In Conversa tion with Mar garet Archer
In Conversation with
Margaret Archer
Interview by Elosa Martn
Current Sociology, an ISA journal, turns 65 this year.
To celebrate this event, we invited all previous editors
to be featured as Sociologist of the Month. The So-
ciologist of the Month campaign, which started in
July 2015, aims to highlight Current Sociologys au-
thors, asking about their careers and research experi-
ences that have been published as articles in the
journal. This year, we will celebrate the editors as well,
who had managed the journal over this six and a half
decades, where we present their varied experiences in
managing Current Sociology.
In my capacity as the present editor of Current So-
ciology, I interviewed Professor Margaret Archer, who
edited the journal over a decade between 1972 and
1982. Invited by the first editor of the journal, Tom
Bottomore, Prof. Archer was the first editor who did
not hold another position in the ISA.
In this interview, Prof. Margaret Archer tells us
briefly about how she became interested in the disci-
pline and what her time serving as Current Sociology
editor was like. Her sociological journey across im-
portant moments in the history of the discipline and
her fellow travellers (professors, colleagues, friends)
are among the most recognised names in contempo-
rary sociology, as is her own.
Elosa Martn
isa.e-Forum
2017 The Author(s)
2017 ISA (Editorial Arrangement of isa.e-Forum)
1
Could you please tell us about yourself? How did
you come to the field of Sociology?
Archer: My excellent Secondary School (founded by
Elizabeth Wordsworth among others) also defined ex-
cellence by how many scholarships their girls could
win to Oxford and Cambridge Universities - every
year since the late 19th century. My destiny was de-
fined by my teachers as becoming a blue stocking
and reading English Literature at Cambridge. Some-
how the notion of a life passed deconstructing Beowulf
did not seem well spent to me. This feeling increased
when from the age of 15 I became involved in the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and Anti-
Apartheid, marching alongside many Social Scientists.
John Rex and I organised the Coast to Coast CND
march and he, Peter Worsely and John Saville intro-
duced me to the founding fathers en route. I recog-
nised what I wanted to do (my Weberian vocation),
immediately made an independent application to the
London School of Economics to study Sociology, and
after a week of being taught by John Westergaard,
Maurice Ginsberg and auditing Karl Popper and Imre
Lakatoss lectures, knew I had found my intellectual
home for life.
After finishing my PhD at LSE I was and remain dis-
enchanted by British empiricism: as in, if it moves,
measure it; if people venture opinions, count them;
if an attitude, scale it. So, as a post-doc I went to
Paris and worked with Pierre Bourdieus quipe in the
CNRS; highly to be recommended as a finishing
school.

There, the International Sociological Association,
Presided over by Tom Bottomore, my favourite (non-
empiricist) LSE Professor, caught up with me and
proposed I take over as Editor of the ISAs Journal
Current Sociology, thinking I could cope with the
notes of the previous French Editor who had just re-
tired. That was not difficult; he handed me a file with
three sheets of paper in it and the news that we were
9 issues behind schedule!
Please tell us a little about your time as Editor of
Current Sociology: how do you start your appoint-
ment? How does it work at that time? How do you
manage to combine your editorial work with your
other professional and personal duties? What did
you enjoy most from being an editor?
Archer: From 1972-82 editing Current Sociology was
manual labour; no computers, of course, quantities of
correcting fluid and a piece of industrial archaeology
that reproduced waxed sheets, instead of a photo-
copier. During that decade, Current Sociology pro-
duced Trend Reports on major sociological
specialisms (education, medicine and social stratifica-
tion etc. some of which were classics), but also long
Bibliographies to supplement our Universities card-
index catalogues. Doubtless these were useful; the al-
ternatives being Write to the Author or pay excess
baggage fees on the papers we hoarded at ISA World
Congresses.
But it was manual work; sometimes requiring French
accents to be inserted in hand throughout! One day,
a narrow, metre long box arrived by special postal de-
livery. An author had simply lifted a drawer from his
filing cabinet, arranged the cards in alphabetical order
and sent it as his Bibliography for me to retype.
How was this combined with other commitments?
Well, I had my two sons during this period (there was
no maternity leave then) and soon realised that rear-
ing babies and writing books did not combine. That
is why The Social Origins of Educational Systems
(1979), where the Morphogenic Approach was first
conceived, was such a long book. It was largely writ-
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ten in hand. But editing Current Sociology did blend
well with child care; you could put texts down and
pick them up in any free hour and somehow they got
finished. From that time onwards, I cant read any-
thing without copy-editing it! However, reading Cur-
rent Sociology manuscripts word-by-word also gave me
a conversancy with other specialist fields, which was
a wonderful source of examples to draw upon in
teaching. It was a busy, happy time, rewarded with a
full Professorship when I was 36, but academic life
was less pressurised then and there was room for gen-
erous collegiality. Ernest Gellner sent 17 pages of sin-
gle-spaced comments on my manuscript for the above
book and sealed my consistent combination of ana-
lytical philosophy with Social Theory for life.
Could you tell us how you feel the field of sociology
is changing? Did you notice certain trends or chan-
ges during your time as editor?
Archer: Thanks to ISA meetings, we travelled to every
continent, but Eastern Europe most intensively. Part
of me feels very at home there, but in Poland above
all, where I leave for Warszawa this weekend to give
an annual week of Masters classes1. It was important
as a cure from Eurocentricism and Current Sociology
started to feature issues on the historical trajectories
and current preoccupations of Sociology in different
countries. This seemed the mission of the ISA and
Current Sociology in the bad old days, to counter
both Anglo-American hegemony and Soviet intellec-
tual repression. It worked two ways: giving a small
shop window to the rest of the world and, much less
successfully, attempting to resist sociological mono-
linguicism. It still depresses me that, for instance,
Bourdieu is treated as a novel discovery in English
speaking countries when we were having those same
debates in Paris 50 years earlier!
Sociology is always changing and should be, but re-
cent trends are not propitious. Globalised competi-
tion exacerbated by centralised political intervention
imposes a straight-jacket through its world listings,
league tables, performance indicators and impact
factors. These are relational evils: collegiality crumbles
In Conversa tion with Mar garet Archer
into competition, informal esteem becomes a formal
hierarchy with the non-research-active at the bottom,
concern for students becomes keeping office hours,
Journals are selected for their impact factors, articles
are written with an eye to citation indices etcetera as
we know only too well.
The counter response (or is it?) is to make outrageous
claims, to criticise authors without a care about mis-
representation, no concern for argumentative engage-
ment and often clearly having failed to read the works
in question fully. Two words in particular I find in-
dicative of authors simply craving attention. One is
beyond you could call it Beyondism where in
one article and usually with one trite notion, someone
claims to have superseded a whole corpus of books,
by proclamation rather than demonstration. The sec-
ond is the announcement of yet another turn and I
have counted more than 50 without really trying.
Apart from the linguistic turn that attracted some se-
rious thinkers, most of these represent self-promo-
tional advertisements for what some aspirant
happened to be doing.
I have argued that for any process to merit consider-
ation as a generator of social change or stability it
must necessarily incorporate (i) structured human re-
lations (context-dependence) because there is no such
thing as context-less action and calling it situated
makes no difference; (ii) human actions (activity-de-
pendence) because even the most distant, such as
GDP or Climate change in the Anthropocene would
not exist without the continuous actions of people,
and (iii) human ideas (concept-dependence) because
activities like voting, paying taxes or opening a
bank account require that actors have some notion
of what they are doing, however vague.
A more familiar way of putting the above is that every
theory about the social order necessarily has to come
in a sack, SAC: it must incorporate structure,
agency and culture without conflating them. The
problem in hand will govern which of the three is ac-
corded most attention and the acronym SAC is thus
not a rank ordering of priority between the three ele-
ments, since all are indispensable.
During the last quarter of a century, the ranks of SAC
deniers have swollen dramatically and the meta-the-
oretical stance of denial rests upon conflation of these
three elements. Instead of distinctive properties and
powers pertaining to structure, culture and agency,
any pair is conflated with each another, thus ruling
out examination of the (changing) interplay between
them and its theorisation. Instead, the guiding
metaphor is of flows or liquidity and that depends
upon a prior dissolution of all three components of
SAC. Retreat into Complexity theory is another case
of being misled by metaphor, replicating the career of
the organic analogy. The warm embrace given to Big
Data is simply a life-support system for empiricism.
In this morass, Current Sociology continues to reach
out to the rest of the world and I am ever grateful
for the panorama it gave me within Sociology and the
incentive it provided to go global before the term was
coined.
Notes
1
She refers to Social Thought Master Courses held
on March 29th and 30th, 2017 at the Faculty of His-
torical and Social Sciences at Cardinal Stefan Wyszyn-
ski University in Warsaw, where she was the keynote
speaker and where she also received the title of Doctor
Honoris Causa. The present interview was held in
April 2017.
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Prof. Margaret Archer is the Director of the Centre for Social Ontology, at the De-
partment of Sociology University of Warwick (UK), where as Professor of Sociology
for thirty years, she developed her Morphogenetic Approach to social theory. She
was the first woman to be elected as President of the International Sociological As-
sociation (1986-90) when she initiated International Sociology and started the World-
wide Competition for Young Sociologists. She is currently the President of the
Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, among many other distinguished positions.

Elosa Martn is Professor of Sociology at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

(Brazil) and the editor of Current Sociology (2010-2017).

Margaret Archer Eloisa Martin