Professor Margaret Archer is a leading critical realist and major contemporary social theorist. This edited collection seeks to celebrate the scope and accomplishments of her work, distilling her theoretical and empirical contributions into four sections which capture the essence and trajectory of her research over almost four decades.

Tom Brock is Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

Mark Carrigan is Research Fellow in the Centre for Social Ontology at the University of Warwick, UK.

Graham Scambler is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at UCL, UK, and Visiting Professor of Sociology at Surrey University, UK.

Foreword

Introduction

Realism's Explanatory Framework

1. Thinking and Theorizing About Educational Systems

2. On Predicting the Behaviour of the Educational System

3. The Myth of Cultural Integration

4. The vexatious fact of society

5. Morphogenesis versus structuration

6. For structure: its reality, properties and powers

7. The private life of the social agent

8. The Ontological Status of subjectivity

9. Reflexivity as the unacknowledged condition of social life

10. A brief history of how reflexivity becomes imperative

11. Self-Government & Self-Organization as Misleading Metaphors

12. The generative mechanism re-configuring late modernity

13. How Agency is Transformed in the Course of Social Transform

Trajectory of the Morphogenetic Approach

Interview with Maggie

Annotated Bibliography