Power between habitus and reflexivity – introducing Margaret Archer to the power debate

Abstract

This article introduces Margaret Archer's research on reflexivity to the power debate, alongside Pierre Bourdieu's already influential concept of habitus. Both offer significant insights on social conditioning in late modernity. However, their tendency to the extreme of social determinism and voluntarism must be avoided. To do so, this article adopts Haugaard's family resemblance concept of power, describing habitus and reflexivity as an important new binary of power instead of a conceptual zero-sum game. This strengthens the explanatory role of agency, central to the three dimensions of power, without losing sight of constitutive, structural power. It also helps overcome the habitus-reflexivity dichotomy in social theory and provides a starting point to evaluate Archer's work from a power perspective.

Collective reflexivity in social marketing through ethnographic film-making: The Yolngu story of tobacco in Yirrkala, Australia

“…However, one criticism of collective reflexivity is that it limits an understating of relationality and the process of intercession between structure and agency to reflexive deliberations (Caetano, 2015). However, we agree with Caetano (2015) and Vogler (2016) that this is not a matter of discarding Archer's (2013) idea that collective reflexivity concerns relationality of people, but rather it requires an acknowledgement that understanding reflexivity and social relations may require the integration of Archer's (2013) concepts with other concepts such as process-relational theory (Cobb, 2007;Cooper, 2005) that are concerned with relationality. Our focus in this study is not to address the critiques of Archer's ideas or to study relationality per se.…”

Curiosity and careers: Female working-class students’ experiences of university

“…However, one of the challenges researchers face when trying to combine Archer's work with that of other theorists is the limited references she makes in her work to the concepts of others (Mutch, 2004) although her later work (Archer, 2007(Archer, , 2012 addresses some of these critiques. Nevertheless, Archer's critical realist theory is gaining increasing attention as a way of conceptualising agency in a more voluntaristic manner than habitus (Clegg, 2016;Gunnarsson et al, 2016;Vogler, 2016) or Boudon's (1974) primary effects.…”

Morphogenetic theory and the constructivist institutionalist challenge

“…As Archer () explains in detail in Culture and Agency , the cultural system exerts a causal power upon agents, particularly as a result of the logical contradictions and complementarities that exist between ideas. As well as theorising the power of the systemic level, morphogenetic theory crucially insists on “the quintessential power of human agency to react with originality whatever its circumstances” (Archer, , p. 187; for a discussion of agency and power in morphogenesis, see Vogler, ). It therefore makes sense to assume that agents have powers relevant to each, so that any individual has a degree of cultural power in their negotiation of the cultural system, including an ability to think creatively, imagine new possibilities and negotiate contradictions between ideas, but also has as a degree of material power in their negotiation of the material structure.…”