
x
Social Origins of Educational Systems
theory, made from 1982 onwards,11 which basically held it guilty of sinking the differences between structure and agency rather than linking them.
In turn, Bhaskar adopted this critique of Giddens,12 and critical realists
generally came to accept that different emergent properties and powers
are proper to different levels of social organization, and that those pertaining to structure are distinct and irreducible to those belonging to
agents. Thus, it follows that critical realism is necessarily ontologically
and methodologically opposed to ‘transcending’ the difference between
structure and agency. Instead, the name of the game remains how to
conceptualize the interplay between them, which is what the morphogenetic approach set out to do from the beginning.
PHILOSOPHICAL UNDERLABOURING AND FORGING
AN EXPLANATORY TOOLKIT
When taken together, two theorists enabled the ‘morphogenetic approach’
to be advanced in 1979. What it aimed to do was to develop a framework
for giving an account of the existence of particular structures at particular times and in particular places. The phenomenon to be explained
was how SES came into existence at all and, more specifically, why some
were decentralized (as in England) whereas others were centralized (as
in France) and what consequences resulted from these differences in
relational organization. Thus, the ‘morphogenetic approach’ first set out
to explain where such forms of social organization came from, that is,
how emergents in fact emerged.
Thanks to David Lockwood’s seminal distinction between ‘system’ and
‘social’ integration,13 it was possible to conceive of the two (taken to refer
to ‘structure’ and ‘agency’) as exerting different kinds of causal powers
(ones that varied independently from one another and were factually
distinguishable over time), despite the lack of a well-articulated social
ontology. Thanks to Walter Buckley, my attention was drawn to
‘morphogenesis’, that is, ‘to those processes which tend to elaborate or
change a system’s given form, structure or state’14 in contrast to ‘morphostasis’, which refers to those processes in a complex system that tend
to preserve the above unchanged. However, Buckley himself regarded
‘structure’ as ‘an abstract construct, not something distinct from the
on-going interactive process but rather a temporary, accommodative
Introduction
xi
representation of it at any one time’,15 thus tending to ‘dodge questions of
social ontology’.16
Although the study is ontologically bold in advancing the relational
organization of different structures of educational systems as being temporally prior to, relatively autonomous from, and exerting irreducible
causal powers over relevant agents, there was something less courageous
in acceeding with the methodological collectivists (Gellner and Mandelbaum) that such claims must be open to ‘potential reduction’ because
their justification rested only on ‘explanatory emergence’.17 A more
robust social ontology of causal powers and generative mechanisms was
needed to underpin this explanatory programme and allow it to shed its
apologetic attitude. This is what Bhaskar provided in The Possibility of
Naturalism, describing his own role as ‘underlabouring’ for the social
sciences.
Nevertheless, his realist social ontology does not explain why, in
Weber’s words, given social matters are ‘so, rather than otherwise’. A
social ontology explains nothing and does not attempt to do so; its task is
to define and justify the terms and the form in which explanations can
properly be cast. Similarly, the morphogenetic approach also explains
nothing; it is an explanatory framework that has to be filled in by those
using it as a toolkit with which to work on a specific issue, who then do
purport to explain something. Substantive theories alone give accounts
of how particular components of the social order originated and came to
stand in given relationships to one another. The explanatory framework
is intended to be a practical toolkit, not a ‘sensitization device’ (as
‘structuration theory’ was eventually admitted to be): one that enables
researchers to advance accounts of social change by specifying the
‘when’, ‘how’ and ‘where’ and avoiding the vagaries of assuming ‘anytime’, ‘anyhow’ and ‘anywhere’.18
In this book, I am doing two jobs at once: developing the toolkit
and also putting it to work to offer an explanation of the social origins
of SES and of the difference that their relational organization makes to
subsequent processes and patterns of educational change. Part I of the
book uses this framework to account for the diachronic development of
SES and their differences in structural organization, which can be
summarized as centralized or decentralized. Part II moves on to explain
the synchronic effects of emergent centralization and decentralization,
while these two forms of relational organization were maintained. The
briefest outline of this explanatory framework is needed before turning to
some of the debates it has provoked.
xii
Social Origins of Educational Systems
THE ORIGINS OF THE MORPHOGENETIC APPROACH
Although all structural properties found in any society are continuously
activity-dependent, 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’, whereas 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: (1)
structure necessarily predates the action(s) that transform it and (2)
structural elaboration necessarily postdates those actions, as represented
in the following diagram.
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 before the emergence of SES and the one after them (the book
ends with the state of educational affairs in 1975). The delineation of
cycles 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
FIGURE 1
The basic morphogenetic sequence
Source: Margaret S. Archer, 1995, Realist Social Theory:
the morphogenetic approach, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 76.
Introduction
xiii
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 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
WHY STUDY SES AND HOW?
This is merely a particular version of the question ‘Why study social
institutions at all?’ Some social theorists do not,22 and substitute the
investigation of ‘practices’, ’transactions’, ‘networks’, ‘activities’, and so
forth. Those doing so find themselves driven to introduce a ‘qualifier’,
whose job is to register that these doings are not free-floating but are
anchored temporally and spatially, the most common being the term
‘situated’. However to talk, for example, about ‘situated practices’ may
seem to give due acknowledgement to the historical and geographical
contextualization of doings such as ‘transactions’ but only serves to
locate them by furnishing the coordinates of their when or where. Simply
to provide these spatial and temporal coordinates is not to recognize
the fact that all actions are contextualized in the strong sense that the
context shapes the action and therefore is a necessary component in
the explanation of any actions whatsoever, since there is no such thing as
non-contextualized action (contra Dépelteau).23
Thus, the point is how this context should be conceptualized. Some
attempt a minimalist response and basically construe the situated nature
of all doings as the accumulated deposit of past actions. This merely
re-poses the problem: what was the historical context of such past
doings themselves? If ultimate regress is not to result, such theorists
have to cease backtracking at some point and take the contemporary
historical, contextual properties as given. They do so as a heuristic
necessity and expressly refuse to grant that these historical contextual
properties should be accorded causal powers. Such properties are indeed
treated as an ‘accumulation’, at most supplying a situational inheritance
to be drawn upon by those actors present, but not as something they
FIGURE 2
xiv
Summary use of the morphogenetic approach in the book
Source: Figure 7, original text, p. 616.
Social Origins of Educational Systems
Introduction
xv
inevitably confront and that necessarily enters into the shaping of their
actions and the trajectories they take. (See Anthony King, for example.)24
There is a voluntarism in such approaches that even at the experiential
level struck me as unrealistic. As a postdoctoral student moving from
London to Paris in the late 1960s, the organization of courses at the
Sorbonne, with booklets of lecture notes for sale around the corner,
which invited their regurgitation and was reinforced by a lack of seminar
discussion, represented a context that fostered standardized performance
and stylistic standardization. Writ large, it was this experience of two
different educational systems that prompted the present book, but it
would not have done so without the conviction that the contexts of
teaching and learning in England and France derived from systemic
differences that fundamentally shaped their pedagogical practices.
In other words, the structure of social institutions (of education, in this
case) mattered to what took place within them and who had a say in
this. These two educational systems had been structured in the past but
exerted causal powers in the present because of lasting differences in their
relational organizing structures. If that was the case, then an exploration
of the social origins of these different educational systems was necessary,
although not sufficient, to explain the differences in their enduring
properties and powers. Those social origins in both countries (as in Russia
and Denmark, which were added later) were ones of intense struggle
in terms of cultural aims and educational ideals, and in terms of material
resources and objective interests on the part of different groups vying
for educational domination but with none ever achieving outright,
unopposed control. To me, this meant then, as it still does, that society’s
institutional complex was the product of group conflict, which meant
construing the social order as a relationally contested organization. This
signified that the development of society’s institutions could not be
represented as processes of functional adaptation or as complex adaptive
systems. Today, I would extend this and deny that contemporary
educational systems can be characterized as either self-governing or selforganizing. They became what they were and are what they are because
of the relational contestation between interested parties and the compromises and concessions temporally reached that give a temporary
structure to the organization of education.
Then as now, such a generic starting point had little in common with the
work of sociologists of education, who set themselves the entirely different
project of advancing general theories (including universal propositions)
about the educational process in society. As such, they theorized about
xvi
Social Origins of Educational Systems
‘process without system’. Despite the kindness received from both
Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein, I could not accept their three main
theoretical assumptions, whose combined effect was to deprive the
structure of educational systems of any importance: (1) schools, colleges
and universities were permeable membranes, penetrated through osmosis
by social stratification, thus reproducing class differences in the pedagogical process; (2) the definition of instruction at all levels was conducive
to the morphostatic maintenance of class relations and that teachers were
condemned reflexively to ‘mis-recognize’ their homeostatic practices;
and (3) differences in the organizational structure of education could
be deprived of significance by selectively accentuating similarities and
neglecting differences, thus homogenizing the structure of educational
systems. Their combined effects are summarized in Figure 3 below.
FIGURE 3
Assumptions making the structure of the educational system unimportant
Source: Margaret S. Archer, 1983, ‘Process without System’,
Archives Européennes de Sociologie, XXIV (1083), p. 219.
Introduction
xvii
The argument advanced in the chapters that follow rejects all three of
those assumptions and the explanatory procedures to which they led.
Instead, I counterposed the following two propositions.
First, the advent of an SES in any country marked a radical change
from the previous historical situation in which the existence of educational provisions was a matter of private ownership, giving those who
furnished its physical and human resources untrammelled control in the
educational domain. The advent of an SES, defined as ‘a nationwide and
differentiated collection of institutions devoted to formal education,
whose overall control and supervision is at least partly governmental, and
whose component parts and processes are related to one another’,25 was a
structural transformation with far-reaching consequences. The development of SES universally signalled crucial changes in who could gain
access, what definition of instruction was imposed for what ends, and for
which positions and roles in society entrants were being prepared. Clearly,
with the advent of SES, the attachment of education to the state introduced some element of political influence that had previously been far
from universal.
The problem was how to theorize the emergence of SES, given the
overview that every form of institutionalization is the outcome of
relational contestation. The theoretical approach had to be more specific
because it needed to embrace the fact that different forms of strategic
interaction (legal restriction of or market substitution for the previous
privately owned provisions) were responsible for generating an SES in
different countries. It had also to explain how these different strategic
forms of interaction resulted in SES whose common characteristics
(‘unification’ by the State, ‘systematization’, referring to the principled
connection between educational components, ‘differentiation’ from other
social institutions, and ‘specialization’ of pedagogical activities) differed
in strength and importance according to the strategy that had generated
the SES. Specifically, the relative strength of the two pairs of characteristics, ‘unification’ plus ‘systematization’ and ‘differentiation’ plus
‘specialization’, represented the difference between centralized versus
decentralized educational systems. This is held to be the most significant
and far-reaching difference between SES. Providing analytical histories
of the emergence of centralized compared with decentralized SES is the
task undertaken in Part I of the book.
Second, the advent of an SES represented a great break with the
previous socioeducational context. It constituted a new institutional
structure, differentially serving more parts and portions of given societies
xviii
Social Origins of Educational Systems
and valorizing different sections of the total cultural system in its
definition of instruction. Cui bono at the time an SES emerged was never
a matter of osmosis but the consequence of which groups (materially or
ideationally motivated) had won out most and which least. However, with
the advent of an SES, both the (temporal and temporary) beneficiaries
and the less successful (frustrated, obstructed and partially excluded)
groups could no longer resort to unbridled conflict to defend their gains
or to redress their grievances. Educational change now became a matter
of negotiation, replacing the exchange of injurious acts previously
intended to eliminate other educationally active parties through strategies
of market substitution or political restriction. These were no longer
possible because no group could now complete with the powers and
resources of the state. Instead, three new processes for negotiating
educational change universally came into play: political manipulation,
external transactions and internal initiation. However, their differential
importance varied with the social origins of the particular SES. Which of
the two strategies had resulted in the emergence of an educational system
profoundly influenced who proved most and least influential in negotiating further educational changes, in the service of what ends, and how they
brought these modifications and reforms about. Once again, this is utterly
unlike osmosis, it guarantees no universal beneficiary (even the state) and
there is no sense in which it automatically underwrites the form of social
stratification prevailing in any country. On the contrary, for the first time,
education comes to play a central role in confirming and transforming the
class structure of modernity. All of this is the subject matter of Part II of
the book.
THE BOOK MEETS SOME OF ITS CRITICS
How any social form comes to exist (in this case, SES) is crucial for
explaining the emergent properties and powers that derive from the new
relational organization of its parts. What the first morphogenetic
cycle accounts for is how education was transformed from a ‘heap’ (of
disparate private educational provisions) into a ‘whole’ (an SES, subject
to governmental regulation and with coordinated component establishments). It supplies an analytical history of emergence, indispensable
for explaining the new emergent powers pertaining to the nationwide
Introduction
xix
SESs–ones that did not exist for even the broadest networks of educational
institutions previously owned and operated by the churches in Europe.
The second cycle, dealing with the SES in action, is vital to account for:
(1) the novel workings of this new structure in general; (2) how the
particular relational organization of centralized and decentralized SES
structurally conditioned different processes and patterns of change; and
(3) why once SES had developed they remained in existence despite
ongoing struggles and resultant changes.
Broadly, there have been two sets of critics, whose targets are respectively the first and the second cycles. In the former group are those like
Peter Manicas who would argue that the social origins of SES (as
novel structures with novel workings) are dispensable in sociological
explanation. Manicas is basically endorsing an elisionist account26 that
requires the instantiation of structural properties by agents before they
can be accorded any explanatory role. In line with structuration theory,
he claims that far from structural properties impinging upon agents, it is
agency that brings them into play by instantiating them. Yet, for example,
parents do not instantiate compulsory school attendance and nor do
teachers instantiate school inspection; both depend upon prior legislation
and its sanctions. Because such laws differ from country to country, how
they came into existence needs to be explained. Equally, the major
preoccupation of sociologists of education, namely the differential
educational achievement of pupils from different socioeconomic backgrounds, cannot be adequately conceptualized. Manicas considers
the structural and cultural properties attaching to pupils’ social backgrounds as being ‘materials at hand’,27 without the capacity to exert
causal powers. From this standpoint, we would be deprived of any ability
to account for why some of these ‘materials’ (structural and cultural)
are within easy reach of certain social groups but out of reach of other
ones.
Conversely, others have claimed (although they rarely show that they
have read this book) that any morphogenetic cycle, such as the first
one discussed here, is only history and has dubious connections with
emergence. I will not delay over the bizarre assertion that the explanatory
framework regards anything as being emergent because it is historical. On
this view, all antiques would qualify as emergents! In a similar vein,
Keith Sawyer maintains that cycle I is only history and cannot account
for the making of emergent powers and their constraint, enablement and
motivation of (subsequent) agents. Hence, Sawyer’s misleading comment
that I am arguing is that ‘it is emergence over time – morphogenesis –
xx
Social Origins of Educational Systems
that makes emergent properties real and allows them to constrain
individuals’.28 (my italics)
It seems obvious that Sawyer cannot dismiss explanations of how
something (such as an SES) came into existence and that this ‘may
require’ what I term an ‘analytical history of its emergence’.29 It puzzles
me sociologically why this only ‘may’ rather than ‘must’ be required in
every case. It is because Sawyer’s choice of words endorses Fodor’s30
notion of ‘wild disjunction’, such that a higher-level property (such as an
SES) can be ‘multiply realized’ by a wildly disjunctive set of lower-level
properties. Even were this to be granted, it is difficult to see how it dispenses with analytical histories of emergence in the plural. Indeed, I give
two instances of the ‘multiple realizability’ of SESs (those deriving from
restriction and substitution, respectively), and ‘wild disjuncture’ seems a
wildly inappropriate description of the two action sequences analysed in
Part I. There is not space to enter this discussion here, save to point out
that the whole point of Part I is to show that the interaction involved is
systematically related to the development of SESs and to their relational
organizing structures. Wild disjunctures never enter the picture.
However, Sawyer’s fire is not predominantly directed at the social
origins of educational systems but at maintaining that the explanatory
approach cannot supply an account of how the relational organizational
structures of SESs can constrain (and I would add, enable and motivate)
individuals and groups; that is he holds it incapable of furnishing a
synchronic account of reflexive downward causation in Part II. Here, he
joins hands with Dave Elder-Vass.
The latter differs from Sawyer in readily conceding that the morphogenetic approach usefully supplies the diachronic account that he
holds to be universally necessary in order to explain how any emergent
property comes to exist. Nevertheless, he proceeds to argue that
morphogenesis does not explain how an entity can possess emergent properties
and powers. Such an explanation always depends on the existence of a specific
set of synchronic relations between the parts: morphogenesis explains the development of a such a set of relations over time, but the operation of a causal
power at any given moment depends upon the presence of those relations at that
specific moment in time. (original emphasis)31
In other words, we have now moved over to a critique of cycle II, namely
how can an SES exert causal powers once it exists?
When he first advanced this argument in 2007, it was difficult to understand how it squared with the commitment in realism to the ‘activity
Introduction
xxi
dependence’ of all social forms. To realists, nothing social, whatever its
origins, is self-sustaining, which is what inter alia distinguishes the social
from the natural world. Only a myriad of agential ‘doings’ keep any given
higher level social entity in being, underwrite its causal powers, and
render it relatively enduring. I agree; while something like the centralized
French educational system lasts, then move a marker, second-by-second,
from the inception of the system until today, and each and every moment
of its ‘centralization’ depends upon agential doings.
This is not equivalent to some Giddensian notion that every doing on
the part of everyone somehow contributes to maintaining the whole (in
this case, an SES with a centralized relational organization).32 On the
contrary, how different groups of agents are positioned in relation to
the emergent educational system at the end of cycle I profoundly affects
what they can do, seek to do and do in fact do at the start of cycle II. The
relational organization of education is ineluctably handed onto them and
what they do with it does lie in their hands (even although their hands
are not free because of the emergent structure with which they have to live
pro tem and the fact that groups supporting it and challenging it are
significantly defined by it). To me, ‘one of the main antecedent effects
of structures . . . consists of dividing the population, not necessarily and
not usually exhaustively into those with vested interests in maintenance
and change according to the positions in which they find themselves
involuntarily.’33 This is how the diachronic segues into the synchronic and
the latter is incomprehensible without allowing for this continuity.
Although in The Causal Power of Social Structures,34 Elder-Vass has
come to adopt morphogenetic and morphostatic analysis, his ‘solution’
to the problem he voiced about my approach is ‘solved’ by confining
morphogenesis to what initially brings about a ‘set of relations’, such as
an SES, whereas morphostasis is held to account for what synchronically
‘stabilizes’ something like an SES and the working of its causal powers
over any further tract of time. This dichotomization creates more
problems than it solves precisely because it erects a wall between the
diachronic and the synchronic, effectively placing morphogenesis on one
side and morphostasis on the other. It entails a misunderstanding of
‘morphogenesis’ (working through positive feedback) and ‘morphostasis’
(which works through negative feedback) and the crucial fact that both
are always in play. This is properly understood by Italian commentators,
who rightly refer to the explanatory framework as the M/M approach.35
In cycle I, for example, the churches defending their networks of
schools were acting morphostatically in the face of assertive groups
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Social Origins of Educational Systems
seeking educational transformation. The interaction between those groups
seeking educational change versus those defending stability together
moulded the SES that emerged. The point is simply that in cycle II their
interaction does not cease (all lines in Figure 1 are continuous) because
those who have won most have not gained everything they want and those
who have lost out most do not throw in the towel but battle on.
In other words, the ‘break’ represented by the emergence of an SES
does not issue in an untrammelled morphostasis, with all hands on deck
and working through negative feedback to maintain the new educational
status quo. Synchronically, what the emergence of an educational system
at T4 does at the end of cycle I, is to re-divide the relevant population
(through the double morphogenesis of agency) into those with vested
interests in maintenance (morphostasis of the new SES) and those interested in further change (that may be morphogenetic but can be regressive), according to the new educational situations in which people and
groups now find themselves.36 But these conflicting interests (material and
ideal) will now, in cycle II, have to work through different processes for
defensive purposes or for further change because the relational organization has become different through their earlier contestation and that of
their predecessors. This is the downwards causation initially exerted by
what their own interaction had brought about at the end of cycle I.
On the one hand, this means, for example, that no government has
ever since voluntarily ceded the centralization inherited from cycle I
because of the objective advantages it perceives as deriving from an SES
responsive to political direction. Such actions can indeed be seen as
morphostatic and stabilizing. However, that same diachronically
emergent SES is also and simultaneously modified significantly by old
and new social groupings seeking morphogenetically to align education
more closely to their interests. For any SES (as for all institutions), the
change it represents is a compromise rather than the morphogenetic ideal
of any group. It is the satisfaction/dissatisfaction of group interests,
together with the further interaction of the relevant parties, that explains
future structural stability and change. In short, the SES remains a
relationally contested organization in cycle II, which is not a period of
unchallenged morphostasis (they never are) in which the pressures for
‘stabilization’ mean that nothing other than negative feedback becomes
the rule.
Elder-Vass does not endorse the social order as a relationally contested
organization. This is what leads him to slide away from the realist canon
that the combined outcomes of morphostasis and morphogenesis are
Introduction
xxiii
always activity-dependent (upon agential interests, aims and doings).
Instead, he introduces a ‘third party’, as it were, the evolutionary adaptation over which systems theorists like Buckley hesitated,37 but that recent
converts to complexity theory are busy rehabilitating in social theory.
As he puts it, ‘The concepts of morphostasis and morphogenesis, then,
are capable of elaboration and combination in ways that enable us to
start describing complex adaptive systems that are reminiscent of social
structures.’38 Because I have never encountered a satisfactory sociological
answer to the question ‘adaptive to what’, I stand by the statement in the
original Introduction (Chapter 1) that ‘education is fundamentally about
what people have wanted of it and have been able to do to it’,39 which
includes the generation of emergent properties, their causal powers, and
their subsequent elaboration.
AFTERWORD
The book’s last chapter does highlight how, before 1975, centralized
systems were already using ‘subdivision’ to provide more specialization,
especially for the market economy, but without yielding central control
and coordination. In parallel, decentralized systems were limiting
local and professional powers in order to enhance the responsiveness of
education to political direction. However, what could not be foreseen
was the lurch of all SES towards a centralized structure during the 1990s,
in the context of globalization and of centrist politics, despite a disingenuous rhetoric about ‘devolution’. In the past, the main problem
with centralized systems was that they were always out of synchrony with
the surrounding environment because of their overcontrol, whereas the
historical problem of decentralized systems was internal anarchy, because
of their undercoordination.
Today’s shift towards almost universal educational centralization
universalizes the mismatch between educational systems and the global
environment. This cannot be adequately explained by empirical
generalizations about ‘marketization’, ‘financializaton’ and ‘commodification’. Nor can the sociology of education persist in structure-blindness
and continue to discuss class, gender and ethnic educational inequalities
as ‘processes without system’. Isn’t it time for the analysis of cycle III?