Margaret Archer

Margaret Scotford Archer (born 20 January 1943) spent most of her academic career at the University of Warwick, UK, where she was for many years Professor of Sociology. She is now a professor at l'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. She is best known for coining the term elisionism in her 1995 book Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. In April 2014, Professor Archer was named by Pope Francis to succeed former Harvard law professor and U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon as President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.

She studied at the University of London, graduating B.Sc. in 1964 and Ph.D. in 1967 with a thesis on The Educational Aspirations of English Working Class Parents. She was a lecturer at the University of Reading from 1966 to 1973.

She is one of the most influential theorists in the critical realist tradition. At the 12th World Congress of Sociology, she was elected as the first woman President of the International Sociological Association, is a founder member of both the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences. She is a Trustee of the Centre for Critical Realism.

She has supervised some Ph.D students, some of whom have gone on to contribute towards the substantive development of critical realism in the social sciences, including Rob Willmott, author of Education Policy and Realist Social Theory and Justin Cruickshank, senior lecturer at the University of Birmingham.

Margaret Archer argues that much social theory suffers from the generic defect of conflation where, due to a reluctance or inability to theorize emergent relationships between social phenomena, causal autonomy is denied to one side of the relation. This can take the form of autonomy being denied to agency with causal efficacy only granted to structure (downwards conflation). Alternatively it can take the form of autonomy being denied to structure with causal efficacy only granted to agency (upwards conflation). Finally it may take the form of central conflation where structure and agency are seen as being co-constitutive i.e. structure is reproduced through agency which is simultaneously constrained and enabled by structure. The most prominent example of central conflation is the structuration theory of Anthony Giddens. While not objecting to this approach on philosophical grounds, Archer does object to it on analytical grounds: by conflating structure and agency into unspecified movements of co-constitution, central conflationary approaches preclude the possibility of sociological exploration of the relative influence of each aspect.

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