ARCHER AND CULTURAL MORPHOGENESIS: A THESIS ON FRAGMENTATION AND ‘OTHERING’ IN CONTEMPORARY UK
ABSTRACT
This essay addresses the issue of cultural change. Introducing and drawing on Margaret Archer’s theory around the constant interplay of structure, culture and agency and her concept of cultural morphogenesis – denoting the contemporary acceleration of cultural change – it asks why this is occurring and postulates some suggestions in relation to the circumstances of the United Kingdom (UK) in the second decade of the twenty-first century. The proposition is put forward that the present socio-cultural interaction promises a cultural elaboration that has developed largely independently of the no less significant phenomenon of structural morphogenesis. Cultural morphogenesis has, however, worked to the advantage of the combination of capital and power articulated via the structural resurgence of the class/command dynamic that shapes UK society. Cultural change, in short, has facilitated an increasing structural maldistribution of capital, power and advantage/disadvantage in the UK. The paper ends with the hypothesis that any significant social transformation may depend on the implosion of an increasingly predatory rentier capitalism.
Key Words: class, culture, morphogenesis competition, opportunity,
INTRODUCTION
It is the central thesis of this paper that countries like the United Kingdom (UK) have undergone a significant cultural as well as structural transformation in the post-1970s. This latest phase of contemporary capitalist society has attracted various labels, all of which have received a degree of criticism. Indeed, Margaret Archer was led to deny the very possibility of characterising any particular societal period by a single word or phrase. While outlining and elaborating on her theory of structural and cultural morphogenesis (or change), however, she allowed herself sufficient leeway to refer to a shift from ‘modernity’ to ‘late modernity’, the latter also dating from around the 1960s to the 1970s (Archer, 2014). In this contribution the terms ‘welfare state capitalism’ and ‘rentier capitalism’ are substituted for Archer’s preferred terms. As this suggests, rather more significance to social class as an enduring and telling dimension of social stratification is acknowledged than Archer was inclined to (Scambler, 2018, 2026). In this paper, however, draws on the framework for analysing cultural rather than structural change that Archer bequeathed to us. It is this theoretical as well as conceptual frame that are introduced in these few preliminary paragraphs. Consistently with a general orientation to ‘build bridges’ between abstruse realms of philosophy and theory on the one hand and empirical research on the other, this paper stresses putting the philosophy of critical realism to use in advancing sociological theory (Morgan & Scambler, 2025).
Archer distinguished between structural and cultural morphogenesis but argued that each can be studied in terms of ‘morphogenic cycles’. She rightly contended that sociologists’ historical fixation on the ‘two sociologies’ of structure versus agency too often excluded factoring in the causal salience of culture. It was of the essence of her theory that there is a constant causal interplay between the members of the triad of structure, agency and culture: each possesses causal efficacy and is irreducible to and resistant to conflation with either of the others. This contribution concentrates on culture but is accepting of her notion of ‘analytic dualism’, namely, that each of structure, agency and culture must be treated as analytically independent of the others in order to examine how they interact.
Archer maintained that it is plausible and helpful for sociologists to think in terms of temporally-bounded structural and cultural morphogenetic cycles, comprising structural or cultural conditioning, socio-structural or socio-cultural interaction and structural or cultural elaboration. It is with culture and cultural morphogenetic cycles that we are concerned with in this paper, thus:
- cultural conditioning refers to how culture stands at the start of a cycle, as it were at its take-off point;
- socio-cultural interaction refers to how people engage with culture, either working to maintain stability (morphostasis) or to engender change (morphogenesis);
- cultural elaboration refers to the cultural shift accomplished at the conclusion of a cycle.
Archer also distinguished between the ‘cultural system’ and socio-cultural interaction. The cultural system in her framework comprises the objective realm of ideas existing independently of individual minds and governed by a universal logic, pre-eminently the logic of contradiction. Her cultural system approximates to Karl Popper’s ‘World Three’. Socio-cultural interaction, however, is governed by causality. She specified four types of configuration at the interface of the cultural system and socio-cultural interaction and outlined their sociological import:
- a contradiction in the ‘logic’ of the cultural system can lead to cultural tension at the level of socio-cultural interaction. The impetus here may take the form of ‘corrective repairs’, leading to unification via ‘ideational syncretism’.
- In the event of ‘complementarities’ between the cultural system and socio-cultural interaction, the situational logic promotes a deepening consensus, or ‘ideational systematisation’.
- oppositional interest groups can act to bring about – effectively to ‘cause’ – contradictions in cultural system with implications for the wider population. This is a matter of ideational antagonism.
- what Archer called ‘contingent complementarities’ between the cultural system and socio-cultural interaction are associated with a situational logic of opportunity, inviting socio-cultural opportunists to take advantage of it.
Archer’s somewhat challenging concepts outlined here are important, as will become clear in the course of this paper.
It will be argued that in the UK we are presently engaged in socio-cultural interaction oriented to morphogenesis and significant cultural elaboration. Late modernity or rentier capitalism, in short, has witnessed what Archer analysed as a cultural shift towards ‘variety heaped upon variety’. But while she suggested that this introduces a cultural ‘logic of opportunity’ to counter the still-dominant structural ‘logic of competition, the thesis here differs from hers. It is suggested that the cultural elaboration emerging in the UK is more negative than positive; and that although its emergence cannot be directly traced back to nor causally attributed to the class-based structural relations of rentier capitalism, it is in fact functional for the ‘capital monopolists’ who dominate policy and mould life in a contemporary Britain epitomised by extended precarity (Scambler, 2018, 2026).
The paper comprises three sections and a brief conclusion. In the first section an outline and characterisation is offered of cultural morphogenesis in general and the cultural elaboration presently emerging from contemporary socio-cultural interaction in particular. The second section is focused on the nature of the interplay between culture, structure and agency and how they have combined to precipitate this form of cultural elaboration at this juncture. And the third section examines the possible implications of the core themes addressed in this paper for the future of UK society in the early part of the twenty-first century.
Cultural Morphogenesis and Cultural Elaboration in Britain
There is no contesting that the rate of cultural change has increased in Britain as welfare state capitalism has ceded ground to rentier capitalism. Attributing causality to alternative precipitants is another matter, as are debates about the relative causal inputs of structure and agency. As used by Archer, the term cultural morphogenesis indicates a gathering and a heightened momentum of forces favouring genesis or change over forces favouring stasis or stability. The Faculty of Social Science and Public Policy at King’s College London recently reported a study conducted by Ipsos UK, who interviewed online a representative sample of 4,027 adults aged 16+ across the UK in August 2025, following previous surveys of 3,716 in August 2023 and 2,834 in November/December 2020. The results give some idea of people’s thinking on cultural matters and how it is changing. They found that the proportion of people feeling the UK is divided has risen over the five years preceding 2025 from 74% to 84% (IPSOS, 2025). Specifically, there has been a big increase in the numbers saying the nation is divided by ‘culture wars’. A growing proportion of the public see culture wars as a serious problem for society as a whole and for politics: 44% strongly agreed/agreed with the statement that ‘culture wars are a serious problem for UK society and politics’ in 2020, compared to 64% in 2025. People have also come increasingly to believe that politicians invent or exaggerate culture wars as a political tactic. Approximately half the public say UK culture is ‘changing too fast’ and look back positively at how the country used to be; and this represents a substantial increase over the years 2020-2025. But national pride has declined to under a majority since 2020. These shifts are most pronounced among older and middle-aged groups, though even younger people show increased nostalgia for the past. Studies like this suggest an accelerating process of cultural morphogenesis, a ramping up of cultural volatility and growing public awareness and concern. In the remainder of this opening section the focus is on offering a sociological characterisation of what I see as an unfolding (second) phase of socio-cultural interaction heralding the emergence of a (third) phase of cultural elaboration. I do this under a number of sub-headings.
- Absolutist relativism
One of the features of present socio-cultural interaction is a spread of absolutist convictions among individuals and groups against the prior background ethos of a (first) phase of cultural conditioning. The heading ‘absolutist relativism’ might seem paradoxical. What it points to is (i) a general dividing, splintering and relativisation of culture, which (ii) prompts a sometimes frenetic search for the security that only absolutisms or fundamentalisms appear to offer. Taking (i) first, Lyotard’s (1984) distinction between ‘grand’ and ‘petit’ narratives has been used to argue that the kind of settled and often longstanding grand narratives that had their origins in the European Enlightenment, typically around idea of progress and the good society, and that still held sway in the cultural conditioning phase associated with Archer’s modernity and my welfare state capitalism are being displaced at pace in the present phase of socio-cultural interaction by a much less settling configuration comprising multiple and often incompatible ‘petit’ narratives.
Instead of taking their cultural cues and guidelines from, and tailoring their commitments and engagements to, a limited and limiting core of grand narratives, people are increasingly confronted by a plethora of options. While this amplification of ‘choice’ has been heralded by some as an emancipation from cultural conventions, others have critiqued it as a force for conservatism. Habermas (2015, 2015a), for example, has offered an in-depth critique of the ‘postmodern’ espousal and celebration of this putative extension of choice and therefore freedom (one aspect or facet of Archer’s cultural morphogenetic explosion of ‘variety upon variety’). He argues that this ‘cultural turn’ is best understood as a ‘new conservatism’. His thesis is that with the rejection of established modes of reasoning, cultural disputes have fallen into an abyss of ‘anything goes’. The logical and practical rules governing argumentation are being glossed over and even abandoned. The resulting sense of freedom is illusionary.
This multiplicity of petit narrative options, real or imagined, can foster confusion and insecurity as well as a need and search for absolute answers to futures no longer socially organised and prescribed. It was this kind of ‘liquid society’ that Bauman (2000) wrote about, emphasising that rapid change has disrupted relationships, careers and identities and delivered anxious hyper-individualist mindsets. Social stability has been undone and replaced by fleeting, superficial and uncertain connections. It has also spawned a new form of identity politics which has nudged aside the politics of distribution and redistribution familiar in modernity/welfare state capitalism. It is a picture Archer also paints, though she scanned the horizon for opportunities amidst the flotsam and jetsam of cultural morphogenesis.
- End of Universal Humanitarianism
Against the background of this new cultural fluidity or liquidity it is unsurprising that the universalism anchored in a network of Enlightenment grand narratives has taken a hit. Kant’s (1795, 2006) influential treatise on ‘Towards Perpetual Peace’ and its progeny have lost much of their force. Kant’s text set out a vision for establishing a moral basis, rooted in a universal philosophy of cosmopolitan justice, for nations to come together in pursuit of a stable and lasting peace. This type of universal humanitarianism has been picked apart and its status is increasingly that of one position or stance among many others. Moreover, it is ‘merely’ of equal epistemic and moral weight and appeal to ‘any’ of its rivals. It is one that is now thoroughly severed from its Enlightenment-oriented tap roots. The principal effect of this fading away of universal humanitarianism is a reluctance to think, consider and plan for humanity as a whole. There is, it is sometimes alleged, no longer any compelling philosophical or reasoned basis for doing so.
- In-Group Empathy versus Out-Group Hostility
There is an attitudinal and emotional correlate to this sidelining of universal humanitarianism. This is an issue addressed with urgency and poignancy by Roberto de Voglio (2026) in his analysis of the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza and extending to the West Bank and into Lebanon. As well as considering the arena of geopolitics, De Voglio refers to the research literature around ‘moral asymmetry’ and in-groups versus out-groups. Humans may be biologically and psychologically susceptible to selective empathy, but the lens of culture too plays a role. He writes: ‘cultural moral double standards can lead to selective empathy, dehumanisation and even misperceptions of justice and morality’ (De Voglio, 2026: 32). In relation to the genocide in Gaza he discusses the potential viability of the notion of ‘collective psychopathology’; that is, the thesis that whole populations can in the right circumstances buy into overt out-group hospitality, even hatred. His eventual reluctance to sign up to this otherwise persuasive possibility is down to the existence and exceptional courage shown by Israeli dissidents.
But the cultural disposition to fragment and to edge people into combinations of in-group solidarity and empathy and out-group condemnation and hostility extends well beyond the exceptional case of genocide. Perhaps this is captured most readily in the emergence of the offence of ‘hate crime’ in Britain. Uniquely, the attribution of guilt resides with the person who professes to be offended; and the reach of the present legislation ranges from confrontational racial abuse to comments overheard in a bar and adjudged upsetting by the eavesdropper. Digital platforms are now increasingly deployed as venues for hate. The idea that ‘you agree with me or you hate me’ is epitomised in the often toxic online interchanges between (gender ideological) trans activists and (gender critical) feminist materialists.
- Media Framing and Bias
There are two aspects to address under this heading: (i) political bias, and (ii) distractive entertainment. With regard to the first, it has become increasingly rare for the mass media to contest the neoliberal rhetoric emanating from what Archer rightly calls the UK’s successive postwar centre-right governments. Notwithstanding her argument that the neoliberal grand narrative has gone the way of others, it is suggested here that it remains ‘the grand narrative at the end of grand narratives’: it lurks out of sight behind the general relativisation of culture, influential and largely unchallenged. Ninety per cent of the UK-wide print media is controlled by three companies and US-Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s News UK, which publishes The Sun, The Times and their Sunday titles, all right-wing outlets, controls one-third of the UK’s newspaper market. The BBC, which has from its inception had a pro-establishment ethos, has also become increasingly receptive to neoliberal ideology. It is the only online news provider in the UK that is more widely used as a source of online news than search engines and social media. Media bias can take different forms. For example, ‘content bias’ occurs when the news presents only one side of a dispute or conflict; ‘corporate bias’ happens when stories are selected or slanted to satisfy owners of corporate media, like Murdoch; and ‘coverage bias’ is when media choose to report only negative news about one party or platform. Object lessons in content, corporate and coverage bias are the way multiple outlets operated in unison to smear and undermine left-leaning Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party and potential Prime Minister (Holden, 2026), and the unremitting pro-Israel reports of the ‘conflict’ in Gaza (De Voglio, 2026). With reference to distractive entertainment, Archer makes the point that much of what passes for entertainment and relaxation takes the form of an addictive escapism, whether in the form of celebrity or influencer-led TV series or via repeated tuning into mobile phones to check on digital platforms and the number of ‘likes’ a post is receiving.
- Anormative Regulation
Archer (2016) argues that late modernity has witnessed a rapid demise of any shared normative system. This has in turn led to reductions in social integration, a growing deficit of social solidarity and an enhanced ‘macro-moral disconnect’ between religious or ethical systems and members of society, ‘all of which have negative repercussions upon the normative components of the legal order: the law, norms/rules, conventions, customs and etiquette’ (Archer, 2016: 143). The result, she continues, is the ‘anormative regulation’ of the contemporary social order (or, calling Weber to mind, ‘bureaucratic regulation’). In short, normativity no longer sets guidelines for social action: the law and social custom have alike shrunk in influence relative to non-normative types of regulatory control.
- Displacement of Liberal Democracy
Associated with the phenomenon of cultural morphogenesis too is (i) a disassembling and displacement of regular liberal reformist or irregular utopian realist manifestos for social reform or social transformation, and (ii) the social opportunity it has given to peddlers of proto-fascist absolutisms and fundamentalisms to parade their wares in a less rule-bound and constrained marketplace of ideas and ideologies. After all, if there are no longer rationally compelling criteria for adjudicating one over the another, once more ‘anything goes’. What absolutist-friendly relativism, the termination of universal humanitarianism, the growth of in-group empathy and out-group hostility and anormative regulation deliver in combination is a threat to the theory and practice of liberal democracy.
Combining this sextet of points of characterisation of a contemporary UK culture on the move, it might be said that its division into many petit narratives, some compatible with and some in contradiction with others, and in the absence of any telling means of adjudication: mitigates against any reasoned commitment to universal humanitarianism; allows for and facilitates in-group empathy and out-group hostility; is produced and reproduced by mainstream and social media platforms; is associated with a marked degree of social disintegration and the substitution of anormative for normative regulation; and adds up to a meaningful threat to the version of liberal democracy that co-existed with modernity/welfare state capitalism. In the next section Archer’s theory of cultural morphogenesis is subject to further examination and analysis. While it must be accepted that UK culture is undergoing rapid change, also that this is indeed resulting in ‘variety upon variety’, Archer’s cautious and constrained optimism in suggesting that this is positive for a logic of opportunity oriented to transformative change is questionable.
The Interplay Between Culture and Structure and Agency
Archer attributes causal efficacy to structure and agency as well as to culture. It is important therefore to examine their interplay when considering the specific case of cultural morphogenesis in the UK. It is convenient to start by focusing on the two-way linkage between structure and culture. In late modernity/welfare state capitalism structure and culture have each become morphogenetic and, according to Archer, have begun to mutually reinforce each other through positive feedback. Cultural morphogenesis, understood in terms of ‘variety upon variety’, has resisted colonisation by vested interests. No group has ‘commandeered’ it; and nor will they if morphogenesis eventually becomes ‘unbound’.
Unlike Archer, the orientation to social structure in the UK advanced here attributes more salience to class, which unlike relations like those of race or gender is intrinsic to capitalism. It is argued that during what I will now call rentier capitalism a tiny minority of those called ‘capital monopolists’ – that is, the major shareholders of transnational companies, financiers, bankers, CEOs, asset managers and their managers and allies, comprising well under 1% of the population – have significantly enhanced their power over the UK’s centre-right political parties by virtue of sponsorship, donations, bribery, freebies and, latterly entryism, allowing them to influence and even shape economic, social, welfare and health policies. These capital monopolists are nomads, freed from national loyalty and commitment (excepting for philanthropic or promotional purposes). While they are competitive with each other they share what Wright Mills (2000) once called a ‘tacit understanding’ deriving from common class-based interests and agenda as well as what he ironically labelled a ‘higher immorality’. They epitomise Archer’s logic of competition. The thesis here is not that the capital monopolists – in Archer’s terminology and my thesis pre-eminent ‘corporate agents’ in rentier capitalism – have engineered the present cultural morphogenesis in the UK. It is rather that ‘variety upon variety’ is proving functional for the power they are exercising over what has been called the ‘command relations’ of the state. Like a jigsaw broken into pieces, cultural morphogenesis has fractured people’s grasp of the whole picture.
The trumping of petit over grand narratives owes much to French academia’s loose-knit network of social theorists in hot cultural pursuit of ‘postmodernist’ or ‘poststructuralist’ ways of thinking from the 1960s onwards. Under the false banner of emancipation these university-based ‘intellectuals’ and their disciples in the UK and elsewhere made their reputations by promoting the displacement of grand by petit narratives. This should not be seen as a strategic achievement on the part of the capital monopolists and their allies, but rather as a ‘gift’ donated to them in the form of a leakage into UK universities and thence to popular culture out of the philosophically-innovative French university system. The capital monopolists, in short, are grateful beneficiaries rather than causal proponents of core elements of this aspect of cultural morphogenesis.
But while the present ferment of socio-cultural interaction distracts citizens and provides cover for neoliberal ideology (qua ‘grand narrative at the end of grand narratives’), it has also opened the door for the emergence of a rival identitarian politics. Post-Brexit initiatives like the UK’s Reform Party represent an absolutist or fundamentalist rejection of mainstream centre-right politics via an overtly racist appeal to voters to blame an out-group of refugees, immigrants and UK members of ethnic minority communities for the country’s protracted ‘cost of living crisis’. It is a manifesto mainstream parties have failed to contest but have rather sought to imitate. In consequence UK political debate currently revolves around an absolutist, identitarian and in-group approach to ever-widening material and social inequalities. It is interesting in this question that the BBC’s leading political discussion programme has seen Nigel Farage, novice MP and Reform Party leader, appear 44 times, while Jeremy Corbyn, longstanding MP, a socialist and twice elected leader of the Labour Party, has been invited onto the panel only once.
As well as fuelling their personal and social identities, structure and culture enable or constrain agents as social actors addressing their concerns and pursuing their projects. But like structure and culture, agents, Archer rightly insists, have causal efficacy or powers of intervention. She argues too that we all conduct what she calls ‘internal conversations’ (Archer, 2003). Moreover, her own small-scale projects suggest that people’s dominant mode of ‘reflexivity’ differs (although it can also vary over time). She identifies three dominant modes of reflexivity and appends one other of increasing salience (‘fractured reflexivity’):
- Communicative reflexives are those who need confirmatory support from others (from ‘similars and familiars’) before committing to opinions, concerns and projects;
- Autonomous reflexives are those who need no support but make up their own minds and pursue their concerns and project regardless of others’ views;
- Meta-reflexives are those who are self-critical and motivated by values, often as a consequence finding themselves challenged by the social world they inhabit;
- Fractured reflexives are those who have become disoriented or lost, detached and precariously positioned in their social worlds (I have used the phrase ‘disconnected fatalism’ to capture this).
Archer (2012) goes on to argue that in what she calls late modernity and its splintering into ‘variety upon variety’ people have not only necessarily become more reflexively-oriented, but the distribution of modes of reflexivity in the population has changed. The proportion of the populace who might be designated communicative reflexives, she contends, has reduced, while the proportion of autonomous reflexives has increased, reflecting an increasingly rapacious structural logic of competition. Within the mindsets of the competitively-oriented capital monopolists and their immediate asset-management and professional allies focused autonomous reflexivity predominates (Scambler, 2012a). But Archer adds two other relevant theses. The first points to an increasing proportion of the UK population ‘falling into’ the ‘constraining’ category of fractured reflexivity (often out of the limited security provided by communicative reflexivity). The fractured reflexives constitute a particularly vulnerable grouping, victims of both class-based structural morphogenesis and the disconnected fatalism leaking out of cultural morphogenesis (Scambler, 2013).
Scambler has postulated ideal typical characteristics for the three of Archer’s modes of reflexivity – autonomous, meta- and fractured reflexives – with the most obvious connections to morphogenesis as opposed to morphostasis (see Scambler, 2018). Autonomous reflexives might be considered prime movers, meta-reflexives a potential force for social elaboration embodying transformative change, and fractured reflexives as those falling by the wayside. They can be represented for present purposes as follows:
Autonomous Reflevixes
Total Commitment – the autonomous reflexive (AR) exhibits an overriding commitment to personal strategic goals. Nothing less will do. Anything less will result in absolute or relative failure.
Nietzschean Instinct – deriving from a Hobbesian notion of the natural human state, or of human nature, the commitment of the AR betrays a ruthless determination to cut corners to gain an advantage over others.
Fundamentalist Ideology – the commitment of the AR is not just Nietzschean but fundamentalist: the AR’s worldview does not admit of dilution or compromise. It is an ideology emergent from a coherent set of vested interests than cannot brook dissent.
Cognitive Insurance – while cognitive dissonance is near-universal, the AR has enough insurance to draw its sting. Accusations of self-centredness are rarely internalised and do not impinge on the AR’s sense of self or their security.
Tunnel Vision – a concomitant of the AR’s Nietzschean and fundamentalist leanings is the sidelining of other matters and a reflex and often gendered delegation of these to others to sort out.
Lifeworld Detachment – the coloniser is colonised: there is no time for the ordinary business of mundane everyday decision-making. This lifeworld detachment presupposes others’ attachment.
Meta-Reflexives
Impulse to Solidarity – meta-reflexives (MR) are oriented to community and their natural mode of relating is communicative rather than strategic. Their actions are informed by values of sociality, favouring norms of reciprocity.
System Immunity – MR activists have strong ego-defences, allowing them to have enduring lifeworld rather than system motivations and ambitions. Their aspirations are resistant to the system-based ‘steering media’ of money and power (Habermas, 1985, 1987).
A Predilection to Optimism – optimism of the will subduing pessimism of the intellect is on the calling cards of MRs. They are committed to securing better futures en route to the ‘good society’.
Visionary Insight however embryonic, the MR envisages a future that improves on the past and does so for the ‘community as a whole’ rather than a discrete segment. They are ‘utopian realists’.
Therapeutic Orientation – MRs ‘care’ in ways often antipathetic to instrumental or strategic action. Their challenge is Lenin’s ‘how to get things done’ and Hegel’s notion of ‘seriousness’. If they are serious about their activism, however, they are far from ceding ground to the ARs.
Action Commitment – MRs are predisposed to act, to intervene and to make a difference, so their therapeutic orientation is leavened by engagement.
Fractured Reflexives
Lifeworld Dependency – fractured reflexives (FR) are sucked in and almost dry by the routines of the household and private sphere. The daily tasks of ‘getting by’ often seem to ask too much.
Ships Without Anchor – the FRs lack bearings, drifting, at the beck and call and mercy of cultural variety and relativity. There is no core to who they are, or why, and what it all might amount to: it has been nibbled away by the cut and thrust of conditional circumstance.
Easily led – in need of rescue or guidance, they await the arrival of either the cavalry or an AR or MR; but they wait without hope or expectation.
Open to Ephemora – with no set compass and ‘disorientated’, FRs attach themselves to fads, fashions and the discourses of the moment, but without conviction; rather they are appendages or hangers on to the convictions and commitments of others.
Lacking Personal Projects – FRs are characterised by passivity: they are Sartrian ‘objects-for- others’, underplaying any causal efficacy for want of hope, aspiration or ambition.
Alienated – FRs are alienated in line with some of all of Seaman’s (1959) dimensions, namely, powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, isolation and self-estrangement.
Of Low Self-worth and Esteem following on often from their natal backgrounds and early life-events, plus the ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’, they hold themselves of little account. Their outlook is informed by ‘felt stigma’ (internalised shame) and/or ‘felt deviance’ (internalised blame).
The second thesis arising out of Archer’s consideration of modes of reflexivity carries a note of optimism. It concerns what Archer interprets as a logic of opportunity which has been given a new prominence by cultural morphogenesis in general and by the current wave of socio-cultural interaction in particular. This opening up, she suggests, is positive for a growing community of value-oriented meta-reflexives with aspirations to create the good society. Maybe she is clutching at straws, but out of the mists of absolutist relativism and kindred cultural phenomena, she suggests that meta-reflexives might yet hit upon a new clarity of hope and ambition, most likely through the offices of local, national and global non-governmental bodies and initiatives. It is an attractive form of positivity, but it will be argued in the next section that it is more probable that cultural morphogenesis is leaving the door ajar for a disparate band of largely autonomous reflexives desirous of a shift towards proto-fascist rule. Furthermore, the kind of far-right protagonists lining up within and behind the UK’s Reform Party are successfully seducing the UK’s mainstream – and since the 1970s uniformly centre-right – political parties into a tranche of policies promoting continued austerity, tax cuts for the rich, welfare cuts for the poor, and an explicitly racist hostility towards asylum seekers, refugees, immigrants and extending to non-white citizens of the UK (Virdee & McGeever, 2023). Research has shown that more than £170 million was given to MPs, political parties, media organisations and thinktanks aligned with the UK’s resurgent populist right over the five years from 2020. More than £130 million came from four telling sources: the crypto-investor Christopher Harborne, the hedge fund manager Paul Marshall, the Dubai-based investment firm Legatum and the financier Jeremy Hosking (Mason, 2026).
The third section of this brief contribution develops this interpretation of the present state of play in relation to socio-cultural interaction around cultural morphogenesis and the prospects for UK society in the event of the emerging stage of cultural elaboration.
Sociology, Cultural Morphogensis and a Changing UK
Sociologists have not proved good predicters of the future of societies, and the account of cultural morphogenesis proffered here is suitably circumspect. It present one way of interpreting the direction of travel. It is fruitful to acknowledge a debt to Margaret Archer’s theory and conceptual innovations whilst departing from some of her emphases (Scambler, 2026). The view that significant structural and cultural change began to occur in the UK around the 1960s to the 1980s is shared. As noted, she refers to the genesis of late modernity out of modernity, where (structurally) the situational logic of competition typically prevailed over conditions propitious for opportunity, and where (culturally) variety in its multiple guises increased exponentially and at pace. The preferred account and vocabulary used here refer to the emergence of financialised or rentier capitalism out of welfare state capitalism, where (structurally) a novel ‘class/command dynamic’ arose, and where (culturally) Lyotard’s grand narratives collapsed into a diffuse assembly of petit narratives and ‘an era of cultural relativity ensued, amplified by digital platforms and culminating in quandaries around post-truth, cancel culture and the like’ (Scambler, 2026: 167). At the time of writing it is becoming clear how the birth, childhood and adolescence of Artificial Intelligence is compounding this process.
The most significant corporate agents involved in structural social interaction following the advent of rentier capitalism have been the capital monopolists in economic or ‘class’ relations and members of the power elite overseeing the apparatus of the state in political or ‘command’ relations. The corporate agents have accomplished sufficient coordinated collective action to have forced through much of their common agenda and to have recruited and rewarded class allies in the economy. These same corporate agents have deployed their causal powers to insist on each of content, corporate and coverage bias (see above) in print, radio and TV and digital media platforms. This represents a form of ‘colonisation’ of the private and public spheres of the lifeworld by the system comprising economy and state (Habermas, 1984, 1987). Under each of the UK succession of centre-right regimes during rentier capitalism a range of capitalist monopolist-friendly policies have been enacted and largely rationalised and propagandised in the media. These include welfare and healthcare cuts, privatising a wide range of public services, downplaying climate change and geopolitical forms of complicity with Israel’s genocide and Gaza and Trump’s lust for war and conquest. What all this amounts to is a ramping up of class-based domination and exploitation which for some commentators presages a collapse in capitalism per se, although few attach a date to their predictions.
Nation states through much of the Global North have grown more autocratic and oppressive during rentier capitalism. This is apparent in a side-lining of liberal democratic parliamentary authority in the UK via the greater use of executive political powers (piloted extensively by the Johnson Conservative government during the COVID-19 pandemic) and what Archer calls the ubiquitous spread of anormative regulation. The Reform Party is currently anticipating further moves towards illiberal governance ‘modelled on the second trump administration’: that is, making changes via executive orders rather than by Congress (Spring Equinox, 2026). Those interest groups aspiring to move from collective to corporate agency who protest ever-widening wealth and income inequality, neoliberal cuts to benefits, campaign for green policies oriented to degrowth or protest against genocide and illegal wars have been treated as ‘enemies within’ and kettled and harassed by the police or arrested or even charged with terrorism. In short, the class/command dynamic is having a significantly more marked impact in rentier than it did in welfare state capitalism.
There is a feedback loop between structural and cultural morphogenesis. Each has occasioned changes in the other. It has been maintained that the structural relations epitomised in the class/command dynamic cannot be held directly causally responsible for the emerging shifts in social-cultural interaction; but rather that these have been beneficial for the capitalist monopolist and political power elite in combination. One way of exploring this is by referring back to the quartet of configurations at the interface between the cultural system and socio-cultural interaction introduced in the Introduction to this contribution. This allows for the development of two specific theses. A first comment is on Archer’s hopeful suggestion that ‘contingent complementarities’ between the cultural system and socio-cultural interaction allow for socio-cultural opportunists – and meta-reflexives in particular – to pursue a logic of opportunity. The response is that the UK’s window for a situational logic of opportunity may be unlatched but is certainly not yet open. This is essentially because what Archer calls ‘oppositional interest groups’ have acted to bring about – or cause – contradictions in the cultural system, or ‘ideational antagonism’. Referring back to the previous discussion of the stand-out characteristics of cultural morphogenesis, it is apparent that the Enlightenment-oriented grand narratives, together with the logic of reasoning that long underpinned them, have been thrown into disarray by recent socio-cultural interaction. How else is the current no-holes-barred or ‘toxic’ debate on biological sex versus gender identity to be interpreted? Each in-group derides its out-group antagonists: advocates of material or gender critical perspectives condemn disciples of gender identity ideology as ‘illogical’ fantasists, while the latter dismiss the former as ‘illogical’ terfs or bigots. Archer’s notion of ideational antagonism better captures this moment and mood of cultural morphogenesis than those of ideational syncretism or ideational systematisation.
What this all-or-nothing commitment to the petit narrative of one’s choice does is undermine the force and appeal of political programmes for either stasis or change; but neoliberalism as the grand narrative at the end of grand narratives is, at it were, the political programme in possession and as such enjoys a degree of security absent from any and all rival programmes. Indeed, the dominant class-empowered corporate agents might be said to have a certain vested interest in promoting statis and freezing socio-cultural interaction in the midst of the flux of rentier capitalism’s cultural morphogenesis. In his published Ph.D thesis on the Scottish socialist MP James Maxton, centre-right co-founder of New Labour Gordon Brown was drawn to Maxton’s emphasis on the need for a ‘middle way’ between ‘the frustrated incendiarism’ of the hard-left and ‘the time-serving passivity’ of Ramsey MacDonald. Decades later, he defined this middle way as follows: ‘the real message of my book was that to hold to an ideological purity, at the cost of political impotence, served no one’ (quoted in MacIntyre, 2026: 31). Translated into the UK party politics of today, this same challenge has divided the founders and supporters of the left-cum-centre-left ‘Your Party’: uphold, espouse and try to mobilise people on the basis of uncompromising socialist principles or seek a middle way without falling into the trap of Giddens’ (1998) advocacy of a compromised liberal ‘third way’ which morphed into Blair and Brown’s New Labour (see Scambler, 2024)? This challenge is stated not in order to resolve it, but to stress the way in which cultural morphogenesis and socio-cultural interaction are now lending themselves to the neutering of any attempt to mobilise for social transformation, even via a putative middle-way strategy somewhere along the left-to-right political spectrum.
If Archer’s autonomous reflexives, oriented to the logic of competition, have the potential to thrive in this structural/cultural morphogenetic environment, and meta-reflexives oriented to the logic of opportunity must struggle against the cultural odds to ‘make a case’ and be heard in an expansive field of petit narratives (let alone win sufficient causal power to become corporate agents), communicative-cum-fractured reflexives are experiencing neglect verging on abandonment. Fractured reflexives already experiencing protracted suffering and distress leading to sickness and premature death are now confronted by old and new, complex and obdurate sources of vulnerability (Scambler, 2013, 2019). While Archer understandably looks for hope for transformative change and the future decades are unpredictable, the omens are not positive in an era not only of rapid structural and cultural morphogenesis and a disarming relativisation of standpoints, but of growing volatility, consolidated plutocracy, oppressive state control and military conflict.
Agency fuels even as it is fuelled by structural and cultural relations. To be causally effective on policy and practice, however, individuals must become actors, combine under the aegis of collective agency and then achieve the transition to corporate agency. Both structural and cultural morphogenesis in their present cycles all but prelude this. Summarising, it can be argued that corporate agents anchored in and by a reinvigorated mix of (i) capital (pre-eminently via transnational capital monopolists), and (ii) power (via national states increasingly both compliant to the demands of capital and oppressive in their mode of governance) remain obstinately in the ascendant. This class/command dynamic is subject to continuing renegotiation, yet the prospects of the translation of any neophyte interest group geared to resistance and societal transformation (collective agency) into a powerful social and political instrument of actual change (corporate agency) seem slight. Nor, to draw on another of Archer’s factors, are contemporary centre-right governments open, porous or receptive to negotiation. For its part, cultural morphogenesis, while it largely emerged independently of structural morphogenesis, has served to facilitate the class/command dynamic.
Conclusion
This paper has two primary objectives. The first is to commend the theoretical and conceptual apparatus created and pioneered by Margaret Archer for the ongoing project and practice of sociology. In a wide-ranging series of books and articles she not only set out convincing parameters for an optimal way of doing research and constructing theory, but also effectively demonstrated and illustrated the value of her coupling of morphogenesis and morphostatis (her ‘M/M’ approach) (see Scambler, 2026). The second objective is to draw specifically on her M/M outputs with regard to the practice of sociology by advancing the outlines of a theory of cultural morphogenesis for contemporary UK. The gist of this is that to understand and explain cultural morphogenesis (i) necessarily involves a constant interplay of structure, culture and agency ‘over time’, and (ii) in the case of the UK in the second decade of the twenty-first century the current socio-cultural interaction-cum cultural elaboration is occurring largely independently of structural morphogenesis but, in a feedback loop, is doing so to the advantage of the owners of capital and holders and exercisers of political power. By way of an addendum, it might be added that the most likely precursor of significant social change/transformation is the implosion of rentier capitalism via a violence of excess. The direction of change of any ensuing structural and/or cultural eruption is likely down to the balance, orientation, commitment and – possibly transnational – power of emerging agentic combinations. The nature and distribution of corporate agency will be key.
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