Margaret Archer’s work on culture, structure and agency has been frequently used by educational researchers as a theoretical framework. Focusing on the applicability and application of Archer’s work to research into higher education, this seminar features a keynote paper from Professor Archer herself, and two papers from early career researchers whose work is located in overseas contexts.

Keynote paper: How does structure influence agency?
Professor Margaret Archer, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Central to the Critical Realist answer to this question is Roy Bhaskar’s statement that ‘the causal power of social forms is mediated through social agency’. This is surely correct, because unless the emergent properties of structure and culture are held to derive from people and their doings, and to exert their effects through people, Realism would obviously be guilty of reification. Nevertheless, it is not a complete answer because what that crucial word ‘through’ means has not been unpacked. In this keynote paper Margaret Archer discusses how structural and cultural powers impinge upon agents, and how agents use their own personal powers to act ‘so rather than otherwise’, addressing a problem that is evaded in most of social science: how to theorize the interaction of these two sets of causal powers.

The development of research cultures within a Pakistani university:
analysing structure and agency

Ahmad Lodhi, lecturer at the University of the Punjab, Pakistan, and PhD candidate, University of Leeds

This paper presents findings from a doctoral research project that examined factors influencing the development of research cultures in two faculties in a Pakistani university. Margaret Archer’s theoretical perspectives on culture – including her morphogenetic interpretation of structure and agency – are used as an analytical framework. Ahmad Lodhi shares the problems he encountered and the process that he applied to make sense of his data.

Academic lives through a lens:
exploring and explaining the formation of academic professional identities using Archer’s theories

Dr Carol O’Byrne, lecturer in German, Waterford Institute of Technology, Republic of Ireland

In ever more regulated and structured environments, where flexibility is restricted and compliance is king, we see individual academics managing to pursue their own desired pathways and the emergence of a wide range of different professional identities. How can this be explained? Drawing on empirical research, this paper examines academics’ experiences through the lens of Archer’s conceptualisations of the interplay between structure and agency and of the reflexive formation of personal and social identities.