Margaret Archer

Margaret Scotford Archer was a British sociologist, born in 1943 and died in 2023, known for her work in social theory and the sociology of education. Working within critical realism, she developed the morphogenetic approach, an account of structure and agency as operating on different timescales and interacting through repeated cycles of morphogenesis and morphostasis, most fully set out in her 1995 book Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. In that book she coined the term elisionism for theories that instead collapse structure and agency into one another rather than treating them as analytically distinct. She taught for many years as professor of sociology at the University of Warwick and later held a professorship at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland. In 1986 she became the first woman elected president of the International Sociological Association, serving until 1990, and from 2014 to 2019 she was president of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, an appointment made by Pope Francis.