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Routine, Reflexivity, and RealismAuthor(s): Margaret S. ArcherSource: Sociological Theory, Vol. 28, No. 3 (September 2010), pp. 272-303Published by: American Sociological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25746229Accessed: 19-02-2016 16:56 UTC

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Routine, Reflexivity, and Realism*

Margaret S. Archer

University of Warwick

Many scholars continue to accord routine action a central role in social theoryand defend the continuing relevance of Bourdieu's habitus. Simultaneously, most

recognize the importance of reflexivity. In this article, I consider three versions ofthe effort to render these concepts compatible, which I term "empirical combination,

"

"hybridization,"

and "ontological and theoretical reconciliation."None of the efforts

is ultimately successful in analytical terms. Moreover, I argue on empirical groundsthat the relevance of habitus began to decrease toward the end of the 20th century,

given major changes in the structures of the advanced capitalist democracies. In these

circumstances, habitual forms prove incapable of providing guidelines for people'slives and, thus, make reflexivity imperative. I conclude by arguing that even the

reproduction f natal background isa reflexive ctivity today nd that themode mostfavorable to producing it?what I call "communicative reflexivity"?is becomingharder to sustain.

The role of habit?habitual, routinized, or customary action?has had an extremelylong run in social theory. Theorists are indebted to Charles Camic (1986) for demon

strating that "habits" played a bigger part in classical theorizing than is usuallyacknowledged. His definition is also nicely straightforward and catholic: "The term'habit' generally denominates a more or less self-actuating disposition or tendency to

engage in a previously adopted or acquired form of action" (1986:1044). However,it is hard to agree with his bold claims that "contemporary sociology has virtuallydispensed with the concept" (1986:1040); that "there is no need to carry this in

vestigation forwards in time" (1986:1076)?meaning beyond the first decades of the20th century?or to accept that the end of habit in social theory resulted from asuccessful takeover by behavioral psychology abetted by Talcott Parsons's substitu

tion of normative regulation for habituation. Even harder to endorse is Camic's viewof reflexivity as the usurper of habitual action: "So obviously appropriate has thereflective model come to appear that those who employ it seldom concern themselves

with providing a reasoned defence, or even an explicit justification, for their practiceof uniformly casting human conduct into this one mold" (1986:1041). In what follows, I want to question the death of habit; suggest that there is ample reason for

attending to reflexivity today; and challenge whether habit and reflexivity have stoodin a zero-sum relationship over the last hundred years of theorizing.Writing in 1986, it was understandable that Camic did not yet detect the nascent

revitalization of pragmatism, but less so that he had no intimation that Bourdieu'sreformulation of habitus was already becoming what Scott Lash dubbed the onlycultural game in town (there is a single reference in Camic's article to Reproduction(1970)). What is more, there were very good reasons, which strengthened over the

*Address correspondence to: Margaret S. Archer, Department of Sociology, University of Warwick,Coventry CV4 7AL, Warwickshire, Great Britain. E-mail: [email protected].

Sociological Theory 28:3 September 2010? 2010 American

SociologicalAssociation. 1430 K Street NW,

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ROUTINE, REFLEXIVITY AND REALISM 273

last two decades of the 20th century, for paying more attention to reflexive action,although those I will advance are not identical to those Alexander presciently gavein 1982 (1982:67f). Finally, what has predominated among social theorists is farfrom an endorsement of one mold of reflexive

action,but rather diverse efforts to

hybridize habit and reflexivity.However, there is a puzzle about certain theoretical convergences that paved the

way toward the popularity of these hybridization efforts today. On the one hand,modern pragmatists have become much more concerned, not with routine, but, intheir most emblematic book, with the Creativity of Action (Joas [1992] 1996). Con

versely, a number of critical realists, brought up on the "transformatory model ofsocial action" (Bhaskar [1979] 1989) and some on the "morphogenetic approach"(Archer 1979, 1988, 1995), today rank among the strong defenders of routine action,habits, and habitus. In other words, pragmatists and realists appear on the "wrongsides" in the discussion of reflexivity?with pragmatists ever more disposed to stressthe contribution of innovative action while certain realists are strong supporters ofhabitual dispositions.

This crossover begs for explanation. It seems as if both parties are seeking to

strengthen their weaker flanks in fast-changing times. The classical American pragmatists had always maintained that reflexivity (exercised through internal conversa

tion) came into its own when habitual action was blocked by problematic circumstances. It might be argued in short hand that globalization creates vastly more

problems that are not amenable to traditional routine responses and hence augmentsreflexive deliberations. Yet, this is too pat, because Joas stresses the situated creativity of all action (as against purposeful, normative, or rational instrumental action

orientations) without increasing the role of reflexivity, since creativity?tantalizinglyundefined?is not held to involve premeditation.

Conversely, critical realism came on the scene with a depth ontology (Bhaskar[1979] 1989), but has encountered two recurring critiques. On the one hand, the

charge of reification has constantly been leveled, prompting some to emphasizesynchronic analysis alone. This is clearest in the work of Manicas who, despiteincluding realism in the title of his latest book, A Realist Philosophy of Social Science,

concentrates exclusively upon the synchronic, treating the diachronic distribution ofthe structuring of roles, rules and resources, and interests as "matters to hand"

(Manicas 2006:75f). Questions about how this structuring came to be so rather thanotherwise remain unanswered. On the other hand, despite realism's insistence uponactivity dependence and relationality, realists largely view social relations as founded

upon shared objective interests and their associated effects inmotivating action. In

brief, realism's weaker flank is that it does not have a robust and relational theoryof social integration. It seems to me that the otherwise puzzling invocation of habit

by so many realists is an attempt to plug this gap.What these

developmentsseek to

satisfyare the

basically reasonable?thoughof

ten one-sidedly exaggerated?objections that the influences of the social order uponagency should not be located fully within agents or entirely outside them. The for

mer has been something of a problem for pragmatism and the latter for realism.

Despite the high ratio of internalized sociality, especially inMeadian pragmatism,the very fact that agents encounter external obstacles defeating their habitual routines and exceeding their habitual repertoires means that all social influences cannotbe subcutaneous?which would leave the spontaneous "I" permanently unemployed.The constant interplay between situated problems and situated creativity in contem

porary pragmatism evens out the workload between the "I" (always more of a task




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274 SOCIOLOGICALTHEORY

performer than a seething Freudian id) and the generalized other, balancing thesocial-within and the social-without.

For its part, realism has never placed sociality entirely outside agency; had it doneso its

frequentreferences to

ideological mystification and, indeed,the

living-outof

epistemic fallacies would have become incomprehensible. Those who have tried tolevel the charge that realism subscribes to monadic individualism in a wholly exterior social world (Depelteau 2008; King 1999, 2007) are hard pressed to account forthe importance realism has always attached to explanatory and ideological critique(Bhaskar 1989:60-71; Collier 1994:101-04, 170-90). Nevertheless, the recent annexation of habit and habitus presumably recommends itself to the above type of critic

by letting more of the social get under the agential skin.

My own version of realist social theory?the morphogenetic approach?is not

very hospitable to this current enthusiasm for habitual action among realists for tworeasons. The two coincide with what the morphogenetic approach is and does: (i) it isan explanatory framework for examining the interplay between structure and agencyand their outcomes, and (ii) it is a tool kit for developing the analytical histories ofemergence of particular social formations, institutional structures, and organizationalforms. In other words, the morphogenetic approach is both an explanatory program(the methodological complement of critical realism), but also a means of accountingfor the trajectories and dynamics of social formations.

Morphogenesis refers to "those processes which tend to elaborate or change a

system's given form, structure or state" (Buckley 1967:58), and morphostasis to pro

cesses in a complex system that tend to preserve these unchanged. As an explanatoryframework, the morphogenetic approach endorses a stratified ontology for structures

(Archer 1995), cultures (Archer 1988), and agents (Archer 2000) because each has

emergent and irreducible properties and powers?and explains every social outcomeas the product of their interplay. Outcomes, which can be broadly reproductoryor largely transformatory, depend upon the intertwining of structure, culture, andagency, but not by rendering them inseparable, as in the "central conflation" (Archer1995:93-134) of Giddens, Bourdieu, and Beck, which makes for an amalgam precluding the examination of their interplay. Nor is this co-determinism, implying a

dualistic?literally a dual-factor?approach (Depelteau 2008)l; it is never anythingbut analytical dualism. Crucially, what is missed inter alia by such co-determinismis the double morphogenesis in which actors themselves change in the very processof actively pursuing changes in the social order. This can be viewed as one of the

principal non-Meadian ways by which the social gets inside us.

My generic aim is to account for what forms of interplay generate morphogenesis at one extreme and morphostasis at the other, be it at the micro-, meso-, or

macrolevel. In order to discuss the bearing of this realist approach on the relationshipbetween habit and reflexivity, itwill be necessary to draw upon it as both an explana

toryframework and an

analytical historyof

emergence.Discussion of both

requiresa brief inspection of the basic morphogenetic cycle. From that, first, I will situate

leaving aside the mechancete of this paper, whose author even reproduces citations inaccurately andtortuously misrepresents my arguments, Depelteau is insufficiently versed in either the realism he attacksor the relational sociology he defends. It is not appreciated that in social realism all emergent propertiesare relational in kind, that they may exist unexercised and be exercised unrealized, inwhat is an ontologicaland not, as is asserted, an epistemological position. Relational sociology fares worse, being attributed to

Emirbayer (1997), oblivious of the flourishing Italian school (locus classicus Donati's Introduzione aliasociologia relazionale (1985) and his many subsequent elaborations, the latest in 2009), which, incidentally,endorse critical realism. Instead, relational sociology is reduced to the repetition of the term "transactions"as if no other concept were needed?with the exception of "habits."




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Structural ConditioningRelation (a)

T1

Social InteractionRelation

(b)

Structural eproduction morphostasis)

Structural Elaboration (morphogenesis)

Figure 1. The basic morphogenetic sequence.

the differential importance of habit on the morphostatic?morphogenetic continuum,which is also the historical trajectory of the developed world. Second, I will derivecriticisms about the ahistorical nature of the debate surrounding habit/habitual ac

tion, which will also allow me to situate the importance of reflexivity in the historical

panorama of structural and agential transformation (i.e., double morphogenesis andits epochal consequences).

THE RELEVANCE OFTHE MORPHOSTATIC-MORPHOGENETICCONTINUUMAll structural properties found in any society are continuously activity dependent.Nevertheless, it is possible to separate structure and agency through analytical dualism, and to examine their interplay in order to account for the structuring and

restructuring of the social order. Fundamentally, this is possible for two reasons.

First, structure and agency are different kinds of emergent entities, although spaceprecludes entering the debate about emergence here. This is shown by the differencesin their properties and powers, despite the fact that they are crucial for one another's

formation, continuation, and development. As Bhaksar put it succinctly: "Peopleand society ... do not constitute two moments of the same process. Rather theyrefer to radically different things" (1989:76). Thus, an educational system can becentralized, while a person cannot, and humans are emotional, which cannot be thecase for structures. Second, and fundamental to the workability of this explanatory

methodology, structure and agency operate diachronically over different tracts oftime because: (i) structure necessarily predates the action(s) that transform it and (ii)structural elaboration necessarily postdates those actions, as represented in Figure 1.

The possibility of employing analytical dualism rests upon nothing but this.

Full significance is accorded to the time scale through whichstructure

and agencythemselves emerge, intertwine, and redefine one another, since this is the bedrock ofthe explanatory format employed in accounting for any substantive social change.Since all the lines in Figure 1 are in fact continuous, delineating any cycle dependsupon the problem in hand. The projection of all lines forward and backward connects

up with anterior and posterior cycles of the historical structuring and restructuringprocess, enabling us to unravel and explain the processes involved in the structuringand specific forms of restructuring that take place over time. Equally, it is what allowsus to grasp agential change, occurring through the double morphogenesis and thecrucial

changesin

relationalitythat ensue

(Donati 2008, 2009).




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Finally, contra what some have claimed (e.g., Elder-Vass 2007), this is both adiachronic and a synchronic account. Nothing social is self-sustaining; a myriad of

agential doings (including reflecting, believing, and imagining) and social relationsalone

(thecohesive and conflictual

relationalityof

groups) keep any higherlevel

social entity in being and may render it relatively enduring. In other words, even as

long as something like the centralized French educational system has lasted, eachand every moment of centralization from its inception until today has dependedupon agential doings and intentions (individual and collective). However, this is not

equivalent to Giddens's notion that every doing on the part of everyone somehowcontributes to maintaining the whole (Giddens 1979:77-78). On the contrary, someactors and actions are irrelevant to sustaining centralization, some are more important than others, and further doings counteract one another so that the status quocontinues pro tern. The point of the morphogenetic approach is precisely to specifythe "who's who" and "who does what" in social transformation.

When a morphogenetic cycle is completed, by issuing in structural elaboration,not only is structure transformed, but so is agency, as part and parcel of the same

process?double morphogenesis (Archer 1995:247-93). As it reshapes structural relations at any given T4, agency is ineluctably reshaping itself in relational terms: ofdomination and subordination, of integration, organization, combination, and articulation; in terms of the vested interests of some but not of other agents; in terms ofwhat has become normalized and taken for granted; in terms of the new roles and

positions that some occupy and others do not; and in terms of the novel situations

in which all agents now find themselves, which are constraining to the projects ofsome and enabling to the projects of others, yet of significance for the motivationof all.

To appreciate fully the part played by either habit or reflexivity, it is necessary tolook more closely at the interconnections between the relationships summarized inthe basic diagram (Figure 1).Within any cycle this is to clarify {relation a}, that is,how structural/cultural conditioning effectively influences sociocultural interaction.

Without such clarification, the term "conditioning" merely rules out any form ofdeterminism, but does not arbitrate between two possible answers: conditional influ

ences are exerted largely through socialization (of habit and associated repertoires ofroutine action) or through the exercise of reflexivity, entailing deliberation about the

appropriate course of action in a given social context.When first applying critical realism to the social order, Bhaskar was clear that in

{relation a} "the causal power of social forms is mediated through social agency"(1989:26). While this (laudably) wards off charges about the reification of structuraland cultural emergent properties or their hydraulic influences upon members of soci

ety by properly insisting upon their "activity-dependence," it actually tells us nothingabout the process of mediation itself. Hence, it does not arbitrate between the two

possible answers above: nonreflexive socialization versus reflexive deliberation. Thismay account for why realist social theorists freely opt for either habit or reflexivitybeing the key mediatory mechanism, as I will later argue.

To provide guidelines for arbitration, rather than leaving the issue of what constitutes conditioning undefined, it is necessary to clarify {relation b}, namely, whatkinds of social interaction issue in structural/cultural morphostasis versus morphogenesis. This is crucial because T4 is the new T1 of the next cycle of < conditioning? interaction -> elaborations the end of one cycle being the beginning of the next.In other words, it is decisive for whether or not the conditional influence exerted




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further down the time line on the next generation of agents (who may or may not bethe same people) ismuch the same as at the initial T1, as would be the case where

morphostasis was the outcome, or is distinctively different, where the sequence endsin

morphogenesis.A timeless, placeless, and societally unspecific debate on mediatory processes isfutile, that is, one seeking a show of hands on the universal motion that "habit is

more important than reflexivity" or vice versa. Of course, most would rightly re

spond "sometimes one and sometimes the other." Quite properly, they are hedgingtheir bets until the "when," "where," and "under what conditions" have been specified. Attempts to short circuit this specification by performing a shotgun weddingbetween habit and reflexivity and calling its offspring "hybridization" achieves noth

ing of theoretical utility. Obviously, the sponsors of this hybrid are usually more

sophisticated than that. Conversely, strong defenders of habitual action almost uniformly assign a high and universal importance to the prereflexive (years, practices,experiences, sociality, and socialization) upon habit formation. Alternatively, strongadvocates of reflexivity attribute the same high and universal importance to people'sability to scrutinize, monitor, and modify acquired habits through the internal conversation. These, too, are generalizations and call for the same specification as theblunt "sometimes one and sometimes the other."

What I will seek to argue is that ifwe put {relation a}, meaning how people are

socially conditioned, together with {relation b}, standing for whether they reproduceor change their initial circumstances, it becomes possible to advance some specificpropositions about the relative importance of habit and reflexivity in relation to time,place, and conditions. Part of the usefulness of the three propositions advanced isthat it enables us to identify from which particular type of social configuration those

defending the universality of habitual action are overgeneralizing its importance;the same goes for universal protagonists of reflexivity. A more useful theoreticalcontribution than either would be to offer a specific diagnosis of the place of habitand reflexivity in the past, present, and future.

Generically, the conditioning influence of the structural/cultural context in

{relation a} works through shaping the situations?from the accessibility of re

sources to the prevalence of beliefs2?in which agents find themselves, such thatsome courses of action would be impeded and discouraged, while others would befacilitated and encouraged. The use of these terms denotes objective effects uponsubjectivity as Porpora (1989) argues: "among the causal powers that are depositedin social positions are interests ... Actors are motivated to act in their interests"

(Porpora 1989:208). However, if constraints and enablements are taken as illustrativeof contextual conditioning, then it has to be acknowledged that this is only thefirst installment of the story, the part accounting for how structural and cultural

properties objectively impinge upon agents. This is because there are no constraintsand enablements

per se,that

is,as entities. These are the

potentialcausal

powersof emergent social properties, yet a constraint needs something to constrain and

21 formulated the transmission of social properties to agents as follows in Realist Social Theory andquote it to reendorse it: "Given their pre-existence, structural and cultural emergents shape the socialenvironment to be inhabited. These results of past actions are deposited in the form of current situations.

They account for what there is (structurally and culturally) to be distributed and also for the shape ofsuch distributions; for the nature of the extant role array; the proportion of positions available at anytime and the advantages/disadvantages associated with them; for the institutional configuration presentand for those second-order emergent properties of complementarity and compatibility, that is whetherthe respective operations of institutions are matters of obstruction or assistance to one another. In these

ways, situations areobjectively

defined for theirsubsequent occupants

or incumbents" (Archer 1995:201).




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an enablement something to enable. In other words, for anything to exert the con

tingent power of a constraint or an enablement, it has to stand in a relationshipsuch that it obstructs or aids the achievement of some specific agential enterprise as

subjectivelydefined. The

genericname for such

enterprisesis

"projects"?any end,however inchoate, that can be intentionally entertained by human beings. In short,the activation of objective constraints and enablements depends upon their subjectivereception by individuals or groups.

Three conditions are required for the conditional influence of structural and cultural properties to exercise their powers as constraints or enablements. First, such

powers are dependent upon the existence of human projects; ifper impossible therewere no such projects, this would mean that there were no constraints or enablements. Second, to operate as either an enabling or a constraining influence, therehas to be a relationship of congruence or incongruence, respectively, with particularagential projects. Third, agents have to respond to these influences, which, beingconditional rather than deterministic, are subject to reflexive deliberation over thenature of the response, and their personal powers include the abilities to withstandor circumvent them.

However, this brief discussion of {relation a} remains indeterminate about whatmembers of society (in what proportions) will actually do. In my last two books

(Archer 2003, 2007) I have argued that this depends upon the mode of reflexivity?taken up later?employed by different agents, but have simultaneously maintainedthat the dominant mode practiced is contextually dependent (2007:317-25). The

general formula [social contexts + personal concerns] attaches equal importance toboth elements in accounting for the extensiveness of reflexivity and its dominant

modality. Thus, to advance the present discussion about when habit prevails over

reflexivity or vice versa, it is necessary to link up {relation a} to {relation b} inorder to introduce the overall historical sequence of morphostatic and morphogeneticcycle(s).

In the broadest terms, there is a historical trajectory from morphostatic socialformations (governed fundamentally by negative feedback) to morphogenetic ones

(where positive feedback begins to predominate) that accounts for the variable impor

tance that habitual action has played societally. In other words, habit does, indeed,have a particular place in history?it belongs with morphostasis. Undoubtedly, habitual action can be prolonged (among large tracts of the population) wherever

morphostatic and morphogenetic feedback loops circulate simultaneously, which isthe duree of modernity itself. But its days are numbered when morphogenesis beginsto engage fully because this is also when the "reflexive imperative" (Archer forthcom

ing) becomes ineluctable, even for the realization of traditional concerns. To invoke

"hybridization" is to put a label on this complexity rather than to understand and

explain what is going on, or so itwill be argued.

In other words, I want to respond to Vygotsky's (unheeded) call, made in 1934, fora history of reflexivity (Vygotsky 1964:153), rather than treating it as a human potential but one whose practice is historically indeterminate. This aim broadly coincides

with Emirbayer and Mische's injunction to "look at agentic orientations supportedby periods of stability and change" (Emirbayer and Mische 1998:1006-07), when

seeking to understand the kinds of projects they entertain. However, although their

injunction shows that the present argument appeals to a broader church than realism,nevertheless, realism can improve upon their empiricist appeal to Swidler's (1986) distinction between settled and unsettled times. This can be achieved by distinguishingbetween the contexts

shapedfor

any given groupof

agents, {relation a} beingone




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of contextual continuity, contextual discontinuity, or contextual incongruity It entails situating these three kinds of inherited contexts (not of contemporary agents'

making or choosing) on the morphostatic-morphogenetic continuum and showingthat they occupy distinctive tracts of the historical panorama stretching from the

earliest societies to the present day {relation b}. Variations in contextual kind mayalso be differentiated for different sections of the population and distinct sectors ofthe relevant society, neither of which are necessarily in synch with one another or

with the macro-trajectory of society

MORPHOSTASIS-MORPHOGENESIS ANDCONTEXTUALCONTINUITY,DISCONTINUITY, AND INCONGRUITYFrom the summary discussion just presented, three propositions can be advanced

and will be examined in turn.

The Hegemony of Habit Depends upon Societal Morphostasis

Here, "habit" is used to embrace cognate terms {habitus, customary behavior, habitual and routinized action). Habit denotes what William James termed "sequencesof behavior that have become virtually automatic" (1890:107) or what Giddens des

ignated as actions that are "relatively unmotivated" (1979:218). Charles Camic hasdone sterling service by combing through the works of Durkheim and Weber to

provide an overview of the respective parts they assigned to habit and habitualaction. However, he is so concerned to demonstrate that habit remained a preoccupation for both theorists that he fails to appreciate fully the connection each

forged between early societies (or ancient civilizations) and their contextual conti

nuity, which promoted the hegemony of traditional action?in short, Durkheim andWeber's characterizations of morphostasis and its consequences. Yet, we all know

that the worried man of the Third Republic and the delegate to the Conference ofVersailles were equally riveted by the transition to modernity and the discontinuities,differentiation, and diversification of mental orientations and institutional operationsthat it

represented?allof which are manifestations that

morphogenesishad

seriouslyengaged.In other words and under their own descriptions, both founding figures seemed

acutely aware of the pivotal role played by contextual continuity, which is shorthandfor how action contexts are shaped for the members of structurally and cultur

ally morphostatic configurations of the social order. Thus, Camic reports that toDurkheim: "Primitive peoples ... live to a large extent under the 'force of habit'and under the 'yoke of habit' ... for 'when things go on happening in the same

way, habit ... suffice(s) for conduct' and moral behavior itself is easily transformed'into habit mechanically carried out'" (Camic 1986:1051)?which remained the case

into the Middle Ages. Durkheim's own summary statement is classically pragmatist,namely, wherever "there is an equilibrium between our dispositions and surroundingenvironment," action bypasses reflexive deliberation, with "consciousness and reflection" awakening only "when habit is disrupted, when a process of non-adaptationoccurs" ([1913-1914] 1983:79-80).

From this Camic concludes that for Durkheim "human action, whether individualor collective, oscillates between two poles, that of consciousness or reflection on theone side, and that of habit on the other side, with the latter pole being the stronger"(1986:1052). However, the references substantiating this judgment were largely drawn

from Durkheim's works on moral education, civic ethics, and future pedagogy. We




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should not forget that these writings were part of Durkheim's reformist and remedialrecipe for modernity, the aim of which was to restore social integration to its levelin the status quo ante. This judgment is not part of his description of modernity

but of hisprescription

for the statusquo post. Moreover,

Camic doesacknowledgeDurkheim's belief that "under the dynamic conditions of the modern age, any viable

morality entails as well continual reflection at the upper reaches of the social order"

(1986:1054).Lacking Comtean dreams of sociologists becoming society's guides, Weber simply

describes the ligatures binding early societies and ancient civilizations to traditionalism and habit: "the further we go back in history ... social action is determinedin an ever more comprehensive sphere exclusively by the disposition (Eingestellheit)toward the purely traditional" ([1922] 1978:321). Contextual continuity is presentedas the necessary condition for this "sea of traditionalism," with peasant life revolving around the seasons. Camic fails to highlight the significance of morphostasis(and its transformation) because he leapfrogs over Weber's world religion studies asa whole on the grounds that the emergence of Western rationalism and capitalismis "sufficiently familiar that it can largely be passed over" (1986:1063). In so doing,the significance that Weber attributed to contextual continuity, stemming from the

mutual reinforcement of structural and cultural morphostasis, is lost. So, too, is thepoint of the comparative studies of world religions, where the absence of these conditions was precisely what he held to account for the origins of rationality in ancientJudaism (whose prototype in theodicies of misfortune was pinned upon the contex

tual discontinuities produced by repeated conquest and exile). Three thousand yearslater?a detour he never fully examined?Weber traced back the spirit of capitalismto these origins, which overcame the "general incapacity and indisposition to departfrom habituated paths" ([1923] 1927:355).

Nevertheless, Weber cautioned the citizens of modernity to be "constant in em

ploying correctives against unthinking habit" (Levine 1981:20). In other words, Weber did not see his four types of action, based upon different orientations, cedingplace to one another seriatim as circumstances changed. Instead, traditional (habitual) and instrumental rationality were extreme types, neither mutually exclusive

nor excluding the Wertrationalitdt or the charismatic. But, the Zweckrationalitat became increasingly dominant in the slow, partial, and differential process that wasthe progress of modernity. What he disavows within modernity is a strictly zero-sum

relationship between habitual action and the reflexive deliberations entailed by theZweckrationalitat. This provides no justification for the amalgamation of the two inhybridization theories developed for globalized society a century later. All the same,it does capture nicely how the marker moves from predominantly habitual action to

predominantly reflexive action when morphostasis slowly tips toward morphogenesisas structural and cultural differentiation engage during modernity.

Hence,I am

arguingthat the

continuityof

morphostatic societies (generative ofcontextual continuity) was underpinned by a low level of structural differentiationand an equally low degree of ideational diversification?the two being mutually reinforcing. Thus, the structural elite was trapped in the only form of cultural discoursein parlance, given the absence of an alternative fund of ideas; similarly, the culturalelite was enmeshed in existing leadership roles, given the lack of any other form ofsocial differentiation. Cultural morphostasis, through the stable reproduction of ideasamong a unified population, generated an ideational environment that was highlyconducive to structural maintenance. Equally, structural morphostasis, through per

petuatingsubordination and thus

controlling differentiation,made a substantial




11/33

ROUTINE,REFLEXIVITYAND REALISM 281

1:oMl

CULTURAL DOMAIN;s:s.,i;::K .,;:i,K:;:?: 1..K ,;;^ifc

1P$

Socio-Cukural InteractionT2 13

Cultural Maintenance

STRUCTURALOMAIN

T4Structural

T3

Figure 2. Morphostasis: Predominant habitual action, and low reflexivity.

contribution to cultural maintenance. When the context remains continuous over

many generations, then very large tracts of everyday life come under the tutelage ofroutine action and remain there. Induction, initiation and imitation suffice for thetransmission of this repertoire and for the conduct of most repetitive activities. Thegenerative mechanisms of contextual continuity are illustrated in Figure 2.

However, human reflexivity was not entirely absent and could not be because itis socially indispensable in three ways: a reflexive "sense of self is necessary for thecorrect appropriation of rights and duties by those to whom they are ascribed, theself-monitoring of performance is necessarily a reflexive task, and reflexivity is crucialfor bridging the gap between formal expectations and actual eventualities in the

opensocial

system. However,what

reflexivitydoes not and cannot do in

traditionalsocieties is to enable its members to reenvisage either the self or the social becausethey lack the ideational and organizational resources for doing so. This is why it isjustifiable to use the term "traditional societies." It is so because the co-existence ofcultural and structural mophostasis together generated a high and lasting degree ofeveryday "contextual continuity" for the populations in question: repetitive situations,stable expectations, and durable relations?and with them, habitual action.

Parity of Importance Between Habit and Reflexivity Coincides with Social

Formations that are Simultaneously Morphostatic and Morphogenetic (i.e., SituatedToward the Mid-Point of the Continuum)

"Parity" here ismeant as a summary term covering different sections of the population, rather than indicating "hybridization" for all. "Hybridization" is generallyendorsed by those emphasizing the durability of the prereflexive period and the internalization of its influences?from significant others or from the social background

more generally. The protagonists of hybridization are distinctive in withholding thepower from subjects to override early socialization reflexively (or restricting it to themodification of socialized dispositions), thus derogating personal powers in favor of




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the social order. Importantly, such theorists show little inclination to discuss differences between those most proximately involved in morphogenetic social sectors,compared with those remaining embedded inmorphostatic areas (rural), institutions

(agriculture),and ideational

preserves (folklore).There are two fundamental ways in which the relation between habits and reflex

ivity can be conceptualized: one sees the two in tension and producing intrapersonalstruggles, while the other views reflexive, innovative action as built upon habitual

dispositions. The first is antipathetic to hybridization; the second endorses it. Theformer is hospitable to people's purposeful commitments, the latter is hostile. Theone can accentuate macroscopic contextual discontinuity as a spur to reflexivity;the other emphasizes minute quotidian continuities at the micro-level.

The first view is Peircian and is compressed into the following five points (Colapietro 1989; Davis 1972; Archer 2003:64-78). First, Peirce is an advocate of our

"personal powers," especially those of our moral natures that should result in theself-monitoring of our habits rather than their replication: "You are well aware thatthe exercise of control over your own habits, if not the most important businessin life, is at least very near to being so" (cited in Davis 1972:111). Second, selftransformation comes about through the reflexive "internal conversation" in which

people seek to conform themselves to their ultimate concerns, ideals or commitments, arrived at intrapersonally, "by cherishing and tending them as I would theflowers inmy garden" (Peirce 1965:192). Third, this involves a struggle on the partof the committed and innovative "I" to overcome the inertia of the habitualized

"me" (or critical self), as Peirce pictures in his famous courtroom analogy wherethe Advocate of Change marshals his case against the deepest dispositions that havebeen developed biographically. Fourth, imagination plays a major role in realizingour commitments through the "power of preparatory meditation" (1965:189) because such "musements" are prompted not only by obstacles impeding the routine

accomplishment of courses of action: "People who build castles in the air do not,for the most part accomplish much, it is true, but every man who does accomplishgreat things is given to building elaborate castles in the air" (1965:189). Fifth, the

more social variation and cultural variety available to ponder upon reflexively, which

Colapietro calls "booty" (1989:115-16),3 the greater the stimulus to innovative commitments: "what most influences men to self-government is intense disgust with onekind of life and warm admiration for another" (Colapietro 1989:111).

This Peircian understanding, to which I have not done justice, allows for bothirreducible personal powers and also for distinct social properties and powers, thus

being compatible with realism's stratified ontology. Conversely, those who regardinnovative or creative action as dependent upon habit have a flat social ontology

made up of a myriad of occurrent situations (unlike Mead himself). Simultaneously,they also endorse a much more socially permeated concept of the person, hence theirvalorization of the

prereflexive (see Crossley 2001),with the

quintessential expressionof this outlook being Joas's Creativity of Action ([1992] 1996). This insightful studyhas been noted for its greater affinities with Dewey and Mead, and its "curiousreluctance to assimilate the ideas of CS. Peirce" (Kilpinen 1998:41). In fact, it

3Colapietro maintains of Peirce: "When I enter into the inner world, I take with me the booty frommy exploits in the outer world, such things as my native language, any other languages I might know, aboundless number of visual forms, numerical systems and so on. The more booty I take to that secrethiding place, the more spacious that hiding place becomes ... the domain of inwardness is not fixed inits limits; the power and wealth of signs that I borrow from others and create for myself determine the

dimensions of my inwardness" (1989:115-16).




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endorses none of the five points above. Again, I will overcompress by accentuatingthree issues.

First, Joas holds creativity to be reliant upon the prerefiexive because it iselicited

by"situations which call for

solutions,and not as an unconstrained

production of something new without any constitutive background in unreflected habits"(1996:129). Moreover, "even acts of the utmost creativity assume the preexistence ofa bedrock of underlying routine actions and external conditions which are simplytaken as given" (1996:197). This foreshadows the minimization of both personal andsocial properties and powers. Thus, in Joas's opposition to the tyranny of purposefulness (whether normative or rational), he opposes both the presumption of goalsprior to action and "the actor's basic autonomy in the setting of goals" (Burger2007:109): "goal-setting does not take place by an act of the intellect prior to theactual action, but is instead the result of a reflection on aspirations and tendenciesthat are prerefiexive and have already always been operative" (1996:158). Second, thisis the fundamental stranglehold placed upon personal powers of self-commitment.It is intensified because the "interactive situation is constitutive of goals and actions. It does not merely set limits to what may occur, it constantly and directlyinfluences what does occur" (Mouzelis 1998:492). Therefore, and at variance with

Peirce, the autotelic process receives no examination. Third, since the book and ar

gument remain entirely at the situational level, macroscopic shifts and particularlythe contextual discontinuities that intensify with modernity are not admitted to haveany impact on this seamless situational flow (Gross 1999:341-42; Burger 1998:109;

Mouzelis 1998:495).In their very different ways, the founding fathers all accentuated that the transi

tion tomodernity constituted a huge growth in "contextual discontinuity" manifestedfirst among its prime movers. Whether the key transformation was conceptualizedin terms of the transition from segmented to cooperative social organization, fromfeudalism to capitalism, or from pre-Reformation to post-Reformation, the commondenominator was "contextual discontinuity," represented by new forms of differentiation, dissimilarity, alienation, anomie, and uncertainty. Correspondingly, those features that had been characteristic of traditional "contextual continuity"?similarity,

familiarity, and solidarity?were presented as being progressively (if not irreversibly)undermined. As I have argued elsewhere (Archer 2007:317-30, forthcoming), the slowand differential impacts of urbanization, industrialization, and political participation

were major prompts serving to extend the reflexivity of those groups in the vanguardof change and those whose support was solicited and mobilized, even if the veryslowness of modernity allowed some contextual continuity and routinzation to bereestablished for others, for example, in urban working-class communities.

Indeed, this very slowness of the modernization process and its differential im

pacts (on the urban and the rural, the political players and the populace, advancedcountries and less

advanced)meant that "contextual

discontinuity"and "contextual

continuity" co-existed cheek by jowl for different sections of any specific populationat any particular time. Nevertheless, the fact that ideational pluralism proliferatedand recruited increased (sectional) support also precluded the reestablishment of old

style cultural morphostasis. No resumed reproduction of a traditional, systematizedconspectus of ideas was possible in the face of sectionalized sociocultural groupings. Similarly, the interaction of a growing variety of promotive interest groups,associated with newly differentiating institutions?each of which became articulatein its own defense and capable of detecting self-interest in the legitimatory claims




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of others?was sufficient to prevent any drift back to unquestioned structural mor

phostasis.

Figure 3. Morphogenesis and reflexivity.

Increases in Reflexivity Depend upon Morphogenesis

Swift change renders habitual guidelines to action of decreasing relevance or positively misleading. From the 1980s onwards, the synergy between multinational production and information technology resulted in unprecedented morphogenesis, whose

generative mechanism is for variety to spawn more variety. With it, the situational

logic of opportunity began to emerge at both corporate and individual levels for the

first time in human history, at variance with modernity's zero-sum "situational logicof competition." This is what Thevenot terms the "imperative of innovation" (2006,2008:14) and it constitutes the condition for "the reflexive imperative."

On the one hand, exercising personal reflexivity in order to make choices in uncharted territory means that the previous guidelines, embedded in "contextual conti

nuity," are fast vanishing as they become increasingly misleading. On the other hand,the prizes inwork and employment start going to those who detect, manipulate, andfind applications for links between previously unrelated bits of knowledge; oneswhose contingent complementarity could be exploited to advantage. The "winners"become such

by extrudingtheir skills to match the fast

shifting arrayof

opportunities or making their own opportunities by innovating upon contingency. All of thisfosters the "reflexive imperative" because the old routine guidelines are no longerapplicable and new ones cannot be forged because (even) nascent morphogenesis(Figure 3) is inhospitable to routinization.

Increasingly, agents navigate by the compass of their own personal concerns.This growing reliance on their personal powers?whether deployed individually or

collectively?has as its counterparts the demise of the generalized other and thediminution of socialization as a quasi-unilateral process (as I discuss later). Its corol

lary is that some of the better-known theories from the 1990s are conceptually

M

E

T




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incapable of dealing with the consequences of morphogenesis unbound. For exam

ple, whenever pragmatists insist upon the absence of "premeditated action," thislogically excludes "prior personal commitments" functioning as navigational devices:if

aspirationswere

truly prereflexiveand

"always already operative,"there would be

a misfit with new opportunities. Similarly, if those acknowledging "individuation"simultaneously derogate agential powers, as in the "reflexive modernization" thesis(Beck et al. 1994; for a critique, see Archer 2007:29-37), then they also maintainthat "the self-focussed individual is hardly in a position to take unavoidable decisionsin a rational and responsible manner, that is, with reference to the possible conse

quences" (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002:48). He or she has had their personalcompass confiscated by theoretical fiat.

Instead, I argue that extended reliance upon reflexivity tomake and monitor agential commitments and a correspondingly selective relationality (the two being mutu

ally reinforcing) generates an agency of reflexive, evaluative engagement (Thevenot2006, 2008). This sociology of engagement, shared by the French "pragmatic turn"and by my own position (Maccarini 2008; Archer forthcoming), although far fromidentical, stresses the growing reliance of agents on their personal powers?whetherdeployed individually or collectively. Its counterparts are an acknowledged demiseof the generalized other and of socialization as a quasi-unilateral process. Evaluative engagement with the world, as the antithesis of Luhmann's "self-despairingsubject" and Habermas's "utopianism" alike (Maccarini and Prandini 2010), findsaffinities in the work of Charles Taylor (1989:27-43) and Harry Frankfurt?that is,

in theorization of the "importance of what we care about" (Frankfurt 1988:80-94).In place of habitual guidelines, subjects become increasingly dependent upon their

own personal concerns as their only guides to action. Reflexive deliberation is in

creasingly inescapable in order to endorse a course of action held likely to accomplishit; self-interrogation, self-monitoring, and self-revision are now necessary given thateveryone unavoidably becomes her own guide.

CAN REALISM AND HABIT BERUN INDOUBLE-HARNESS?There are three reasons why critical realists do not, in principle, have good causeto be strong defenders of "routine action." First, since social life in an open systemis always at the mercy of contingencies so, by definition, people's responses cannotbe entirely "routinized." Second, the co-existence and interplay of plural generative

mechanisms often shapes the empirical situations encountered by subjects in unpredictable ways, thus requiring creative responses from them. Third, realism's stratifiedsocial ontology includes a stratum of emergent personal properties and powers, which

include thehuman

capacityfor innovative action.

Thus, it is unexpected to find Dave Elder-Vass (2007), Steve Fleetwood (2008),and Andrew Sayer (2005, 2009) each mounting independent defenses of "routine action" and seeking to accommodate reflexivity to it. All three authors tend to vaunt"social conditioning" over subjects' degrees of freedom to produce nondetermined,heterogeneous responses (not fully "voluntaristic" ones, which no one is defending)through their reflexive practices. Reflexivity was first ventured to refine realism'svague account of how the process of "social conditioning" actually works (Archer2003, 2007), by suggesting that people's reflexive deliberations constitute the media

torymechanism. What is

being counterposed bythe above authors is the

equivalent




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286 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY

importance of an alternative process of mediation* namely, "habituation"?hencetheir attraction to Bourdieu. But, because critical realists endorse a transformationalor morphogenetic model of social action, involving change, innovation, and creativ

ity,their aim is to reconcile habitus and

reflexivityHence, they also shun Bourdieu's most stringent French critic, Bernard Lahire

(1998, 2002, 2003), and his attempt to replace the overgeneralized attribution ofhabitus to a collectivity by a precise specification of the determinants of subjectivityat the level of the individual. As an explanatory program in social psychology, thiswould deprive agency of all properties and powers other than malleability. Andrew

Sayer dismisses this as "demeaning reductionism" (2009:115) and the other twoauthors endorse the compromise he advocates: "Yes we do monitor and mediate

many social influences, but much still gets in below our radar" (Sayer 2009:122).In other words, the social order is held partly to shape our subjectivity internally,rather than working as a wholly external feature encountered by people's independentinteriority as, for example, in rational choice theory.

However, the complete independence of personal subjectivity from social objectivity is not what divides us here. Sayer never attributes this presumption to meand Fleetwood (2008:195) quotes a passage in which I explicitly deny it: "Without

nullifying the privacy of our inner lives, our sociality is there inside them because itis there inside us. Hence, the inner conversation cannot be portrayed as the fully in

dependent activity of the isolated monad, who only takes cognisance of his externalsocial context in the same way that he consults the weather" (Archer 2000:117). But,importantly, the passage reads on: "Conversely, the internal conversation can tooreadily be colonized by the social, such that its causal powers are expropriated fromthe person and are reassigned to society." In other words, the role I have assigned to

reflexivity aims to strike a balance between construing everything that human beingsare as a gift of society (Harre 1983:20)5 and modernity's monad, who is untouched

by his social environment, as in the case of homo economicus and his kinfolk.Only by striking the right balance between personal, structural, and cultural emer

gent powers is it possible to explain precisely what people do, rather than fallingback upon correlations between group membership and action patterns, which are

necessarily lacking in explanatory power. To account for variability as well as regularity in the courses of action taken by those similarly situated means acknowledgingour singularity as persons, without denying that our sociality is essential for us to be

recognizable as human persons.

THREE ATTEMPTS TO COMBINEHABITUS AND REFLEXIVITY

Empirical Combination

There is a considerable difference in the amount of theoretical adjustment that thoserealists advocating a combination of habitus and reflexivity deem necessary for the

4Manicas is critical of any form of mediation between structure and agency being required and asks:"Why postulate the existence of structure or culture as causally relevant if, to be causally effective, these

must be mediated by social actors?" (2006:72). Since the question is rhetorical, it is presumably heldto be unanswerable. However, structure and culture could only be deemed causally irrelevant if what

were being mediated was, in fact, invented then and there by actors whose own personal powers wereentirely responsible for it. This ban upon mediation seems as untenable as holding that the wires bringingelectricity into my house are entirely responsible for the working of my electrical appliances and that theexistence of a national grid and electricity generators are causally irrelevant.

5"A person is not a natural object, but a cultural artefact" (Harre1983:20).




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two concepts to work in tandem. At one extreme, Fleetwood (2008) and Sayer(2009) largely advocate an empirical combination involving quite modest theoreticalconcessions from Bourdieu's thinking and my own. On the one hand, both want

me to be moregenerous

inacknowledging

the durable influences of socialization:that it imposes blinkers on the types of jobs that will be considered by those fromlower class backgrounds and of female gender (Fleetwood 2008); or that when noveloccupational opportunities present themselves to the young adult?ones that did notexist in the parental generation?those from more privileged backgrounds exhibit

"precisely that sense of security, enterprise and entitlement that mark the middle classhabitus" (Sayer 2009:123). Thus, both maintain that family socialization continues

much as it did throughout most of the 20th century.This is an empirical question that may be answered differently for particular groups

in given locales. However, there is evidence (discussed later) that socialization cannotbe treated as a constant and that, especially for those now reaching adulthood,this process bears little resemblance to the practices continuing throughout mostof the last century. In other words, Bourdieu may have been more or less rightin practice for the period to which the bulk of his work relates (toward the mid

point of the morphostatic-morphogenetic continuum). What is debatable is if thesocialized habitus continues to generate a goodness of fit between dispositionalityand positionality during the last two decades. On the contrary, it can be argued thatthe young of the new millennium are no longer Bourdieu's people because they no

longer live in Bourdieu's world.

Both Sayer and Fleetwood assign a greater role to reflexivity than did Bourdieubecause they accept that people make choices and do so increasingly as the socialorder becomes more morphogenetic. Although the injection of reflexive deliberationswould have the advantage of freeing Bourdieu's thought from charges of determinism

(Alexander 1994), it is not clear that he would have accepted this olive branch.

Despite his "late concessions," he persisted inmaintaining that such choices as wedid make were orchestrated by the hidden hand of habitus: "this is a crucial proviso,it is habitus itself that commands this option. We can always say that individuals

make choices, as long as we do not forget that they do not choose the principals

[sic] of these choices" (inWacquant 1989:45).Fleetwood's and Sayer's empirical case for combining habitus and reflexivity restsupon the prolongation of large tracts of routine action, even as morphogenesisengages. Thus, to Fleetwood:

It does not follow that an open, morphogenetic system lacks routinized tem

plates or established patterns, and/or moves too quickly for institutional rulesto solidify and form habits with a degree of success. ... Some agents' intentionsare non-deliberative, and the best explanation we have for such intentions is that

theyare rooted in habit.

(2008:198)

Similarly, Sayer maintains that "habitus continues to loom large even in the midstof contextual discontinuity" (2009:122), doing so to counteract my argument aboutthe progressive deroutinization of life, which consigns habitus to more stable societies than our own, ones manifesting the "contextual continuity" required for its

acquisition. Thus, he continues:

Yet most children still have enough continuity in their relations and experiencesto

adjustto them?the familiar

home,the dull routine of

school,the

daily




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reminders of their class and gender position. While there probably is an increasein contextual discontinuity there is still plenty of stability, and they could hardlybecome competent social actors if they did not develop a feel for familiar games.(2009:122)

Thus, both Fleetwood and Sayer settle for an empirical patrim et patrim formula,which accepts that there is sufficient change to make some reflexive deliberation

inescapable, but enough continuity for the formation of routinzed responses stillto be realistic and reproduced in large tracts of life. Empirical claims can only be

adjudicated empirically. In my longitudinal study of undergraduate students (Archerforthcoming), one graduate, when confronted with data about children reared byfour to six parents by remarriage, responded, "Well, they're all middle class aren't

they," which places a question mark over why similarity of class position is held

automatically to trump differences inmother tongue, country of origin, religion, andpolitics in the process of socialization.

Hybridizing Habitus and Reflexivity

"Hybridization" (Adams 2006) entails more than the basic empirical assumptionthat in some situations habitus governs action quasi-unconsciously, while in othersresort ismade to self-conscious reflexivity. Specifically, it involves concept-stretchingby advancing the notion of a "reflexive habitus" in order to project Bourdieu's

dispositional analysis forwards, despite contemporary positional transformations. InSweetman's hybrid such societal changes are synonymous with those outlined in the

theory of "reflexive modernization" (Beck et al. 1994), and his aim is to link themto the extended practice of reflexivity?now itself characterized as a new habitus:

What is being suggested here is that, in conditions of late-, high-, or reflexivemodernity, endemic crises ... lead to a more or less permanent disruption ofsocial position, of a more or less constant disjunction between habitus andfield. In this context reflexivity ceases to reflect a temporary lack of fit betweenhabitus and field but itself becomes habitual, and is thus incorporated into thehabitus in theform of theflexible or reflexive habitus. (2003:538, italics inserted)6

The compromise concept of a "reflexive habitus" elides two concepts that Bourdieuconsistently distinguished: the semi-unconscious dispositions constituting habitus and

reflexivity as self-awareness of them. Moreover, what work does calling this a "habitus" do? Literally, it states that people now have a disposition to be reflexive abouttheir circumstances and perhaps to be prepared for change rather than for stability.If so, "preparedness" must be used transitively; one must be in a state of preparationfor something determinate, otherwise this hybrid habitus cannot supply dispositionalguidelines for action. Without these, the concept boils down to the statement that

most people now expect to have to think about what to do in the novel situations

they confront. True, but it is hard to see how calling this expectation a "habitus"explains anything about either their deliberative processes or about what they do.In fact, given that for Bourdieu habitus underlined the preadaptation of people to

6This quotation continues: "To the extent that Bourdieu's 'non-reflexive' habitus depends upon relativelystable conditions and on 'lasting experience of social position,' his analysis may thus be said to apply

more to simple- or organized- modernity, where the comparative stability of people's social identitiesallowed for a sustained, coherent, and relatively secure relationship between habitus and field" (Sweetman2003:538).




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ROUTINE, REFLEXIYITY AND REALISM 289

circumstances and the semi-conscious, quasi-automatic nature of its operations?allof which Sweetman accepts?it is difficult to think of any concept less apposite forcharacterizing conscious deliberations about novel choices.

Sweetman maintains that "certain forms of habitusmay

beinherently reflexive,and that the flexible or reflexive habitus may be both increasingly common and

increasingly significant due to various social and cultural shifts" (2003:529). Whatdoes "inherently" mean here, given that Bourdieu consistently held the formation ofany habitus to be the result of socialization? What type of socialization can providea preparation for the unpredictable and novel? This seems to be a contradiction interms, unless it slides into vacuity?into something like the Boy Scouts' intransitive

motto: "Be Prepared "There are only two ways out of this impasse. One path is taken by Mouzelis, who,

consistent with Bourdieu, attempts to provide an answer in terms of a socializationthat could result in the development of:

a reflexive disposition acquired not via crisis situations, but via a socialization

focussing on the importance of "the inner life" or the necessity to "create one'sown goals." For instance, growing up in a religious community which stresses

meditation and inner contemplation can result in members of a communityacquiring a type of reflexive habitus that is unrelated to contradictions between

dispositions and positions. (2009:135)

Although such experiences may indeed promote "meta-reflexivity" (reflecting uponone's reflections), the mode of life that fosters "apophatic" as opposed to "cat

aphatic" reflexivity (Mouzelis 2010) does not seem to be widespread in either Easternor Western religious communities, much less to constitute a model for contemporarysecular socialization outside them.

The other path entails abandoning any claim that such a "reflexive habitus" is

acquired through socialization, but accepting that it is derived from the individual'sown life experiences. The changes constituting "reflexive modernization" are held to"contribute toward a continual and pervasive reflexivity that itself becomes habitual,

however paradoxical this notion may at first appear" (Sweetman 2003:538). But whatdoes calling reflexivity "habitual" add to noting that it is "continual and pervasive,"given that it cannot be the motor of habitual action?as the author agrees? Whenthe concept is voided of all connection with courses of action, paradox gives wayto contradiction. For example, Ostrow writes that there "is no clear path from

dispositions to conduct. What does exist is a protensional field, or perspective, thatcontextualizes all situations, setting the preobjective framework for practice, withoutany express rules or codes that automatically and mechanically 'tell' us what to do"

(2000:318). What perspective could possibly contextualize all situations, especially

unpredictable and unintended ones? Fatalism alone fits the bill, but presents uswith the passive actors who have resigned any governance over their own lives and,moreover, is just as incompatible with Beck's notion of "making a life of one's own,"in a de-structured social order, as it is with my own version of "making one's waythrough the world," amid morphogenetic restructuring.

Ontological and Theoretical Reconciliation

The reconciliation Elder-Vass proposes entails a more radical theoretical revision in

orderto

make habitus and reflexivity compatible (seeDalton 2004 for a revision




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entirely favoring habitus). The following stages are involved: (i) that Bourdieu's con

ception of the social order in general and agential powers in particular should bedetached from "central conflationism"7 and be linked to an emergentist ontology;

(ii)that the influence accorded to

reflexivityshould be limited

by confiningit to

subjects' modifications of their habitus. Thus, Elder-Vass sees the main ontological"adjustments" falling upon Bourdieu's work and the main theoretical ones on mine.If both are granted, he can then advance (iii) his key claim that most of our actionsare co-determined by both our habitus and our reflexive deliberations," on the basisof an "emergentist theory of action" (2007:335).

In response to (i), this is argued to be an unwarranted interpretation of Bourdieu'sown thought; to (ii) that it rests upon a widespread confusion between the kinds of

knowledge required to play games proficiently in the three orders of natural reality,the natural, the practical, and the social; and to (iii) that it does not succeed in

justifying the proposed reconciliation. Of course, the author may wish to adducethis reconciliation as his own theory, to be assessed on itsmerits, rather than as theprogeny of a shotgun marriage.

Can Habitus, Emergence, and Reflexivity Live Together? Elder-Vass seems correctin maintaining that if structure, culture, and agency are regarded as being mutu

ally constitutive, this is incompatible with reflexivity because reflexive deliberations

depend upon a clear object-subject distinction. Reflexivity is precluded by "centralconflation," where the properties and powers respective to structures and to agentsare elided. As Mouzelis argues:

it is only when the objective-subjective distinction is maintained that it is possibleto deal in a theoretically congruent manner with cases where situated actorsdistance themselves from social structures relatively external to them in orderto assess, more or less rationally, the degree of constraint and enablement thesestructures offer, the pros and cons, the chances of success or failure of different

strategies, etc. (2009:138)

Elder-Vass agrees and, as a well-established defender of emergent properties (2005),protests that Bourdieu's phrase "the internalization of externality" leading to his description of "structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures"

(1990a:53) is an "ontological error" in that "it fails to distinguish between a socialstructure and the consequences that it has for our mental states" (2007:334). Thus, itbecomes crucial to distance Bourdieu and habitus from "central conflation" if reflex

ivity is to be accommodated. The question iswhether or not Bourdieu's thought canwithstand "adaptation" to an emergentist ontology. Specifically, can his theorizingin the Logic of Practice (1990a) be so adapted? This is a text in which reflexivity

is scarcely mentioned, but is the work upon which Elder-Vass relies most. Althoughhe is right to say that Bourdieu did not seem exercised by ontological debates, thisdoes not mean he had no ontological commitments.

Ontological commitments contain judgments about the constituents (and noncon

stitutents) of social reality and thus govern what kind of concepts may properly becountenanced. Certain concepts are precluded from appearing in explanations, justas atheists cannot attribute their well-being to divine providence. No explanation is

7A term introduced to characterize theories where structure and agency are treated as inseparablebecause

mutuallyconstitutive

(seeArcher

1988:72-100, 1995:93-162).




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acceptable to a theorist if it contains terms whose referents misconstrue social realityas they see it (Archer 1998). Bourdieu's ontological commitments are so strong inthe Logic of Practice that, because of their forceful elisionism, they shut the dooron

emergence?leaving the concept and practice of reflexivity outside.The strongest of Bourdieu's ontological convictions is forcefully expressed in thefirst sentence of his book: "Of all the oppositions that artificially divide socialscience, the most fundamental, and the most ruinous, is the one that is set upbetween subjectivism and objectivism" (1990a:25). At one extreme, the subjectivistphenomenology of daily life cannot exceed a description of lived experience andexcludes inquiry into the objective conditions of its possibility. In brief, it cannotpenetrate the "ontological complicity" (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992:20) betweenhabitus and habitat and move from lay epistemology to the "world which determinesit." At the other extreme, when academic social scientists

pretendto

objectivity, theyocclude the necessarily perspectival nature of their epistemology, which places theinverted commas around their "objective" accounts (Bourdieu 1990a:28).

Because there is no "view from nowhere" (Nagel 1986), the most that can be ac

complished is akin to the Gadamerian "fusion of horizons" (Gadamer 1975:364). Foracademic observers: "There is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective 'knowing;'and the more eyes, different eyes, we use to observe one thing, the more complete

will our 'concept' of this thing, our 'objectivity,' be" (Bourdieu 1990a:28). There isno such criterion as the critical realists' "judgemental rationality" to modify our ineluctable "epistemic relativity." The same epistemic barrier prevents the lay subjectsfrom being or becoming "pure visitors," capable of receiving or reporting "unvarnished news" about the objective social contexts they inhabit: "The 'subject' bornof the world of objects does not arise as a subjectivity facing an objectivity: the

objective universe ismade up of objects which are the products of objectifying operations structured according to the same structures that the habitus applies to them"(Bourdieu 1990a:76-77). In consequence, ontology and epistemology are inextricably intertwined, for investigator and participant alike, thus rendering subjectivismand objectivism inseparable?the hallmark of central conflation (Archer 1995:93132), which is fundamentally hostile to the structural and cultural "emergentism" to

which Elder-Vass would "reconcile" it.Beyond insistence upon inseparability and its correlate, the aim to transcend the

objective/subjective divide, there is also the centrality of practice shared with Giddens. But when we do turn to practice, it is equally inhospitable to construing laysubjects as acting for reasons, which are also causes of their actions.

For Bourdieu, the logic of practice "flouts logical logic" because this "fuzzy" logic(1990a:86-87) "understands only in order to act" (1990a:91). This means respondingto practical demands in situ, and such responses cannot be translated into the academic "universes of discourse." Thus, Elder-Vass appears to misinterpret Bourdieu's

statement that: "[If] one fails to recognize any form of action other than rationalaction or mechanical reaction, it is impossible to understand the logic of all actionsthat are reasonable without being the product of a reasoned design, still less of rational calculation" (1990a:50). This is interpreted as "confirming ... that he [Bourdieu]accepts that some actions are indeed the product of reasoned design" (2007:335).

Not only does Bourdieu state the opposite above (the force of the word "without"),but what is "reasonable" is inscribed in le sens pratique and expressed in action,not in personal "reasons" that can be articulated. Contextual embedding is all thatmakes sense to the subject of his/her actions: "[A]gents can adequately master themodus

operandithat enables them to

generate correctlyformed ritual

practices, only




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by making it work practically in a real situation, in relation to practical functions"(1990a:90). Hence, le sens pratique is what Bourdieu opposes as "reasonable" incontradistinction to personal designs (or instrumental rationality).

However,le sens

pratique"excludes attention to itself

(1990a:92);the

subjectfocuses upon "knowing how," not "knowing that"?or why. It follows that the subjectis incapable of reflexivity: "Simply because he is questioned, and questions himself,about the reasons and the raison d'etre of his practice, he cannot communicate theessential point, which is that the very nature of practice is that it excludes thisquestion" (1990a:91). The answer is buried too deep in the historical and practicalgenesis of both practices and the logic of practice for the subject to disinter them. Inconsequence, and in the present, such subjects do "not react to 'objective conditions'but to these conditions as apprehended through the socially constituted schemes thatorganize his perception" (1990a:97). In many ways, Bourdieu never ceased to be an

anthropologist and le sens pratique is close cousin to the Azande (Evans Pritchard1937:195), so enmeshed in the strands of their own coherent culture as to be unableto question their own thinking and incapable of acquiring the requisite distance forbeing reflexive about their own doings.

Are Our Actions Co-Determined byHabitus and Reflexivity? When Elder-Vass movesover to consider theoretical "reconciliation" of the two views on the relationship ofhuman causal powers to human action, it is the turn of the morphogenetic approachto be accommodating. In fact, this is no more amenable to the proposed theoretical"adjustments" than Bourdieu would have been to ontological revision. AlthoughElder-Vass agrees "that we human individuals do, as Archer claims, have emergentpowers of our own" (2007:35), as far as reflexivity is concerned, this is reducedto half the story. The reconciling of the two perspectives rests on Elder-Vass's own

theory that "many and perhaps most of our actions are co-determined by both ourhabitus and our reflexive determinations" (2007:335).

The reason for resisting "co-determination" concerns the premise underlying ElderVass's "theory of human action," that is, "with the emergent roots of our power toact" (2007:336). This key premise is that "action" and "social action" are homo

geneous. Colin Campbell (1996) has documented how the two have indeed becomeelided in sociological texts and thus provided unwarranted support for social imperialism. The same premise is taken over directly from Bourdieu, to whom "thefeel for the game," embodied in habitus, is applied in an undifferentiated manneracross the three orders of natural reality. However, this obliterates crucial ontologicaldistinctions, discussed at length in Being Human (Archer 2000), as underpinning thedifferent types of knowledge that human subjects can develop in each order. Bourdieu overrode these, in typical Meadian fashion, in his "colonizing" assertion that:"[B]etween the child and the world, the whole group intervenes" (1990a:76). This

automatically renders all action as social action and gives habitus epistemologicalhegemony in every order of reality. Conversely, itwill be maintained that our different relations with the three orders give rise to distinct and heterogeneous forms ofknowledge, which entail very different amounts of reflexivity.

In scrutinizing Elder-Vass's key claim that "most of our actions are codetermined by habitus and reflexivity" this seems to beg the sociological question.Co-determination means the influence of two factors upon a given outcome butvaries between a 50/50 percent and a 99/1 percent contribution, by either. My argument is that the proportional contributions of habitus and reflexivity vary system

aticallywith the order of

realityin

question andare

least determinate for the social




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Natural Order Practical Order Social Order

RelationshipKnowledge TypeEmergent From

Importance of

Reflexivity Minimal

Coordination

Object/ObjectEmbodied

Moderate

Subject/Object

Compliance

Practical

Subject/SubjectDiscursive

Maximal

Commitment

Figure 4. Types of knowledge and the three orders of natural reality

order. If correct, this renders the "reconciliation" formally feasible but empty in

practice.The following simple figure represents Elder-Vass's defense of the role of habitus in

"co-determining" action. It also serves to show that two issues are involved.

1.SOCIALIZATIONI2. EXPERIENCESI3. DISPOSITIONS = habitus = "feel for the game"

First, are experiences the basis of human dispositions? This is crucial becauseunless the move from (2) to (3) can be sustained, then the relevance of move (1)to (2) fails, and with it the purported influence of socialization falls. Second, cansocialization justifiably be regarded as a summary term governing the experiences ofgroups, specifically social classes? This is an independent question from the first andwill be examined in the next subsection.

My general argument is that the types of knowledge acquired through experienceof the three orders of reality are not homogeneous in kind and are emergent fromdifferent relations between the subject and each order, which sui generis permit or

require variable degrees of reflexivity from subjects. This makes co-determination anequally variable matter in terms of the proportional contributions made by dispositions and reflexivity to actions based on the three types of knowledge. WhereasBourdieu applied habitus indifferently to all orders, I will maintain that acquiring "afeel for the game" is a metaphor that does not work equally well across the wholeof natural reality.

Figure 4 summarizes the argument advanced in Being Human (2000).In nature, the relational requisite for "experience disposition" (say, to s

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Margaret Archer