This essay uses an example of Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach to sociodynamics to explore the explanatory gap indicated in the following propositions:1.Individuals act and interact in variable ways from constantly shifting states-of-affairs in pursuit of variable and inconsistent interests;2.Groups are made-up of individuals and their actions/interactions;3.The vast majority of groups, current and historic, are stable.Together, the above statements comprise one of the central, perennial problems of sociology; given that the three statements above are empirically verifiable and thus objectively true, we live in stable societies made up of mutually inconsistent, constantly fluctuating individual actions. But how can this be? How can the patterned regularity of social life be aggregated from the disorder and seeming randomness of individual actions? When modeled, sampled, and plotted, the data set of statement 1 should have wide fluctuation in its mean; indeed, rational choice models have shown this to be the case. However the data set for statement 3 should not, yet because 3 is derived from 1 (via the axiom held at statement 2), we are confronted with the above problem.The answer lies in what I call the Predictability Hypothesis, consisting of two clauses: A) of the possible paths to achieving her desired goals, an individual will choose the most predictable path towards the most predictable desired goal; if the individual cannot sufficiently predict the behavior or attributes of their interest or the path that constitutes pursuit of its achievement, she is very unlikely to choose to pursue the interest or to follow that path to the interest, and will instead choose a path and/or interest with a higher predictability; B) for comparable societies, those that provide more choice to their members simultaneously provide more predictability and will, ceteris paribus, be more stable than those that provide less choice and, thus, less predictability.I contend that this hypothesis allows the resolution of the above difficulty: the analytical centrality of (neo-Bayesian) predictability to every choice no matter the context bridges the explanatory gap between individual actions and the large-scale sociological phenomena of social stability; in the same way, the analytical centrality of stability to groups and group structures allows us to identify the predictable paths of agency. This analytical dualism is used to identify the mutual morphogenesis of both sociodynamic ‘poles’ in the example...individual and collective, ‘micro’ and ‘macro’, agent and structure-culture, in a way applicable to a wide range of rigorous sociological inquiry.
Choice and Social Stability: The Morphogenesis of a Sociodynamic Constant
