ISRF Chair in Social Theory

Centre for Social Ontology, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

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Professor Margaret Archer

From Modernity to the Morphogenic Society

January 2011 – December 2013

The research programme is the culmination of 30 years work on developing an explanatory framework to account for social stability and change.
Morphogenesis refers to those processes that tend to elaborate or change a system’s given form, structure or state in contrast to morphostasis, which concerns those processes tending to preserve the above unchanged

The ‘morphogenetic society’ refers to a substantive social form, where processes tending to elaborate the state of the social system – the one global system – considerably outweigh those tending to preserve it.

The ‘morphogenetic society’ is the antithesis of traditional social formations, where the mutual reinforcement between structural and cultural morphostasis accounted for their durability and ‘traditionalism’. It is equally distinct from the configurations of Modernity, where the simultaneous circulation of positive, structure-elaborating feedback and negative, structure-restoring feedback loops, meant change was partial (urban rather than rural), slow (restrained by entrenched vested interests), and retarded by problems of mobilisation (of forming effective social movements).

What is entirely new today is the fact that deviation-amplifying morphogenetic processes are decreasingly held back by negative morphostatic ones. After 1990, with the foundation of the World Wide Web, the globalization of multinational enterprises, of de-regulated finance markets, of reduced democratic participation in elections, and the rise of the Third Sector, we began to witness ‘morphogenesis unbound’ for the first time in history, given synergy between changes in ‘structure’, ‘culture’ and ‘agency’.

It is intended that the research project will include a series of workshops.

External collaborators include Professor Pierpaolo Donati (University of Bologna), Professor Doug Porpora (Drexel University) and Dr Tony Lawson (University of Cambridge).

The end result is planned to be a book entitled “From Modernity to the Morphogenic Society”.