The three papers in this symposium illustrate the value of Margaret Archer's theoretical contribution for their studies of Higher education in Europe and internationally.  We demonstrate how Archer has provided a conceptual framework that can be used to generate critical analyses of intersecting gender inequalities that are specific to the existing social and cultural context and the forms of intersectional inequalities studied. The papers focus on genders and disability in UK Higher Education, genders and sexualities in Croatia and international humanities and social science academics who start work in the UK, with some movement to working in Europe and internationally.

Archer died in 2023.  She is renowned in the field of critical realism.  She is the author, editor and contributor to numerous books in the field of critical realism (see Centre for Social Ontology, 2024, for a full list)  Some of her works were translated into Italian, Spanish and Japanese. Her theoretical concepts are widely used by critical realist scholars but also in education, business and management, health, sociology, psychology, environmental studies and more (e.g. Alderson, 2021; Case, 2012; Thorpe, 2019).  She is perhaps best known for her theorization of agency and for the concept of morphogenesis which is what our papers focus on (see especially, Archer, 2007, 2012, 2014). In this, she built upon and was in discussion with the critical realist work of her colleagues (e.g. Bhaskar 1990; Sayer, 2010).

In three empirical and theoretical studies, Archer described how enacting agency was becoming compulsory as each generation’s educational, employment, home, social and cultural contexts were becoming more unique and there was not an appropriate blue-print for life to be passed on from natal contexts (Archer, 2012).  She proposed that life projects (people's plans around their central concerns) and the process of decision-making (through reflexivity) were becoming more central to shaping individual lives and generating transforming social and cultural structures.  Although as a dialectical process, it is important to note that agency and decision-making take place in the context of current social and cultural conditions, which does shape and facilitate different types of decision-making.  Archer categorised different forms of reflexivity that underpin peoples’ decisions regarding when and how to enact different forms of agency (Archer, 2003)).  Some forms of reflexivity and decision-making reproduce society and individual lives in similar forms over time (morphostasis) others transform lives compared to previous generations and play a role in changing culture and society (morphogenesis).

In developing her articulation of the concept of morphogenesis, Archer (1982, 2014) distinguished her thinking from other theoreticians concerned with increasing individualisation in societies. She took issue with Antony Giddens (1986) notion of structuration, and, post-structuralist and post-modern conceptualisations of individualisation that were associated with a breaking down of social structure (e.g. Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002).  She also believed that Bourdieu’s (e.g., 1998) notion of habitus was only suitable for describing reproduction (Archer, 2012). Therefore, she developed concepts that could capture how phenomena, culture and social structures emerged from materially diverse and structurally differentiated dialectical processes of mutation and change, that included individuals' agencies. 

The intersectional identities and structural processes of transformation and stasis, we find in decision-making in higher education contexts are conceptualised as emergent from the complex set of causal mechanisms and relationships embedded in the different contexts of higher education we have studied.

Alderson, Priscilla. (2021) Health, Illness and Neoliberalism: An Example of Critical Realism as a Research Resource. Journal of critical realism 20.5: 542-556. Archer, Margaret S. (1982) Morphogenesis versus Structuration: On Combining Structure and Action, The British Journal of Sociology, 33.4: 455-483. Archer, Margaret S. (2007) Making Our Way through the World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, Margaret S (2012) The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, Margaret S. (2014) Structure, Agency, and the Internal Conversation. Beck, Beck-Gernsheim, and Beck-Gernsheim, Elisabeth. Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and Its Social and Political Consequences. London; Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE. Bhaskar, Roy (2008) A Realist Theory of Science, London: Verso Bourdieu, Pierre. (1998) Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action. Cambridge: Polity Press. Case, Jennifer M.. (2013) Researching Student Learning in Higher Education: A Social Realist Approach. United Kingdom, Taylor & Francis. Giddens, Anthony. (1986) The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. First paperback. Cambridge, England; Malden, Mass.: Polity Press. Sayer, R. Andrew. (2010) Method in Social Science: A Realist Approach. Rev. 2nd. Abingdon: Routledge. The Centre for Social Ontoloty, Margaret Archer, Publications https://socialontology.org/people/margaret-archer/publications/ Thorpe, Anthony. (2019) Educational Leadership Development and Women: Insights from Critical Realism. International Journal of Leadership in Education 22.2: 135-148.