Complexity, Emergence,

and Causality in
Applied Linguistics

Jérémie Bouchard
Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied
Linguistics
 Jérémie Bouchard

Complexity,
Emergence,
and Causality
in Applied Linguistics
Jérémie Bouchard
Faculty of Humanities
Hokkai Gakuen University
Sapporo, Japan

ISBN 978-3-030-88031-6 ISBN 978-3-030-88032-3 (eBook)

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 Foreword by Dr. Derek Layder

In this book Jérémie Bouchard makes a very sophisticated, not to say

masterly, critique of what he considers to be certain weaknesses of applied
linguistics scholarship—and particularly what he refers to as “succes-
sionism” and “interpretivism.” He does this from the point of view of
a particular strand of social theory summarized by the term “realism”
or “realist social theory.” In this respect I am not by any means an
expert in applied linguistics, but I do applaud the author’s approach
from a social analytical point of view, as well as from a concern with
the idea that theory should, in some crucial way, be tied to empirical
evidence and a commitment to practical research. While my own work
has recently been preoccupied with these latter issues, this is of course
my own preference. However, it seems to me that what Bouchard has
done in this book is exceptionally important in its own right. He concen-
trates on drawing attention to some of the advantages to be gained
by recognizing the relevance of this area of philosophically informed
social analysis to applied linguistics as a discipline in its own right.
But not only this, he also points out its relevance to the many other
disciplines (such as psychology, anthropology, ethnography, sociology)

v
vi Foreword by Dr. Derek Layder

and approaches (for instance, modernism, postmodernism, subjectivism,

objectivism, realism) to which it relates, both as a “contributor” and also
from which it may draw as potential sources of influence and infor-
mation. Bouchard certainly brings to bear a very intimate and expert
knowledge of the importance of issues deriving from various strands
of social analysis such as the problematic relation between agency and
structure (Chapter 3) “realist social theory” (Chapters 4 and 5), as well
as what he calls “complex dynamic system theory” (Chapters 6 and 7),
while throughout, he tackles the parallel, but often neglected and thorny,
issues of “emergence” and causality in social science. In an impressively
detailed manner, he spells out the relevance of all these things to applied
linguistics and while his treatment is always fair and even handed, he
does not hesitate to engage in forceful critique where it is required (see
for example, his remarks on so-called ‘posthumanism’, p. 51).
Apart from the aforementioned achievements, what struck me forcibly
about the book was its underlying emphasis on a creative and open-
minded approach to wider issues and problems in the human and social
sciences concerning the advancement and accumulation of valid, empir-
ically anchored, conceptual knowledge. Bouchard offers a much-needed
emphasis on an approach which I admire because it opens up creative
possibilities for the types of knowledge available to us as practitioners,
as well as for the research methods and strategies that we may use in
unearthing the empirical data that underpins this knowledge. I think
that such an approach certainly throws light on some general issues and
problems in social science which threaten to inhibit advance in these
disciplines, and also points to some practical solutions which would open
up forms of constructive cooperation between them. Thus, Bouchard
rightly underscores the significance of “inter” or “trans” disciplinarity. He
begins from the premise that each discipline (or ‘school’, or ‘approach’)
has something to offer all the others to which it is related, by pointing
out that this would indeed be more obvious and manifest if only such
disciplines could or would communicate more willingly with each other.
Of course, this would only be possible by casting-off some inherent
“defensiveness” from within disciplines—which I have often observed, or
come up against, in my own experience of attempting something similar.
I think this stems from the feeling that a transdisciplinary perspective
 Foreword by Dr. Derek Layder vii

somehow threatens the “internal” integrity or independence of certain

disciplines. In particular cases these may very well be salient problems
or issues which must be addressed. Bouchard does this sometimes, and
necessarily without reserve, but always with constructive enthusiasm.
Although overall the book is intellectually demanding, it more than
adequately repays the diligent reader, by being written in a fascinating,
perceptive and insightful manner. A very impressive and important read.

July 2021 Derek Layder

Emeritus Professor of Sociology
University of Leicester
Leicester, UK
 Foreword by Dr. Albert Weideman

The enduring neglect of many fundamental questions has been a disser-

vice to applied linguistics. Applied linguists have been unwilling to ask:
where is the discipline heading? Is the fate of those who enter the field
likely to be that of victim, or will it enable their development as informed
practitioners? Will ideology prevail, or will good sense triumph in the
solutions we design?
Even where we do consider such issues, there is the one that Bouchard
raises here: are we asking the right questions? If we change our perspec-
tive, will that not facilitate a richer, wider range of more appropriate
questions? Perhaps that might become possible, if we recognize not only
perceived things and objects as states of affairs, but also further dimen-
sions of reality: subjective relations, intentions, events, processes, beliefs,
styles, strategies, commitments, all of which need explanation, perhaps as
interacting “layers” or strata of our experience. And that last, experience,
surely goes beyond what is conventionally—but erroneously—thought
of as sensorily perceptible phenomena? How to “observe” such realities
is, as this book points out, determined by methodological stance, which
in turn is dependent on theory.

ix
x Foreword by Dr. Albert Weideman

No doubt, theories can be more useful or less so; more credible or less
so; more aligned with reality and experience or less so and we should not
be afraid to say so. Nor should we be prevented from considering what
we understand to be useful, credible or aligned with experience because
we are unwilling to doff those conventional blinkers, the paradigms that
we embrace, often uncritically.
The position set out in this book has extensions in and affinities
with a multiplicity of current perspectives in the field of applied linguis-
tics. In my own subfield, language assessment, there have been calls, for
example, for a “pragmatic realism” that promises to lead us out of the
philosophical and theoretical quagmire of the debate on what “valid-
ity” means for a language test. Sadly, that debate is still conducted on
the fringes, while the conventional interpretivist dogma prevails (“Mean-
ingful interpretation is validity”). This book provides a strong antidote
to such unexamined theoretical beliefs.
The difficulty of course is: how to begin? The response here seems to
be: through patient analysis. By exposing reductionism. By introducing
a novel view of the system, yielding a richer perspective, more in tune
with reality. By acknowledging that similar issues and observations in
our field can be critically unpacked from divergent philosophical frames,
and perhaps productively so. In a word: we have only begun to consider
the philosophical and theoretical biases that have inhibited rather than
promoted understanding what applied linguistics is, and what it should
be tackling.
 Foreword by Dr. Albert Weideman xi

Any discussion that promotes this is timely and necessary.

June 2021 Albert Weideman

Extraordinary Professor
in Language Education
University of the Western Cape
Cape Town
Republic of South Africa
Professor of Applied Language
Studies and Research Fellow
University of the Free State
Bloemfontein
Republic of South Africa
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 27
3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 95
4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 177
5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 253
6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 297
7 Complex Dynamic System Theory and Applied
Linguistics 373
8 Conclusion 429

Index 449

xiii
 List of Tables

Table 4.1 Bhaskar’s ontological domains (Bhaskar, 2008: 46) 189

Table 5.1 A realist approach to studying extensive reading 264

xv
 1
Introduction

Defining AL
This book aims to elucidate some of the theoretical bases upon which
research in applied linguistics (AL) is grounded, identify some of the
persistent problems at the level of theory, and offer possible solutions,
an endeavour guided by the hope of a renewed AL scholarship for the
future. Specifically, it looks at the contribution by and growing popu-
larity of CDST in AL scholarship, and attempts to situate this emerging
strand within a realist ontology.
Necessarily, this type of work calls for a definition of AL at the onset;
although given the full scope of issues studied by applied linguists to
date, it is understandable that a single comprehensive definition of AL
has yet to be produced. Nevertheless, some interesting and useful defi-
nitions have been suggested: as a collective effort “of language teachers
wanting to distance themselves from their colleagues teaching literature”
(Kaplan, 2010: vi); as “the academic field which connects knowledge
about language to decision-making in the real world” (Simpson, 2011:
1); as research into language-related problems, with consideration for
social and cognitive aspects of language (Hall et al., 2011); as a “mode of
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1
Switzerland AG 2021
J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_1
2 J. Bouchard

inquiry that engages with the people and issues connected to real-world
problems” (Chapelle, 2013: 2); and as the “theoretical and empirical
investigation of real-world problems in which language is a central issue”
(Brumfit, 1997: 93). Davies and Elder (2004: 1) hint at the broad
epistemological scope of AL when defining the field as,

concerned with solving or at least ameliorating social problems involving

language. The problems applied linguistics concerns itself with are likely
to be: How can we teach languages better? How can we improve the
training of translators and interpreters? How can we write a valid language
examination? How can we evaluate a school bilingual program? How can
we determine the literacy levels of a whole population? How can we help-
fully discuss the language of a text? What advice can we offer a Ministry of
Education on a proposal to introduce a new medium of instruction? How
can we compare the acquisition of a European and an Asian language?
What advice should we give a defense lawyer on the authenticity of a
police transcript of an interview with a suspect?

Clearly, this list of questions goes on. Indeed, a quick look at the
different special interest groups in most AL associations around the world
reveals the true interdisciplinary scope of the field. Rampton (1997)
notes that, by its very nature, AL requires a thorough yet creative reinter-
pretation of concepts and theories from other fields. This is entirely justi-
fiable, for as the above definitions suggest, AL is inherently concerned
with issues situated at the interface of language and society, and there-
fore requires insight from anthropology, cognitive science, education,
sociology, psychology, social geography and political science, for example
(Coupland et al., 2001; Douglas Fir Group, 2016; García et al., 2017).
Specific areas of AL scholarship with strong involvement in transdisci-
plinarity include contrastive linguistics, education and literacy, language
pedagogy and language teacher education, second language acquisition,
pragmatics, translation, language policy and planning, conversation,
discourse and critical discourse analyses and interactional sociolinguis-
tics. In large part because of its transdisciplinary nature, AL research
has undergone impressive developments in research outputs, concep-
tual models and theories and practical insight and techniques aimed at
helping practitioners on the ground. This increasingly stronger and more
 1 Introduction 3

discerning body of scholarly works, in return, also bears relevance to

other social sciences concerned with language including anthropology,
sociology, philosophy, psychology and health services to name a few.
Transdisciplinarity can lead to further sophistication of conceptual and
methodological practices across the social sciences. Rampton (2001: 264,
emphasis mine) lists three types of linkages between sociolinguistics and
other disciplines made possible through transdisciplinary engagement:

First and most obviously, research outside sociolinguistics can be useful

as a form of wider contextualisation for any given project on language
in social life, helping to specify the larger environment within which
any particular group, institution or practice is located. Second, [trans-
disciplinary] can have a deep influence on the underlying assumptions
about social reality that shape research in sociolinguistics. Third, it can
provide concepts which can be integrated into the analysis and interpre-
tation of specific data, and which may then also serve as a very practical
‘bridge’ back and forwards between sociolinguistics and the fields where
the concepts originate.

Although both necessary and beneficial to AL and social research,

transdisciplinarity can be challenging precisely because of how descrip-
tions of specific phenomena in different fields often diverge, with
sociological concepts such as agency and power providing good exam-
ples of how phenomena are understood differently across the social
sciences. Huckle (2004: 35) explains that transdisciplinarity “challenges
academics to reconcile ideas about the nature of reality, how that reality
can be known, and what procedures should guide enquiry (ontology,
epistemology, and methodology).” Understandably, transdisciplinarity
can be threatening to researchers, not only because of the sheer concep-
tual, analytical and logistical complexities involved, but also because it
questions the perhaps comforting notion of rigid boundaries dividing
research disciplines. Layder (2004: ix) argues that,

perhaps one reason why attempts at establishing creative connections are

not common is that they inevitably attract negative critical responses.
This is often because interdisciplinary explorations are regarded with
suspicion by those concerned to ‘protect’ their home discipline from
4 J. Bouchard

uninvited incursions from ‘outside’ – presumably for fear of dilution or

destabilization.

Beyond conservative forces constraining transdisciplinary endeavours,

there are very real conceptual and methodological challenges to be faced
(Hult, 2011). In subsequent chapters, I will identify some of these chal-
lenges in the context of complex dynamic system theory (CDST), and
suggest possible avenues for improvement. Part of this work includes
an emphasis on the point that transdisciplinarity in AL should not
reinforce empiricist viewpoints or approaches; rather, it should involve—
and encourage—greater engagement by AL scholars with theory (Cook,
2005).
The transdisciplinary nature of AL has also been identified quite early
on in its history. Hymes (1974) provided one of the earliest transdis-
ciplinary visions of AL in his calls for a socially constituted linguistics
as based on two core notions: (1) we encounter linguistic features
as outcomes of broader social functions, which implies that (2) our
analysis must provide descriptions and explanations of the relationship
between social functions and linguistic features. This understanding of
AL has only strengthened over time, leading Block et al. (2012: 2–3)
to argue that “the starting point for applied linguistics should be the
study of culture and social structures, followed by an examination of
how language plays a part in the enactment of different forms of social
action as well as the constitution of second order understandings of these
actions.” As these authors elucidate, the study of language-related issues,
problems and challenges (a) is deeply transdisciplinary, and (b) must
come to term with the stratified, or layered, nature of society and social
phenomena (an issue developed in Chapter 4 on realism). This need is
also identified by Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 24) thus:

applied linguistics phenomena operate at different levels and are broad

enough to warrant multiple ways into any topic area. Several examples
that come to mind include a focus on the structure of interdependent
relations, a focus on relational dynamics, a focus on trajectories of change
and self-organized processes or a focus on emergent outcomes.
 1 Introduction 5

Despite some recognition of the importance of theory to AL projects,

however, and perhaps because of AL’s transdisciplinary nature, most
scholars agree that, being an applied field of inquiry, AL should be
devoted to the solution of language-related issues in the world. The
Douglas Fir Group (2016: 20), for example, see transdisciplinary AL
scholarship as inherently problem-oriented,

rising above disciplines and particular strands within them with their
oftentimes strong theoretical allegiances. It treats disciplinary perspec-
tives as valid and distinct but in dialogue with one another in order
to address real-world issues. Specifically, it seeks to integrate the many
layers of existing knowledge about the processes and outcomes of addi-
tional language learning by deriving coherent patterns and configurations
of findings across domains.

A similar principle is captured by Kramsch (2012: 484) when defining

AL as a “‘real-world’ project.” On this point, however, I disagree with
Kramsch’s use of inverted commas framing the term real world , which
oddly suggests that, unlike practice, theory is somehow not about the
real world. In subsequent chapters, I will discuss the realist view of the
real and of the centrality of theory in uncovering the real. Coming back
to AL, Weideman (2006) defines the field as a discipline of design—
i.e., as essentially geared towards the formulation and implementation of
solutions to language problems. Accordingly, AL,

typically presents the solution in the form of a design or plan, which in its
turn is informed by some kind of theoretical analysis or justification. Like
any other entity or artefact, the plan presented has two terminal func-
tions: a qualifying or leading function [the technical aspect of design],
and a foundational or basis function [the theoretically-grounded analysis
of experience]. (p. 72)

This understanding of AL is rather prominent in our field, and posits

AL researchers as responsible for producing scholarly insight, models
and theories specifically aimed at improving language-related social prac-
tices on the ground. In partial agreement with this view, I will make
the point in this book that, to achieve these broad aims, AL needs
6 J. Bouchard

conceptually strong and productive models of complexity, emergence

and causality—three closely linked concepts—and that the production
and consumption of these by scholars and practitioners alike necessarily
involves greater engagement on their part with theory. In short, I will
argue that, if AL’s central aim is to help practice on the ground, it must
be equipped with a more solid conceptual basis. Much of the analysis
and argumentation in this volume is anchored by this central line of
reasoning.

Principles and Motivations for This Book

With its marked emphasis on ontological issues grounding inquiry in
AL but also in various fields of social research and human practice, this
book mirrors recent developments in various branches of social studies
concerned with language issues, including sociology (Archer, 2012;
Carter, 2000; Elder-Vass, 2010, 2012; Layder, 1997, 2006; Maccarini
et al., 2011), education (Maton & Moore, 2010; Murphy, 2013; Whee-
lahan, 2010; Willmott, 2002), language and discourse studies (Fair-
clough, 1992, 2010; Joseph, 2002; Parker, 1998; Wodak et al., 2009)
and AL research (e.g., Block, 2007; Bloome et al., 2005; Bouchard,
2017, 2018, 2020; Bouchard & Glasgow, 2019; Canagarajah, 2005;
Cook, 2010; Coupland et al., 2001; Filipović, 2015; Kramsch, 1998;
Larsen-Freeman, 2015, 2017, 2019, 2020; Larsen-Freeman & Cameron,
2008; Mercer & Williams, 2014; Pennycook, 2019, Rampton, 2006;
Sealey & Carter, 2004). In this sense, I prefer to think of the argumen-
tation developed in this book as “old wine in a new bottle”. Previously
published works in AL, sociology and social theory, in my view, have
already formulated most of the points found in the following chapters
more succinctly and sophisticatedly, and when possible I invite readers
to consult these valuable and timely contributions to AL scholarship and
human understanding.
My goals in this volume are to build upon existing and developing
AL knowledge, locate some of its problematic conceptual bases, clarify
some of the epistemological and ontological grounds upon which the
field stands, and refer to realist social theory and CDST to suggest new
 1 Introduction 7

perspectives and possibilities. The stratified (or layered , or again lami-

nated ) viewpoint developed in this book has developed from awareness
that issues studied in AL are part of, or at least are intricately related to,
education in a broader sense, and as such are fundamentally social and
ethical concerns. As will be discussed later, the viewpoint offered here is
thus stratified both in an ontological sense—i.e., as pertaining to entities
within the social realm composed of, and unfolding within and across,
multiple layers or strata of that realm—and in a critical sense—i.e., in
reference to particular distributions of social “facts” and entities based
on differentiated status and access to resources and privilege. Ontolog-
ical questions, however, will be most prominent. This book also aims
to respond to Weideman’s (2007, 2009, 2015) convincing calls for a
“philosophy” of AL scholarship. The author’s particular use of the term
“philosophy” can, in my view, be interpreted broadly and from multiple
epistemological perspectives. Although in agreement with his view, my
understanding is limited to the question of how we come to know
things within AL worlds (e.g., how do we come to these particular claims
about language and language learning and not others?). I also consider
Rajagopalan’s (2004) understanding of a “philosophy” as an examination
of the philosophical underpinnings of a particular academic discipline,
with the intention of resolving pending conceptual and methodolog-
ical issues and challenges. These combined understandings of the term
achieve two purposes in relation to the work in this book: unpacking
AL scholarship as a distinct area of the social sciences while situating it
within the social sciences, and as such, as an inherently transdisciplinary
scholarly practice of importance to the study of a wide range of social
issues.
Because this book reveals insight into the complex and necessary rela-
tionship between theory and practice, it is also intended as a resource
for both beginner and experienced applied linguists and sociolinguists.
Throughout the book readers will notice a rather free movement
between talks of AL and sociolinguistics. This movement, however,
should not alarm readers: both areas are concerned with explaining
multiple complex phenomena including language(s), language users,
language pedagogy and learning, language policy and planning and other
8 J. Bouchard

language-related issues and problems emerging from the complex inter-

action between structure, culture and human agency. Both AL and
sociolinguistics have inherent social foci, even if the emphasis on social
realities is more explicit in sociolinguistics. In addition, being a trained
TESOL teacher, applied linguist and sociolinguist, I feel confident in
moving from AL to sociolinguistics and back when argumentation calls
for it. This is not to minimize the important differences between AL and
sociolinguistics: it is simply acknowledgement that the content of the
present volume bears equal relevance to both.
Three broad perspectives ground the overall argumentation in this
book. The first one is a justified opinion: AL researchers and soci-
olinguists should not be oblivious to sociological issues and debates
regarding language and society. In our current neoliberal world in which
language education is increasingly being commodified (Block et al.,
2012), the English language teaching (ELT) industry has paradoxically
become more narrow and granular in scope, while gaining greater influ-
ence over the directions of specific strands of AL scholarship, dictating
what phenomena to research, how to design and implement language-in-
education policies that can serve the economic needs of the nation, how
to transform research insight and language policies into one-size-fits-all
pedagogical activities, how to produce learning materials of relevance to
increasingly larger populations of language-learners-as-consumers, and
how to design and administer reliable and profitable language proficiency
tests.
In my view, these developments are alarming and counterproductive
to further sophistication of knowledge in our field, and I would therefore
call for widespread critical engagement by all AL researchers alike. Given
the hegemonic presence of neoliberal forces gradually but surely limiting
the scope and depth of AL scholarship, applied linguists (as social scien-
tists, let’s not forget) must collectively assert the profoundly humanistic
nature of AL as a branch of the social science. This mode of thinking
in part requires AL scholars to come to terms with the shortcomings
of successionism and interpretivism (see next chapter for discussion),
and contextualize AL problems within a robust social ontology, prob-
lems which in my view must be seen as complex and contingent
outcomes of the relationship between structure, culture and agency. They
 1 Introduction 9

must also come to term with socio-political realities, and by extension,

become increasingly comfortable and knowledgeable of transdisciplinary
concepts, research insight and methodologies. If we agree that AL is “the
theoretical and empirical investigation of real-world problems in which
language is a central issue” (Brumfit, 1997: 93), we then need to recog-
nize the value of greater engagement with social issues and social theory
in our attempts to describe and explain the issues we choose to study.
The second perspective grounding this book is based on an ontolog-
ical statement: the social world we inhabit and act within is complex,
and as language learners, teachers, users and researchers, we are forced to
contend with this often confusing and frustrating feature of society. By
complex I do not mean complicated . According to Hiver and Al-Hoorie
(2020: 15), “complicated denotes something quantitatively different
from simplicity; complexity, however, refers to a qualitative difference
[…] unlike the complex, what is complicated is fundamentally knowable
by breaking it down into its component parts.” For example, a watch
is a complicated system: it is a closed system, with multiple parts and
links making it whole, and its behaviours can be predicted with a high
degree of confidence. As a complicated system, a watch can be broken
down into its part and put back again so as to more or less regain its
initial state. On the other hand, social phenomena such as language(s),
beliefs, values, identities, learning processes, people, classrooms, poli-
cies and educational systems are complex, radically open, contingent
systems which progress through time often in non-linear fashion. They
emerge partly from natural (i.e., biological, chemical, physical) elements,
and are the emergent outcomes of activities by human beings as both
biological entities (with a brain, senses, neurological impulses, etc.) and
reflexive social beings (with emotions, beliefs, aspirations, social roles,
etc.). Language-related phenomena are complex because they cannot
be reduced to their constituting elements or parts. Human cognition,
emotionality and learning, for example, depend on certain biological
conditions; however, as emergent phenomena, they cannot be fully
explained by or reduced to these necessary conditions. Similarly, class-
room language learning depends on the existence of an education system
and, of course, specific material objects such as desks, blackboards, text-
books, visual aids and so forth. Classroom language learning cannot,
10 J. Bouchard

however, be fully explained by studying these elements separately, nor can

the English education system in a country, for example, be reduced to an
aggregate of all the English classes unfolding at any particular moment
within that country. Being complex, the social world, the people and
most of the phenomena within it are thus open and emergent systems,
which entails that predicting future behaviours and states with preci-
sion is simply impossible (although as I will argue later, cross-context
patterns do exist and therefore need to be accounted for). Understanding
of this fundamental difference between complicated and complex things
is necessary to the overall argumentation in this book.
The third perspective is also an ontological statement, closely linked to
the second, yet one which perhaps needs to gain more attention within
CDST circles: the social world (and by extension our knowledge of it)
is opaque, a quality which becomes rather evident whenever we move
beyond descriptions of local realities and attempt to explain their rela-
tionship with broader social structures. Stated differently, not everything
about society—or language, or language learning for that matter—can
be understood empirically: other things, processes and mechanisms are
at work in the production of social life, and these exist beyond human
perception. To illustrate social realities which cannot be apprehended
empirically, a social class, for example, is not something we can measure,
touch, feel or delimit the boundaries of through our senses or statis-
tical measurements alone. However, social class divisions have effects
on people, contributing to the very real unequal distribution of power
and resources in society. Likewise, even if we can identify instantiations
of, or evidence of, an education system in the form of policy docu-
ments, accreditation structures and so forth, it remains impossible to
delimit exclusively through empirical means the ontological boundaries
of an education system as a whole unit. Another example is offered by
the notion of learning. Although educators can attest to the reality of
learning, none of them can pinpoint any precise moment when learning
takes place. Pre-test/post-test differentials can only reveal potential traces
of learning, but not learning in and of itself. Nevertheless, phenomena
such as learning, social class distribution and education systems can be
considered “real” mechanisms because they bear consequences to real
people in real contexts. As Collier (2011: 11) explains, “some things
 1 Introduction 11

are not concrete entities, but are nevertheless real […] Relations are real
because they have real effects, and what has real effects must itself be
real.” In other words, everything that we understand as “real” should not
be reduced to the empirical realm alone, for mechanisms and processes
exist transcendentally (Bhaskar, 1998), and possess properties and powers
which allow them to have real effects on real people in real contexts.
The opaqueness of the social world has fundamental implications
for what we do as AL scholars and social scientists. If the empir-
ical is not all there is, we must therefore use theory to explain the
bases upon which variables in our research projects can be operational-
ized and studied. As Coupland (2001: 8) argues within the context of
sociolinguistics research, “sociolinguistic perspectives on interethnic or
intercultural communication will differ greatly depending on whether we
theorise intergroup relations in politically neutral terms or in the context
of post-colonialism.” Because not everyone understands variables such as
ethnicity, age, motivation and task in exactly the same way, greater and
more refined conceptual unpacking of these in AL scholarship becomes
necessary, not only to clarify what we are talking about, but more impor-
tantly to more successfully apprehend realities beyond our perceptual
capacities as human beings.
Secondly, given their opacity, explanatory statements regarding society
and social phenomena must be based on some form of causal model. For
example, sociolinguists studying and attempting to improve language
policy and practice must be equipped with a model or explana-
tory account of how social stability or change take place, how social
phenomena cause other phenomena to emerge, etc., and how these
complex realities are dealt with in different strands of social theory.
The opacity of society inevitably forces researchers to do more than
collect data, study patterns and regularities statistically, and finally
advance causal claims directly from such analysis. The third ontolog-
ical perspective driving the argumentation in this book is therefore that,
because the phenomena we are interested in studying (e.g., language,
learning, systems, identities, beliefs, educational structures, ideologies,
etc.) are fundamentally opaque realities, the type of work we do as AL
scholars and social scientists necessitates theoretical engagement. While
the point has often been made that theory without practice or practice
12 J. Bouchard

without theory are incomplete and rather ineffective, often missing from
this point is an explicit reference to the opacity of society and social
phenomena under scrutiny.
It is also crucial to state here that theories and paradigms are developed
over long periods of time by communities of scholars from different fields
of knowledge, and that despite their diverging foci, all of these contribu-
tors to human knowledge share an interest in understanding their world.
Concepts and theories, in this sense, are not mere human stories or
discursive fabrications about the real world: they are dialectically related
to an objective, material reality experienced by people both in the present
and historically. Recognition of this point, however, should not lead us
to conclude that “good” AL research should be ideologically neutral.
Coming to terms with the opaqueness of the social world also requires
acknowledgement of an important argument made by postmodernists:
what we do as researchers is not a-ideological: there are always biases to
contend with in our data-gathering strategies, our analyses of the data,
etc. This argument has, however, been used by those of a more radical
postmodernist penchant to justify deeply relativist AL research. Arguing
that all inquiries are inescapably biased, Widdowson (2001), for example,
suggests AL scholars to give up trying to be impartial and objective in
their work, and instead invest their energies in ethical pursuits. Although
I certainly agree that AL research contains an important ethical element,
my view as a realist adherent is that commitment to objective knowledge
is a necessary requirement for all natural and social sciences, and I will let
Sayer (2000: 71) justify this stance: “(1) There is no neutral access to the
world, knowledge is linguistic (by and large) and social, and language is
not a transparent, stable medium, but opaque and slippery. (2) We can
nevertheless develop reliable knowledge of the world and have scientific
progress.” As will become clear to readers, a CDST-informed realist AL
scholarship—which is what I advocate in this book—is specifically aimed
at maintaining this commitment to objective knowledge.
Motivation for this book also comes from the groundbreaking contri-
butions by four publications in AL literature which, in their own ways,
have offered novel AL perspectives informed specifically by social theory:
Lass’s (1980) On Explaining Language Change, Coupland, Sarangi
and Candlin’s (2001) edited volume Sociolinguistics and Social Theory,
 1 Introduction 13

Sealey and Carter’s (2004) Applied Linguistics as Social Science, and

Larsen-Freeman and Cameron’s (2008) Complex Systems and Applied
Linguistics. Lass’s volume provides an early critique of AL scholarship
by revealing problematic theoretical and methodological tendencies in
historical linguistics, and by questioning some of the underlying theo-
retical principles used to guide AL research. Specifically, Lass identifies
and unpacks the nature of linguistic data as well as the problematic
tendency among historical linguists to adopt a variable-based, succes-
sionist view of causality (see Chapter 2). Central to Lass’s book is a call
for linguists to consider the philosophical grounds upon which the field
stands. Similarly, although with a slightly different epistemological focus,
contributors to the volume edited by Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin
make compelling cases for sociolinguists (and in my view AL scholars in
general) to enrich their work specifically by considering the links between
sociolinguistics and social theory.
In the third volume, Sealey and Carter extend the work initiated in the
Coupland, Sarangi and Candlin volume, while providing a convincing
response to Lass’s call for a renewed AL scholarship, by developing a
stratified, social realist view of language as emergent from the relation-
ship between structure and agency. They also raise important questions
of relevance to both AL and social theory, defining AL phenomena
as outcomes of complex causal links emerging through human activi-
ties over time, within a complex and contingent social realm. In the
fourth volume, Larsen-Freeman and Cameron provide a CDST-driven
reinterpretation of AL research, and offer the convincing argument that
language and language-related phenomena can be conceptualized as
complex systems causally related to each other in a non-linear fashion,
and over time. The authors also offer new possibilities for studying both
emergence and causality in AL contexts from a complexity perspective.
In large part, CDST is discussed in the current volume very much
along the lines offered by Larsen-Freeman and Cameron, from the realist
perspective developed by Sealey and Carter.
Together, these four important publications make unique contribu-
tions to AL by looking at how insight from social theory can facilitate
research design, data analysis, and conceptual enrichment of AL scholar-
ship. They also help situate AL within the social sciences by providing,
14 J. Bouchard

each in their own ways, perspectives on complexity, emergence and

causality. The books by Sealey and Carter and the one edited by Coup-
land, Sarangi and Candlin, however, are more explicit in their attempts
to situate AL research problems within a social ontology. Although
realism and CDST are explicitly advocated or referred to only in the
Sealey and Carter and Larsen-Freeman and Cameron books, these four
books are very much aligned epistemologically, and coalesce into a
powerful and much needed critique of contemporary AL scholarship.
Readers cognizant of these four important references will find numerous
echoes of these in the following pages.

Purposes of This Book

The main argument proposed in this book is that, for AL scholar-
ship to improve, it needs a more robust social ontology, one that can
potentially be afforded by a CDST-informed realist perspective. A social
ontology is a conceptual viewpoint which considers what objects and
phenomena exist in the social realm, what they are “made of,” and
how they relate to other objects and phenomena (Elder-Vass, 2010). To
understand how a social ontology can benefit the study of language-
related issues, we must first consider AL as part of the social sciences,
and to this Rampton (2001: 265) provides an appropriate response:
“Ontologies provide an essential starting point for any research, and they
consist of non-refutable, metaphysical presuppositions about qualities
and forces thought to underlie all of the phenomena being addressed.”
Aligned with this view, Kaidesoja (2013) places ontological questions
prior to epistemological and methodological ones. Although these views
are certainly aligned with a realist approach to social research, it is impor-
tant to note that ontology, epistemology and methodology influence each
other in complex, profound and often non-linear ways, which means that
influences between them are likely to be multi-directional.
This prioritization of ontological questions in social research agrees
with a Weberian view of sociology as concerned with understanding
social action, and therefore as concerned with understanding the causes
and consequences of social action. The realist thinker Elder-Vass (2012:
 1 Introduction 15

15–16) sees ontological questions as particularly relevant to the formu-

lation of causal claims:

We cannot make sense of the social world without understanding its

ontology: the nature of social being, and more concretely the kinds of
things that exist in the social world and how they can have causal effects.
We cannot develop a coherent ontology of the social world, however,
without first thinking about the general principles of philosophical
ontology and how they may be developed and applied.

The enrichment of AL scholarship through greater engagement with

social theory has become particularly noticeable in sociolinguistics. As
Coupland et al. (2001) explain, the design of sociolinguistic research
and its potential to provide solid social and sociological explanations of
language-related phenomena are considerably improved when researchers
are actively engaged with social theory—and by extension, with transdis-
ciplinarity—asserting that “this shift to a more outward-looking sociolin-
guistics and to more genuine inter-disciplinarity must be the discipline’s
future” (p. xv).
Unfortunately, and for reasons already provided, instead of greater
theoretical engagement, AL scholarship has largely become invested in
the development of language teaching methodology. This relative lack
of engagement with theory by AL scholars is explained by Weideman
(2006: 71) in the following terms:

Applied linguists seldom appear to take the time off to step back and
theoretically consider those ideas that inform their practice. This may be
because their work has a certain immediacy. It is often undertaken for
the sake of alleviating the language-related struggles of those in need of
designing interventions. Perhaps this leaves too little time for reflection,
and even less for a deliberate theoretical articulation.

Another reason involves professional demands placed upon language

practitioners, notably language teachers. Kramsch (2012: 459) identifies
an unfortunate tendency in academia and educational contexts, stating in
rather strong terms that “language program directors, department chairs,
and deans call for more professionalization of language teachers, not for
16 J. Bouchard

more intellectual development.” Most evidently, and perhaps in response

to this, talks of theory are increasingly discouraged by publishers and
journals, many of which impose rigid word limits and rhetorical struc-
tures largely to serve instrumental purposes such as reducing publishing
costs and providing marketable strategies and products for the language
classroom.
However, there is more than mere instrumental concerns at play here.
Also possible is adherence to the idea that theories have little to say about
practice, an idea which is based on acceptance of the postmodernist view
of theories as stories or discursive fabrications. This argument is also used
to suggest that, as discursive realities, theories have more to do with
power inequalities and relationships within academic worlds than with
explaining how the world is and works. However, as Widdowson (2001)
explains, any scientific discipline is characterized by its use of theory as
the discourse of specialists. While such discourse does possess salience to
its knowers and excludes non-knowers, “specialist terminology also has
the entirely legitimate use of expressing conceptual distinction which
define different ways of thinking […] The argument against special-
ized terminology is in effect an argument against cultural pluralism”
(p. 6). What is important to retain from this is that the value of AL
scholarship does not reside exclusively in its arsenal of practical ideas
for the language classroom: it is also a body of field-specific terms and
concepts which gives AL scholars epistemic authority to make claims
about language-related phenomena. As Widdowson (ibid.: 10) states, AL
“only has validity to the extent that it presents reality on its own intel-
lectual authority and in its own specialist terms. If it starts producing
theories and descriptions to specification and their validity measured by
their utility value, then its authority, it seems to me, is bound to be
compromised.” van Lier (1994) also notes this problematic tendency in
AL, and decries the gradual disappearance of the theory–practice rela-
tionship, noting that AL research has veered almost exclusively towards
language teaching pedagogy.
With its marked emphasis on theory, this book agrees with van Lier
and works to contradict the popular claim that applied linguists are not
producers but consumers and users of theories (e.g., Corder, 1973), a
claim which is unfortunately based on a problematic dichotomization
 1 Introduction 17

between theory as “stories” and practice as “what we are all actually here
to do.” Layder (1993: 6) notes a parallel ideological perspective among
sociologists, explaining that,

Researchers are often dismissive of [social] theory on the grounds that

it is speculative and too far removed from the down-to-earth issues of
empirical research. I take the view that this is attitude actually hinders
the general development of sociological understanding by preventing the
harnessing of the insight of general theory to the requirement and proce-
dures of social research. Furthermore, such a situation simply reinforces
the gap that already exists between researchers and social theorists by
stifling potential dialogue and erecting, rather than removing, barriers
to cooperation.

The dichotomy between theory and practice becomes even more prob-
lematic within applied fields of research, for as Sealey and Carter (2004:
63) note with regard to AL,

Even the most practical of applied linguists, whose principal concerns are
with helping language learners to make more successful progress in their
studies, for example, have to make use of some theoretical constructs in
conceptualizing language […] no applied linguist (when being an applied
linguist, that is, and thus, by our definition, a social scientist) can take
‘real language’ as given and unproblematic. Some theorizing and analysis
inevitably goes with the territory.

If we accept the idea that a theory is a coherent set of causal propo-

sitions regarding empirically observable data which can potentially be
generalized (Coupland, 2001), we can then begin to see why theoret-
ical deliberations by applied linguists constitute the necessary grounds
upon which they can develop causal claims, and by extension improve
practice on the ground. Theory is understood in this volume as central
to all applied fields of inquiry, including AL, not only because under-
standing social practice requires theory, but also because practice both
produces and is influenced by concepts and theories as methodologi-
cally useful idealizations of reality. Theory, as Sealey and Carter (2004)
point out, is an emergent outcome of our studies of the social world,
18 J. Bouchard

and plays an important role in the constitution of the social world we

study. Because theories influence both the world and how we view it,
social scientists cannot simply select empirical data that confirms previ-
ously established theories. If research was merely a practice of confirming
what we already know, our epistemological outlook would, of course, be
overly and needlessly constrained.
As such, the argumentation provided in this book also contradicts the
radical poststructuralist view of sociolinguistic research offered by Heller
et al. (2018) as “experience,” which leads the authors to reject discussions
of ontology, epistemology and the philosophy of knowledge. Instead,
this book stems from acknowledgement that “philosophical questions
concerning the nature, validity and scope of our knowledge bear on
questions of method and strategy” (Layder, 1993: 16). Stated differently,
much of what we do and deal with as applied linguists is theory-laden.
For example, variables and analytical categories such as motivation,
language, learner, task, testing, policy, standardization, language shift,
etc. are understood and analysed not exclusively as empirical phenomena,
but precisely because scholars have, over time, developed ideas, theories
and concepts about what these phenomena are. Within the context of
transdisciplinary research, theory matters even more, for as argued above,
not everyone across fields shares the same understanding of variables and
phenomena under investigation.
But again, theories are not entirely devoid of ideologies. Theories
have structures, shapes, and contents. As such, they can be appreciated
aesthetically by humans as narratives of the world. To this view, it is
important to add that the aesthetic component of theories, as Lass (1980)
cogently points out, is an undeniable (and in my view an important)
aspect of research. Indeed, support for a theory depends first and fore-
most on its intelligibility, and intelligibility is more than an emergent
outcome of logic and of commitment to objective knowledge: it requires
appreciation for a theory’s structure, shape, and content, which is not
unlike aesthetic appreciation. Lass (ibid.) opines that,

we often judge (what we call) the ‘explanatory’ power of a statement

or model on the basis of the pleasure, of a very specific kind, that it
affords us […] This pleasure is essentially ‘architectonic’; the structure we
 1 Introduction 19

impose on the chaos that confronts us is beautiful in some way, it makes

things cohere that otherwise would not, and it gives us a sense of having
transcended the primal disorder.

Extending Lass’s argument further, “imaginative” projections,

taxonomies and models can be unpacked, and their capacity to explain
reality can then be judged, precisely because they are conceptual abstrac-
tions emerging from humans’ understanding of an objective world
within which they live and with which they interact. Perhaps more
importantly, theories can be evaluated with reference to the correspon-
dence theory of truth (discussed later in the book), or their ability to
provide a logical, clear and consistent view of the objective world we all
live in. Certainly, some aesthetic pleasure has to be experienced when a
theory seems to many informed individuals to successfully account for
observed “facts.” As Lass (1980: 163) rightfully points out,

even where causal laws are unknown or debatable, or frankly not of

interest, investigators in a particular field can still agree on the ‘scientific
usefulness’ of some given taxonomies […] their undeniable accomplish-
ment is surely the imposition of structure on otherwise chaotic domains.
And this is not a trivial success, but an imaginative and argumentative
accomplishment of the highest order.

With regard to the fundamental links between AL and theory, Coup-

land (2001) explains that sociolinguistics (I would include AL here as
well) has primarily been a descriptivist approach to language-related
issues, especially in its ability to describe the dissemination of linguistic
forms across socio-cultural environments, and that time has now come
for the field to include an explanatory agenda (i.e., become more
concerned with the explanation of causal relationships). To achieve this,
the author concludes that “sociolinguistics needs to be aware of how its
existing, generally tacit social theorising connects to broader theoretical
traditions in sociology and in the other social sciences” (p. 1). Aligned
with these perspectives is Layder’s (2004: xi) argument that “applied
sociolinguistics is in need of a social theory that can do justice to the
variegated nature of social reality and is not content with easy answers
to the agency-structure problem especially ones that simply obviate the
20 J. Bouchard

problem by erasing or dissolving the dualism itself.” More on this subject

will be unpacked in Chapters 3, 4 and 5.
This division between theory and practice is, in sum, odd and rather
unnecessary for the future of AL. For natural scientists, it must be
pointed out, reluctant engagement with theory is not a viable option:
the analysis of rocks, the weather, water and stars, for example, must
be grounded in clear understanding of their real-world referents (i.e.,
their structure and constituting parts, their properties and powers, and
their origins, trajectories and interaction with other natural objects and
phenomena in time). While social scientists (including AL scholars) deal
with human beings and social constructions for the most part, they
nevertheless share with natural scientists a commitment to objective
knowledge. Given that direct, unmediated access to the brute facts of
reality is not granted to human beings, and that human knowledge is
essentially oriented towards the elucidation of ontological issues, theory
must therefore gain a central role in the work we do. Because commit-
ment to objective knowledge is inherent to all the sciences, and in light
of the considerable contribution of theory to practice, AL scholars should
therefore not shy away from theory to remain blind empiricists.

Summary of Contents and General Intention

Behind the Book
The next chapter extends the main argument made in this Introduction
by providing more detailed justification for the need for a renewed AL
scholarship. In Chapter 3, I provide a summary of the structure-agency
debate and clarify its relevance to AL. This is followed in Chapter 4 by
a survey of some of the core principles in social realism, and further
extended in Chapter 5 with an explanation of the relevance of social
realist theory to AL. Chapter 6 then looks at some of the core principles
in CDST and their relevance to social research in general. In Chapter 7,
I then wrap up the overall argumentation in this book by clarifying the
benefits of and the challenges associated with a CDST-informed AL, as
understood from a social realist perspective.
 1 Introduction 21

My central objective in writing this book is to push the conversa-

tion about AL research further, to attempt to bring greater clarity to
what has been said so far about CDST and social realism as it pertains
to AL, and see if this conversation can be improved for the benefit of
future AL research endeavours. In attempting to do so, I will criticize
(from my arguably limited understanding of the complexities involved)
a broad range of ideas and propositions made by a number of writers and
thinkers over the past few decades. At times I will qualify ideas, concepts,
theories or paradigms as “incomplete,” “unproductive” or “ontologically
flattened.” This approach to review and critique might potentially be
perceived by some readers as rather confrontational and detrimental to
the development of a positive and shared academic discourse. Perhaps
a more accepting approach would be to advocate pluralistic viewpoints
and strategies for research, as many in existing AL literature have long
advocated.
While I agree with the underlying spirit and intention behind this
more accepting viewpoint, I disagree with the idea that academic
discourse can be improved through the mere addition of alternative
perspectives. To me, this view is aligned with, or at least strongly inspired
by, neoliberalist ideology. Rather, throughout history and within and
across various fields of inquiry, academic discourse has evolved through a
process of critical evaluation, of selective and justified improvement and
adaptation to new and increasingly more complex realities. Essential to
this process is the practice of researchers identifying certain perspectives
as more valid than others. To achieve this, the correspondence theory
of truth has been central and has served them well. That being said,
however, at no point in this book do I attack the people who generated
or reiterated the perspectives under scrutiny. My approach to critique
is therefore grounded in the belief that ideas also exist independently
of their producers and knowers, and can thus be evaluated and criti-
cally unpacked as phenomena independent from people. Indeed, readers
of the current volume will most likely agree with the argument that
ideas always come from somewhere: they are inherently the products of
complex and antecedent intertextual and interdiscursive processes, them-
selves influenced by broader socio-historical forces. As Filipović (2015:
70) argues with regard to transdisciplinarity, “theoretical postulates are
22 J. Bouchard

not independent, or created in social, historical and epistemological

vacuum.” Instead, ideas are shared and developed by very large groups
of both living and dead thinkers over long periods of time. And it
is precisely this aspect of ideas as also somewhat detached from situ-
ated interaction which allows people to judge them, criticize them and
ultimately improve or dismiss them.
It is therefore perhaps best to avoid conceiving our own arguments,
our own books, our own articles, our own academic voices as exclu-
sively ours but rather as fundamentally shared realities. Freeing ourselves
from the notion of ideas as personal possessions—and thereby rejecting
the institutional, power-laden quality of academic discourse often (and
rightfully) identified by the postmodernists as problematic—allows us to
criticize ideas more freely, perhaps even more directly and purposefully.
Academic discourse is about our shared—and divergent—understand-
ings of the complexity of the world; it is not necessarily about people,
their identities and ideas as their possessions. The development of
academic discourse, instead, is a deeply and irrevocably critical endeavour
requiring intelligence, creativity, humility and reflexive engagement from
all involved. It also requires the capacity to be contentious and even
controversial when times call for it. It is from this mindset that new
and more sophisticated theories and methodologies can emerge over
time. I therefore encourage readers of this volume to understand the
argumentation in this book not as confrontational or dismissive of
existing AL scholarship, but rather as part of a broader critical endeavour
aimed at improving future AL scholarship as a collectively produced and
constantly negotiated edifice of human knowledge. By inviting readers to
adopt this detached and perhaps more selective critical perspective, I also
invite similar critiques of this book, and look forward to seeing where
this conversation will lead.

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 2
The Need for a Renewed Applied
Linguistics

Past and Contemporary Critiques of AL

This chapter builds on the short summary of AL in the Introduction, and
summarizes important critiques of past and contemporary AL. Themes
and issues are discussed with regard to AL as a whole, but also with regard
to how they inform (and can be informed by) realism and CDST in
more specific terms. As such, this chapter does not provide a comprehen-
sive summary of all areas of AL scholarship to date—for this, readers are
encouraged to consult the numerous authoritative books and encyclope-
dias already available (e.g., Berns, 2009; Brown, 2005; Chapelle, 2013;
Davies & Elder, 2004; Ellis, 2001; Liontas, 2018)—nor does it identify
the full range of conceptual and epistemological challenges facing AL
scholars. Instead, this chapter provides a selective review of the field, and
the choices made are based on how themes contribute to the main tasks
in this volume: looking at the contribution by and growing popularity
of CDST in AL scholarship, and situating this emerging strand within
a realist ontology. In the process, the chapter highlights and unpacks
perhaps some of the most pressing issues AL scholars should face, as they
attempt to forge a renewed AL scholarship.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 27
Switzerland AG 2021
J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_2
28 J. Bouchard

Four decades ago, Lass (1980) provided a rather pessimistic assess-

ment of linguistics in general by pointing out that “linguists by and
large are a rather inbred lot, and often seem not to worry about much
except their intradisciplinary self-image, their positions vis-à-vis current
orthodoxies and heresies, and the like” (p. x). Although in partial agree-
ment with this view, I also think that Lass’s assessment does not apply
fully to contemporary AL, which has made considerable progress in the
past few decades. Arguably, as AL researchers began to transcend cogni-
tivism and behaviourism, the transdisciplinary nature of the field became
more prominent. At the close of the twentieth century, Brumfit (1997)
called for a transdisciplinary AL scholarship, given the complex nature
of language and its real-world uses. Following similar transdisciplinary
principles is Ortega (2005), who advocates an ethical re-evaluation of
AL research, specifically how it is used in language learning contexts. The
author proposes three normative principles for such re-evaluation: evalu-
ating AL research in terms of its social utility, acknowledging its inherent
subjectivity, and promoting epistemological diversity, namely through
transdisciplinary engagement. Mann (2011) echoes this call by high-
lighting important developments in ethnomethodological approaches to
qualitative interviews, often used in fields such as sociology, anthro-
pology and discursive psychology. He argues that the qualitative inter-
view, which has become a staple of contemporary AL research,

has, for the most part, been undertheorized. In addition, problematic

aspects of data collection, analysis, and representation are frequently left
aside. Instead, selected ‘voices’ are arranged in what might be termed
a journalistic tableau: there is something appealing, varied and often
colourful in their deployment but they tend to be presented bereft of
context and methodological detail. (Mann, 2011: 6)

Many of the problems identified by Mann pertain to sociolinguistics

research, notably in identity and ideology research within sociolin-
guistics, and can arguably be overcome through greater emphasis on
researcher reflexivity by (1) bringing attention to the interview process
not as a means to access the raw data directly but more as a co-
construction between interviewer and interviewee, and (2) considering
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 29

interview data not as evidence but rather traces of the complex inter-
action between agency, culture and structure (Bouchard, 2017). The
second recommendation can also be applied to statistical data analysis.
Empirically gathered data can, in this sense, be viewed as traces of deeper
causal relations, which means that what we perceive is not reality in its
entirety but rather aspects of it, or as will be argued below, the effects
of underlying mechanisms. To this point, Layder (1981: 17) points out
that,

to say that B has caused A on the basis of an observed regularity between

the two does not tell us why this regularity exists. To discover the real
causal connections between phenomena, we must acquire knowledge of
the underlying mechanisms and structures (theoretical entities) which
bring about the regularities of the given observable phenomena.

Based on this understanding, what is therefore needed in a renewed

AL scholarship is further conceptual work aimed at revealing the onto-
logical grounds of language-related phenomena under investigation,
conceptual work which is inherent to transdisciplinary engagement.
Understandably, greater theoretical and transdisciplinary engagement
in AL research will lead to a more complex and socially engaged AL
scholarship. For instance, considering the gradual infiltration of neolib-
eralism in language education around the world—e.g., the relentless
production of textbooks, materials, computer programs and testing appa-
ratuses; the normalized depiction of language learners as “stakeholders”
(Morgan & Clarke, 2011)—a socially engaged AL will necessarily involve
greater critical engagement by its scholars. Holborow (2013) responds to
Rampton’s (1995) early call for a more critically engaged AL scholarship
in a socio-political realm dominated by neoliberal ideology, and unpacks
the use of language in AL research, particularly the seemingly free and
uncritical use of ideologically laden terms deemed to echo neoliberal
concerns related to economic restructuring. The author calls for AL
scholars to outwardly criticize the spread of neoliberal language within
universities and in the field of AL at large. Also concerned with the
very language used to conduct AL research is Weideman (2007), who
notes the weak philosophical foundations of AL research, and warns that
30 J. Bouchard

an uncritical acceptance of long-standing principles in the field leads to

ignorance of its historical and philosophical grounds. The author argues
that this problem is particularly noticeable among new AL researchers,
many of whom adhere rather uncritically and a-historically to (said) post-
modernist/poststructuralist principles in their work. Similar although
slightly divergent concerns were raised a decade earlier by Rampton
(1997), who also highlighted the need for a more reflexively-engaged
AL scholarship, and questioned long-standing notions in AL including
linguistic competence and speech community, which according to him are
rooted in modernist principles. Kramsch (2015) offers a similar view-
point, and a convincing critique of the term language acquisition by
Larsen-Freeman (2017) is justified on similar grounds.
However, the indeterminate quality of AL research is not unanimously
perceived as a negative trait. For instance, while Coupland (2001a) crit-
icizes sociolinguistics as overly reliant on survey-based analysis and in
need of both theoretical and methodological overhaul, he also depicts
the field as an inherently eclectic strand of social research, asserting that
“sociolinguistics lies at the intersection of several different theoretical
traditions and find it impossible, and probably undesirable, to commit
to a single dogmatic theoretical type” (pp. 14–15). Cook (2005), on the
other hand, sees the theoretical and methodological separation between
various strands in AL as problematic by arguing that the nature and
scope of AL has yet to be clearly determined, and that consensus in
the field is unlikely to emerge largely because of the proliferation of
sub-areas of AL into special interest groups, conference compartmental-
ization and subject-specific academic journals, divisions which according
to the author facilitate avoidance of open debate. In this sense, Cook
sees conceptual debate in AL research as necessary to (a) maintaining
intellectual progress, (b) strengthening AL’s credibility and epistemic
standing within the social sciences and (c) maintaining the vitality of
work conducted in the field. Part of this potential vitality is under-
stood by the author as the capacity for applied linguists to critically
reassess the epistemological value of principles rejected by “new” and
fashionable approaches to language learning and teaching. Five years
later, Cook (2010) extended this argument in an award-winning mono-
graph titled Translation in Language Teaching (Cook, 2010), in which
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 31

he criticizes contemporary AL research and practice as overemphasizing

the Direct Method (which according to the author requires a rejec-
tion of the learners’ L1), a set of principles which ground prominent
AL approaches including lexical syllabi, situational teaching, commu-
nicative language teaching and task-based instruction. This leads the
author to stress that translation (an unpopular practice among adher-
ents of communicative language teaching, for example) actually plays an
important role in second language learning and teaching because, in part,
multilingual individuals naturally translate both in their minds and in
communication on an ongoing basis. The author also recommends AL
scholars to be more responsive to contemporary social realities thus:

Language learning is not the same now as it was when the current domi-
nant ideas about it were formulated. A student’s reasons for learning a
language in 2009 […] are likely to be different from those that were
common fifty or a hundred years ago; and the same is therefore true
of measures of success. This is the era of electronic communication, mass
migrations, an exponential growth in the use of English, and a consequent
complexification of identity for many individuals. (p. xvi)

As will be discussed later, successionism and interpretivism consti-

tute two dominant tendencies within AL scholarship which share one
core feature: a prioritization of empirical data (Sealey & Carter, 2004).
As Firth and Wagner (1997: 288) argue with regard to AL researchers
limiting their insight to empirically gathered linguistic data, “at best it
marginalizes, and at worst ignores, the social and the contextual dimen-
sions of language.” Sealey and Carter (2004: 88) suggest that, instead
of cataloguing repetitions of regularly occurring events in the body of
data, applied linguists should attempt to identify and explain the causal
mechanisms which have led to the empirical evidence under consider-
ation. As argued in the Introduction and developed further below, the
opacity of social phenomena (including language-related phenomena)
implies that empirical data does not “speak” to the researcher directly;
instead, underlying causal processes must be gauged through conceptual
means of inquiry, and recognized as powerful causal forces and as central
elements in the development of explanatory statements.
32 J. Bouchard

In response to the above critiques, some AL scholars, mostly soci-

olinguists, advocate interpretivism, often under the umbrella of social
constructionism or poststructuralism, as a potentially viable alternative
to successionist AL research. These approaches are principally concerned
with explaining the non-linear, complex and highly variable nature of
AL data, and the socio-cultural context around real-world language
use, as understood by research participants themselves. The main point
of interest for interpretivist researchers is how meaning is constructed
among participants, and to reveal this process researchers interpret all the
data gathered from the lens of social and cultural norms, constructs and
relationships, and highlight the need for introspective analytical methods
and researcher reflexivity.
Despite this radical shift from successionism, interpretivism—like
successionism—remains an inherently empiricist viewpoint. Further-
more, while interpretivist research has provided detailed accounts of the
more granular aspects of language learning and teaching, has shown
remarkable potential for dealing with complex social and linguistic
phenomena, and has demonstrated how social reality is indeed partly
constructed through discursive practices (Berger & Luckmann, 1967;
Elder-Vass, 2012; Parker, 1998; Searle, 1995), one of its most prob-
lematic features is how discourse—not people—tends to be conceptu-
ally endowed with agentive properties or powers to negotiate meaning
and, by extension, effect social change. Although Elder-Vass (2012)
sees important connections between social realism and social construc-
tionism, he rightfully points out that “when writers claim that some
social phenomenon is socially constructed, we are entitled to ask what
exactly it is that is doing the constructing” (p. 77). As the author
clearly demonstrates, the interpretivist perspective offers very little of
substance in this regard. In the analysis of discourse and discursive prac-
tices, without clearly identifying who or what does the constructing, we
are left to conclude that it is discourse that is doing the constructing.
With discourse as the main causal force and therefore as principal analyt-
ical foci, people remain conduits through which discursive processes
unfold. This marked characteristic of interpretivism draws principally
from Berger and Luckmann (1967), although Foucault’s earlier writ-
ings (e.g., Foucault, 1972) constitutes perhaps a more prominent source
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 33

of influence. Claiming that it is discourse which constructs the social

world—i.e., discourse as “shaping” things in the real world rather than
the producers and consumers of discourse—and equipped with the
Foucauldian argument that all knowledge claims are inherently claims to
power, interpretivist AL scholars demonstrate a clear propensity towards
(a) reducing social phenomena to power struggles, and (b) overempha-
sizing the causal potential of language/discourse. These problems leave
researchers with the paradoxical challenge of having to use language to
make knowledge claims regarding language. The realist solution to this
particular conceptual problem posits that language and discourse do not
produce social and educational realities: people do. People engage in
discursive practices to achieve their aims, but at no point does discourse
determine whether aims are fulfilled or not. At the same time, people are
situated and their choices and actions are structured (and “cultured”) in
various ways. As such, accounts of underlying generative mechanisms
are also crucial to our understanding of social realities. Furthermore,
language and discourse must be conceptualized as emergent products
of the complex interaction between people and their structurally and
culturally conditioned environment. This leads to the realization that
emergence and causality—or as Sealey and Carter (2004: 86) put it
with regard to language education, “how pedagogy and outcomes are
related”—constitute fundamental conceptual aspects of AL research.
Acknowledgements of this core principle prompts a review in this
chapter of some of the most prominent critiques of how emergence
and causality have been discussed by AL researchers to date. Central
to this critical review are (a) Lass’s (1980) re-evaluation of current
linguistic theory, including issues related to the status of and theoretical
constructs behind the data studied, (b) Sealey and Carter’s (2004) point
that much of AL research adopts the successionist model of causality
and (c) Larsen-Freeman’s (2019) critique of the tendency among second
language development researchers to view second language learners not
necessarily as active agents but rather as recipient or mere experiencers
of change. In this chapter, I also critique recent developments towards
posthumanist AL, initiated largely by Pennycook (2019), and of seem-
ingly growing interest among CDST adherents (e.g., Larsen-Freeman,
2019). Specifically, I ask How can a posthumanist AL (or a posthumanist
34 J. Bouchard

feminism for that matter) work if elements such as human intentionality,

beliefs, emotions and reflexivity are not conceptualized as distinct and emer-
gent properties of human agency and not of other entities in the natural
world? In other words, How can we have a viable critical AL without some
sort of account of people’s unique powers to change their worlds? In asking
these questions, my goal is not to promote an anthropocentric viewpoint
but rather to emphasize the profound scientific agenda at the heart of all
AL research endeavours. This agenda includes in part the tasks of classi-
fying phenomena according to their distinct ontological properties and
powers (Davis & Sumara, 2006), identifying underlying mechanisms,
and revealing causal relationships between phenomena under scrutiny.

Variables and Social Categories in AL

Much of AL scholarship to date has concentrated on the study of vari-
ables in language learning and teaching (e.g., learner errors, sequences
in second language acquisition, language input/output, specific teaching
methods, social factors, L1/L2, cognition, learner characteristics, learner
strategies, learning materials, technology, etc.) and their causal effects
upon one another. Pertaining to the social sciences in general, and
honing in on the issue of causality, Ragin (1987: 26) describes the
variable-based approach as a process in which,

in a simple experiment an investigator compares an experimental group,

which has been subjected to an experimental treatment, with a control
group, which differs from the experimental group in only one respect—
it does not receive the treatment. Only one factor, the treatment, is
allowed to vary; all other conditions are held constant or randomized.
If significant post-treatment differences between the experimental and
control group emerge, these differences are credited to the experimental
or treatment variable, and a tentative cause-effect sequence is established.

Sealey and Carter (2004: 91) similarly portray the variable analysis
tradition in AL research thus:
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 35

In each case, a language learning ‘problem’ is identified, and a number

of factors are considered as potentially having a bearing on that problem.
Investigations take the form of measurements of these factors and iden-
tification of their respective significance. The expression of each problem
incorporates a fairly precise delineation of who is involved (‘advanced
Chinese EFL learners at tertiary level’, ‘a small sample ... of high-school
students in a rural community in Northern California’, ‘first genera-
tion immigrant children’), and what the language learning enterprise is.
(‘French second language performance’, ‘[English] language achievement’)

Within a complex and contingent social realm, however, these “fairly

precise delineations” are rather difficult to make, because the real-world
phenomena to which research variables refer are complex, fluid, non-
linear and emergent realities. Moreover, given the limited space afforded
by academic journals and the likes, variables in AL research—learner
characteristics and beyond—also tend to be presented by AL scholars
as common-sense realities (e.g., Everybody know what “task,” “appropri-
ateness” or “ motivation” are), quantified and then measured through
empirical means of measurement (e.g., attitude surveys, pre-test/post-
test, etc.). In many cases, by comparing survey results with test results,
AL scholars formulate causal claims which endow certain variables with
causal potential to affect language learning in specific ways and not
others. As Larsen-Freeman (2015: 12, emphasis original) explains with
regard to much of AL scholarship prior to the introduction of CDST,
“the prevailing assumption of individual difference research was one of
stasis. Although characterizing individual differences as static was never
stated explicitly, it is a fact that most researchers aimed to find correla-
tions between certain learner characteristics theorized to be influential in
SLD and language learning success at one time.” Again, variables such
as learner motivation, for example, are not static phenomena but rather
complex processes to be studied over time, and in relation with other
complex processes. Instead of this, however, the common AL approach to
the study of learner characteristics retains essentially a linear, mechanistic
view of causality, or in the context of language education, a reduction of
learner behaviour—what is after all reflexively grounded behaviour—to
a mere stimulus–response process. The problem is that the behaviours
36 J. Bouchard

of language learners (who, let’s remember, are reflexive human agents)

simply cannot be accounted for through a linear view of causality which
behaviourism requires. For one, explaining a language learner’s response
to a task must consider elements such as learner awareness and inten-
tion, as well as contextual and historical factors conditioning agency in
important ways, as also possessing causal potential. These elements and
their complex causal relationship simply cannot be accounted for in the
mechanistic terms offered by the variable-based approach. Instead, and
as Chapters 6 and 7 on CDST will explain, we need to see learners and
tasks as complex systems interacting together in complex ways. This view
is captured by (Juarrero, 1999: 75) thus:

The type of causal relations required to explain the relationship between

organisms and their environment—and its past—must be able to account
for the way organisms simultaneously participate in and shape the contex-
tual niche in which they are situated, and to which their dispositions
are attuned and respond. Developmentally as well as evolutionarily, parts
interact to create systems that in turn affect their components: interlevel
causality, in other words.

To provide grounds for the argumentation in this section, let’s hone

in on motivation, perhaps one of AL scholarship’s most studied vari-
ables. Largely understood as one of the four main learner characteristics
including language aptitude, learning styles and learning strategies, moti-
vation is defined by Dörnyei (2009: 231) as “the affective characteristics
of the learner, referring to the direction and magnitude of learning
behaviour in terms of the learner’s choice, intensity, and duration of
learning.” Motivation, as most would agree, is essential to sustained and
effective language learning. However, Dörnyei himself admits that,

if we take a situated and process-oriented perspective of SLA, we cannot

fail to realize that the various learner attributes display a considerable
amount of variation from time to time and from situation to situation.
Indeed, [...] the most striking aspect of nearly all the recent [indi-
vidual difference] literature was the emerging theme of context. [...]
most ID researchers would now agree that the role of learner character-
istics can only be evaluated with regard to their interaction with specific
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 37

environmental and temporal factors or conditions”. (p. 232, emphasis

mine)

One conclusion we can draw from this is that motivation is not an

inherent aspect of learners, nor is it a fixed trait; instead, it is a constantly
shifting process emerging from the structure–agency relationship. With
this view of motivation as example, we can note that much of current
variable-based AL research unfortunately tends to rely on some form of
abstraction of complex phenomena from their contexts, for the purpose
of transforming them into measurable constructs—e.g., motivation as
an individual characteristic, recordable and measurable empirically. On
this point, Sealey and Carter (2004: 205–206) offer a realist view of
learner motivation which, in my view, both explains and provides neces-
sary conceptual sophistication for dealing with the complexity noted by
Dörnyei:

The realist’s stratified ontology […] requires consideration of the proper-

ties of social structure which act to constrain or enable human intentions.
So while learners’ assessment of the probability of being able to make
use of the L2 may also be involved in motivation, that probability
is associated with more macro structural factors such as the global
economy, and the likelihood that facility in this particular L2 will lead to
secure employment. ‘Motivation’, then, is conceptualized not as an indi-
vidual characteristic, nor as a quantifiable variable possessed in different
measures by different learners, but as emergent from relations between
human intentionality and the social world.

Arguably, similar conclusions can be drawn with regard to other

learner characteristics including language aptitude, learning styles and
learning strategies, as well as other research variables commonly studied
in AL scholarship, for not only internal characteristics help us under-
stand human agents and language-related phenomena, but external ones
as well. Specifically, variables in AL research must be conceptualized as
emergent products of learners’ ongoing mediated interaction with struc-
tural and cultural constraints and enablements, in light of their goals
and aspirations, all within a contingent social realm. This particular
viewpoint will be developed further in Chapter 4.
38 J. Bouchard

The main reason why AL scholars have so far demonstrated a marked

preference for variable-based approaches is that, unlike natural scientists,
AL researchers cannot depend on explanations and predictions based on
“laws,” making AL an essentially post hoc endeavour (Lass, 1980)—a
type of analysis happening after an event has happened, or in reaction
to something which previously happened. Problems with post hoc anal-
ysis of social phenomena include (a) over-reliance on statistical testing
(despite recent pushes towards data triangulation, or combinations of
different analytical strategies), which tends to lead to (b) data dredging,
or the desire to find patterns in statistically uncovered data by consid-
ering only statistically significant data while overlooking other elements
deemed “random.” These problems considerably complicate our under-
standing of language-related phenomena, for random elements can—and
often do—play important causal roles and reveal other salient types of
correlations not previously theorized or anticipated (Maxwell, 2012).
Despite these problems, variable-based approaches are effective in
operationalizing the complex features of social realities, and indicating
where potential cause–effect relationships might unfold. Variable-based
studies have also demonstrated useful, for example, in identifying impor-
tant epistemological concerns and in testing specific hypotheses about
the relationship (or lack thereof ) between two or more measurable vari-
ables. However, while accounts of what relationships are deemed to exist
between linguistic “facts” (i.e., the task of description) matter a great deal,
of greater importance to AL research are accounts of why these relation-
ships exist (or don’t) (i.e., the task of explanation), for science is not
merely a descriptive but more importantly an explanatory endeavour.
Another related issue is that, contrary to Grounded Theory (Glaser &
Strauss, 1967), variable-based approaches depend on theory to come
first, specifically in the description of, and justification for choosing,
specific variables over others. In and of itself, this is not a major problem,
for researchers do often begin their work from theory. The problem,
however, is that variable-based approaches are not equipped to produce
theoretical insight: they can only test the theories selected beforehand.
More importantly, and as Lightbown and Spada (2001) rightfully point
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 39

out, variables are not directly observable or measurable—i.e., empir-

ical—since they refer to a broad range of often interrelated features. As
Ragin (1987: 27) clarifies,

rarely does an outcome of interest to social scientists have a single cause.

[…] causes rarely operate in isolation. Usually, it is the combined effect
of various conditions, their intersection in time and space, that produces
a certain outcome. Thus, social causation is often both multiple and
conjunctural, involving different combinations of causal conditions.

By logical extension, a single cause does not have a single, linear effect
on other things. Therefore, explaining which effect(s) happen or have
happened requires consideration for variables, their interaction and their
contexts, as complex and emergent phenomena. As subsequent chapters
will show, both realism and CDST offer more or less parallel views on
these issues.
Related to concern for the causal potentials of variables is concern
for the ontological features of social categories. Here, variable-based AL
inquiries have also revealed to be problematic. Postmodernists and social
constructionists often underline this problem in their critiques of objec-
tive knowledge, and in their relatively convincing attempts a revealing
the constructed nature of social categories and social phenomena in a
broader sense. One of their most salient observations is that it is very
difficult to organize the social world into neat categories. As Rampton
(2001: 275) argues, “people don’t sit contentedly in the social group
categories that society tries to fix them in, and they don’t confine them-
selves only to those identities that they are expected to have legitimate
or routine access to.” Sealey and Carter (2004) note that the reduc-
tion of people to social categories and the essentialization of people to
specific variables do violence to the complexity of social life. The main
reasons are that categories such as gender or age, being culturally laden
concepts, (a) are discursive constructions themselves, and therefore (b)
are not inherent features of research participants, and (c) mean different
things to different people, including researchers and research partici-
pants. Therefore, using categories such as gender or age as “natural”
40 J. Bouchard

analytical categories in a research project can be problematic. Coupland

(2001a: 18) provides the following parallel argument:

Sociolinguistics’ tolerance of independent variables such as sex, class or

age readily essentialises people into these groupings, making the assump-
tion that aggregate patterns of language variation are adequately explained
by individuals’ sex, class or age ‘identities’. […] Social group member-
ship is by no means static and ‘given’ by social attribute, or of course by
language and speech characteristics themselves.

Variable-based AL research tends to be problematic also because vari-

ables and social categories can be of different kinds, with different
implications for causal explanation. For example, social categories can
be social collectives—i.e., dependent to some extent on personal choice,
such as being a language learner or a teacher—or social aggregates—i.e.,
resting on factors beyond people’s volition, deemed of importance to a
research project (e.g., belonging to a social class/culture/ethnicity, being
of a certain age). This distinction is crucial to the issue of causality in
variable-based research, for while a social aggregate is not formed out
of reflexive human commitment by participants to particular projects or
realities (indeed, they are often imposed by researchers), a social collec-
tive is to a large extent an emergent product of decisions made by people.
Being Japanese, for example, says little about how a person speaks or
acts. What explains a Japanese person’s actions/uses of language requires
a view into how this person understands contextual resources, constraints
and enablements, including (but not exclusively) elements and resources
afforded by Japanese culture, and why (s)he draws from such resources
or does not. Consequently, variables and social categories cannot be used
uncritically, or as common-sense realities for the purpose of formulating
causal claims: they must also be accounted for in terms of their distinct
and emergent properties and powers before their influence on other
things can be explained.
Since language learners’ age bears relevance to many AL studies, it is
worth paying additional attention to age as a social category. Particu-
larly problematic is the marked tendency among scholars to refer to age
mainly with regard to early socialization, thus largely disregarding the
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 41

full scope of human experiences from birth to death. Coupland (2001b)

discusses age as one of many under-developed, under-theorized social
categories in sociolinguistic research, and argues that the variable has
largely been conceptualized in terms of the socialization—primary and
secondary—of the infant and child within the family and in the school
context, whereas adults are seen as “socialized” or “complete” beings
ageing through time, relatively untouched by social and cultural forces.
This common understanding of age in AL research fails to consider
that learning happens throughout life, thus unfortunately perpetuating
a modernist view of agency and the human life course. To see why
this view of age is problematic, let’s consider the following example.
According to Ellis (2001), older language learners have an initial advan-
tage over younger learners in terms of rate of grammar learning. In terms
of description, this is a rather non-problematic statement. However,
age—being a social aggregate and therefore not the outcome of humans’
reflexive engagement with the world—actually reveals little in terms
of why this can be the case. Counter-examples are, after all, likely to
be found, thus undermining the view of age as a causally efficacious
variable. If, on the other hand, company workers (forming a social collec-
tive) learning a foreign language for instrumental reasons (e.g., to be
promoted or assigned to a foreign desk) were deemed more effective
at learning the grammar of another language than a group of school-
age teenagers, their age would necessarily matter much less as a causal
factor than their instrumentally motivated commitment to their work.
As such, the category “workers from Company X” could potentially
bear greater significance to accounts of causality than age. Most likely,
however, the category “workers from Company X” becomes a salient
category when studied in relation to other factors including position in
the company, perceived chance of success, language learning experience,
degree of commitment to the learning process, etc. As Sealey and Carter
(2004) cogently argue, this brings attention not only to the contingencies
imposed by broader structural and cultural causal factors unto the expe-
riences of language learners as human agents, but more specifically to the
centrality of human agency in the explanation of social phenomena:
42 J. Bouchard

If we want to explain why many adolescents are in the vanguard of

linguistic change, and why some are not, we need to introduce a strong
notion of social agency – an acknowledgement that people have some
degree of choice over what they do, including how they speak. This in
turn requires the use of social categories that recognize the relevance of
actors’ own understandings. (p. 113)

For this reason, the authors recommend AL researchers to study more

than the interaction between variables and social categories: they should
focus on the “case” while considering the relevance of categories and vari-
ables later in the research process. Important in this process is awareness
that while social aggregates can contribute to the description of empir-
ical phenomena, they remain of limited use to causal explanation. In
contrast, social collectives can be relevant to explanation if understood
as complex outcomes of the structure–agency relationship. In sum, the
use of social categories and variables must not only be selected but justi-
fied in causal terms; they must not be seen as mere labels for or inherent
attributes of collections of people but rather grounded in a theory of
causality, itself grounded in a robust social ontology.
This issue brings attention to the theory–practice issue in AL. In
addition to being mainly a post hoc endeavour, much of AL research
tends to be limited to local concerns, or language-related phenomena
accessed through empirical means. This is understandable, given that (a)
the most readily available data is that which can be accessed through the
sense, and (b) AL scholarship arguably needs to provide language teachers
and practitioners with findings that can benefit practice on the ground.
Nevertheless, fulfilling this particular responsibility becomes even more
complicated when practical insight and advice are grounded in empir-
ical data exclusively. Just as the act of reducing complex language-related
phenomena to single variables does violence to their complexity, limiting
our perspectives to what we can perceive and experience as human
beings means that we can no longer appreciate the full ontological
depth of these phenomena. If we aim to study the usefulness of a
particular teaching approach to language development, for example, the
pre-test/post-test approach can be beneficial to the task of revealing only
some of the factors at play in the moment. But as Sealey and Carter
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 43

(2004: 190) state, not everything can be revealed through empirical

means:

While, of course, the applied linguistic researcher will be concerned with

situated activity (that is, with interviews aimed at assessing language profi-
ciency, or on-line discussions, or encounters between police, detainees and
interpreters and so on), we would advocate an awareness also of the rele-
vance of differential distribution of funding for education, the history of
relations between national governments – and, indeed, the biographical
trajectories of individual participants in these social interactions.

This explains in large part why data cannot be gathered simply

through interviews or surveys methods, for example. For one, there are
important ontological differences between the unequal distribution of
funding for education—itself a complex mechanism with antecedent and
emergent properties—and people’s variegated understandings of it, as
potentially revealed in survey and interview data. Stated simply, studying
and undoing the unequal distribution of funding for education cannot
be done exclusively through a study of what people think about it.
Furthermore, what people say during interviews or their survey answers
are mere traces of beliefs held and formulated in the moment, not the
beliefs themselves, which cannot be perceived empirically unless by indi-
vidual people having them in their mind at particular points in time. In
short, to assume that empirical data (e.g., statistics, test results, survey
and interview responses) is the most reliable source of information about
reality remains, to put it bluntly, conceptually and methodologically
misleading, and in Chapter 4 on realism I will further explain why this
is the case.
The main implication for methodology is that measurement (specific
to the domain of the empirical) cannot offer a pure and unmediated view
of the world. Instead, it “must always be understood as a theoretical tool,
one by means of which we ‘translate’ the world into scientifically signif-
icant descriptions. It is on the basis of these that we then develop causal
accounts” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 191). Moreover, results of statistical
measurement cannot directly reveal causality either, for understanding
causality in the social realm requires a theory of causality responsive to
44 J. Bouchard

the specificities of social phenomena under scrutiny, and not simply the
measurement of constant conjunctions in the Humean sense. Within AL
research, instead of considering variables and social categories as fixed
and deterministic social phenomena, we need to consider, for example,
(a) how people within a specific age group can also be differentiated from
other people in terms of access to and control over economic, educa-
tional and linguistic resources in a particular community or nation-state,
(b) how within a particular socio-economic class, or even within one
school or classroom, human relationships differ in terms of types and
degrees of reflexive engagement, and (c) how people experience growth
and change differently. As Coupland (2001b: 205) states with regard to
age, “we should continue to model ageing in terms of change. But we
should recognize that change involves an interplay between human devel-
opmental processes, historical cohort influences and the shifting contexts
of social structure and culture, all subject to creative interpretation by
people in their other demographic categories.” Again, we need to concep-
tualize the analytical categories in our AL research projects as complex,
non-linear, stratified, emergent and evolving realities themselves.
This section did not aim to discredit the value of variable-based
inquiry in AL research, for as stated earlier this approach has numerous
advantages. However, the delimitation of a variable or social category
must emerge out of active and informed theoretical engagement with the
fabrics of society and social phenomena. Indeed, variables in AL scholar-
ship such as motivation or other learner characteristics can be understood
to some extent as models of the world we perceive and experience. On
this issue, Hedström and Swedberg (1998: 14) explain that,

even in the most trivial description of a social situation, we are forced

to be highly selective about which events to include and which events
to exclude from the description; this choice, implicitly or explicitly, is
guided by our prior belief about the essential elements of the situation.
Thus even the most detailed descriptive accounts are always “models” of
concrete social situations, and these descriptive models will always distort
reality by accentuating certain aspects of the situation and by ignoring
others.
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 45

In order to mitigate the conflating tendencies within variable-based

AL research, the development and use of analytical categories in AL
research requires theoretical unpacking, while their causal potentials
should be explained with reference to a causal model suitable to the
object under investigation, itself something which emerges principally
through conceptual work. Without dealing with the conceptual short-
comings of variable-based AL research, AL scholarship will face increas-
ingly difficult challenges in attempting to contribute valuable and reliable
insight into language-related phenomena, particularly insight of rele-
vance to our understandings of larger groups and populations language
learners and users across contexts.

Statistical Analysis in AL
As part of the social sciences, and given its unique interest in how people
learn, use and live their lives with language, it is understandable that
some applied linguists focus their attention on people’s understanding
of their own experience—in a phenomenological sense—and by exten-
sion, require qualitative analysis which allows them to reveal people’s
complex and dynamic interpretation of meaning. However, Lazaraton
(2000, 2005) found that, in the 1990s, approximately 90% of AL studies
published in leading AL journals adopted some form of statistical anal-
ysis, a figure confirmed roughly a decade later by Loewen et al. (2014),
who interpret this data to mean that statistical analysis (and by extension
statistical literacy among AL scholars) is crucial to research in the field.
The problem with the latter observation, however, is that the need for
statistical analysis in AL research cannot be justified on the basis of how
popular it is among AL scholars, but rather with regard to the theoretical
and methodological benefits it brings to AL research, something which
Loewen et al. (2014) fail to elucidate.
Given that its main contribution relates to large groups and whole
populations, the principal benefit of statistical analysis lies in its poten-
tial to reveal insight into phenomena occurring on a broader demo-
graphic scale, or broader sociological processes not immediately acces-
sible through the senses. Statistical analysis therefore allows applied
46 J. Bouchard

linguists to gain a view of what goes on somewhat beyond empirically

accessible evidence. In addition to being useful to descriptive endeav-
ours, statistical analysis can also be of use to the testing of theories,
and in revealing potential traces of underlying causal mechanisms behind
the emergence of social realities. Statistical indications of (although not
evidence of ) social patterns and inequalities are examples of what can
be initially identified through statistical analysis. Statistical analysis—
a hallmark of quantitative research—has played and continues to play
an important role in AL scholarship, and is often perceived as a way
to strengthen the epistemological quality and authority of the work
conducted in our field.
However, being essentially about macro realities, statistical analysis
bears limited relevance to people’s understandings of their own experi-
ences, and to the study of individuals and small groups. Furthermore,
even if statistical analysis can be helpful in testing theories, because its
explanatory potential is considerably limited, direct application of statis-
tical findings to the generation of theoretical insight is mistaken. As
Hedström and Swedberg (1998: 17) indicate,

many sociologists have had all too much faith in statistical analysis as a
tool for generating theories […] the belief in an isomorphism between
statistical and theoretical models, which appears to be an integral feature
of the causal-modeling approach, has hampered the development of
sociological theories built upon concrete explanatory mechanisms.

Because a central objective of theory is to account for the type of

complexities in social life not immediately accessible through empir-
ical means, the problem, as Ragin (1987) points out, is that statistical
techniques and procedures simplify complexity through a series of
assumptions, for example, that cause–effect links are assumed to unfold
uniformly across contexts. Instead of including, or revealing, impor-
tant features in the data which might help us understand the effects of
contingent contextual forces, statistical analysis requires the elimination
of a broad range of elements—notably contextual influences—usually
deemed as “noise” in the data. In short, a statistical view inevitably rein-
forces a linear (as opposed to complex and contingent) view of social
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 47

processes. To phrase the above point differently, assuming that statis-

tical regularities are direct indications of cause–effect relationships is
mistaken, for as Sayer (2000) cogently points out, how often we notice
something happening in our data has little to do with why it happens.
Sealey and Carter (2004: 209) identify the core problem with using
measurement (including statistical measurement) as sole basis for causal
claims thus: “Measurement is important in most research programmes,
but it does not provide direct access to reality. […] whatever form
of measure you use will rest on theoretical claims about social reality.
‘Facts’ never ‘speak for themselves’.” Sørensen (1998: 239) explain this
unavoidable limitation of statistical analysis thus:

The discipline of statistics is a branch of applied mathematics and has

no social theory whatsoever. Statisticians never claim otherwise. It is
the sociologists’ use of statistics that is at fault. Statistics provides tools
for estimating mathematical models representing a conception of social
processes. Unfortunately, sociologists […] have become less, rather than
more, competent at translating theoretical ideas into models to be esti-
mated by statistical techniques. Sociologists therefore estimate ad hoc
statistical models of social processes, usually additive models that often
represent poor theories of the phenomena being investigated.

The assumption that statistical data reveals causal links has a rather
long history, originating mainly in Hume’s theory of causality as constant
conjunction, and the philosopher’s reluctance to recognize causality as
central to the existence and fluid nature of social phenomena. The
Humean view of causality assumes that,

whenever an event of type A occurs, it is followed by an event of type

B. The idea we form that there is a necessary connection between A
events and B events – some sort of natural force that A has to produce
B – cannot, according to Hume, be justified; all we have good reason to
believe is that there is a constant conjunction of A’s and B’s. (Elder-Vass,
2010: 41)
48 J. Bouchard

Easton (2010: 118) explains that this “constant conjunction of

elements or variables is not a causal explanation or indeed an explana-
tion of any kind. It is simply an atheoretical statement about the world.
It doesn’t answer the question why?” In other words, the Humean model
merely provides descriptive—not explanatory—insight. In contemporary
sociology and social theory, Hume’s approach to causality, or rather his
rejection of causality, has largely been dismissed. According to Collier
(2011: 4), “if Hume were right we would not need experiments, but we
do because cause equals constant conjunction only when other things
are equal, and in nature, other things never are equal.” This dismissal
of the Humean model among social scientists is based on recognition
that society is a radically open and contingent system, which means that
to explain social facts statistical analysis must therefore be combined
with a causal model grounded in a robust social ontology. Pertaining
to sociolinguistics, Lass (1980) argues that the attribution of theoret-
ical significance to statistical patterns is more of an assertion of belief
than a process justified by sound principles of inference. In light of this,
AL scholars must therefore ensure that their causal models and theories
are explicit and clear, so that when evaluated by other social scientists
they can be accepted or dismissed on sound and widely agreed upon
causal principles which are responsive to the complexity of the social
realm. If, as argued above and developed further in Chapter 4, we cannot
know things directly from empirical evidence or statistical analysis, we
must then revert to theory, which according to Lass involves a principled
approach to inference.
While statistical tools and related theoretical paradigms have certainly
improved as a result of more sophisticated insight into social complexity,
the inherent heterogeneity, non-linearity and contingent nature of
society and the phenomena within it nevertheless require consideration
for human agency and underlying causal mechanisms as important causal
forces. Morgan and Winship (2012) explain that, in the 1980s and
1990s, quantitative approaches used in sociology underwent stringent
and largely justified criticism for what the authors describe as “the overly
strong causal assertions in the published literature [which] were based
on misplaced faith in the capacity of linear regression results to generate
warranted causal conclusions from the analysis of survey data” (p. 320,
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 49

emphasis mine). Understanding of this problem calls for the application

of qualitative research methodologies, arguably more appropriate to the
study of contextual influences and the variability we inevitably find in
AL data. Statistics, let’s not forget, play an important role in our work,
but it is a specific one. Davis and Sumara (2006: 22, emphasis orig-
inal) explain why this feature of mathematics matters to a complexity
approach to education:

While mathematics provides powerful tools that should not be ignored,

the project of bottom-up computer simulations is necessarily oriented
toward the identification of essential rules or principles that can then
be recombined to generate complex happenings (or, at least, convincing
simulations of complex happenings). There is no disagreement that math-
ematics and mathematical tools are useful for these sorts of endeavors.
However, as helpful as a rule-based approach may be, it is inadequate
for understanding all dimensions of complexity and it can in fact be a
hindrance to these understandings.

With regard to sociological research, Sørensen (1998) suggests that, for

statistical analysis to bear fruit, theory should be equipped with a math-
ematical model of social processes, while statistical analysis can serve to
evaluate the validity of this model. Yet, estimation can only take social
scientists so far, since social phenomena—e.g., people, classrooms, public
opinions and election polls, etc.—are (or at least include) complex living
and learning systems, which means that change is both expected and
somewhat unpredictable. As such, statistical analysis can offer a clear
view of a complex learning system momentarily interrupted in time, but
as soon as this interruption is removed statistical data begins to lose its
relevance. Again, the use of statistical analysis to AL research is justified
when combined with qualitatively oriented work. While it is a cliché to
state that AL research requires both qualitative and quantitative analyses,
what needs to be stressed in this argument is that a qualitative–quan-
titative combination is necessary precisely in the formulation of causal
claims.
50 J. Bouchard

The Successionist Model of Causality

and Descriptive-Causal Generalizations
Adherence to the successionist model of causality can be noted
by a strong preference for quantifying variables and extensive use
of statistical analysis to advance causal claims. This model, which
requires statistical measurement and quantification, is based on long-
standing scientific notions including falsifiable hypotheses and depen-
dent/independent/confounding variables. Monaghan and Boaz (2018:
175) state that successionism,

adopts an external view of causation and seeks to ascertain whether a

program or intervention works to deliver a desired outcome. For those
working in this tradition, the randomised controlled trial (RCT) is seen
as the gold-standard method for determining this kind of causality. By
randomly assigning participants to a group within a study, one of which
will receive an intervention and one that will not, researchers working
within this paradigm seek to establish what they argue to be causation.

The successionist model has deep roots in the natural sciences which
must deal with numerous closed systems. When applied to the social
sciences, which must deal with complex, open, dynamic and emergent
systems (see Chapters 6 and 7), successionism therefore poses consider-
able problems. Nevertheless, it is worth pointing out that, in many ways,
this model has served the evolution of human knowledge rather well over
centuries of research, for as Schumann (2015: xviii) cogently explains,

The human mind has evolved to view the world in terms of singular
causes and single chains of causality. From an evolutionary perspective,
we can assume that such cognition must have been very important for the
survival of our species. The experimental method itself may be a mani-
festation of our tendency to isolate a single cause, to see averages as the
truth and to dismiss variation as noise. Complicating the matter, is the
fact that the search for a single causal variable often works and has often
been very informative; we have learned a lot from this way of thinking.
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 51

However, the successionist model is aligned with a Humean view of

causality which unfortunately does not allow scientists, especially social
scientists, to make causal claims, only statements about a particular
sequencing of events. According to Williams (2018: 27), this sort of
explanation follows linear regression models “which aim to show the
cause of an outcome by ‘explaining’ as much of the statistical variance
in the model by fitting the independent variables to the model to give
the best ‘fit’.” This particular approach to AL research remains promi-
nent in contemporary AL scholarship, and is advocated and developed,
for example, by Norouzian and Plonsky (2018). For Williams (2018),
however, this is a considerable problem because it overemphasizes empir-
ical knowledge at the cost of necessary conceptual modelling of causality.
As argued earlier, statistical patterns in the data can only provide valu-
able hints that causal links might exist. Since statistical regularities do not
constitute evidence of causal links, however, they simply cannot explain
those links. As Monaghan and Boaz (2018: 175, emphasis mine) explain,

meta-analysis based on successionist logic is poor at dealing with

complexity and context is purposefully excluded from such studies. [In
statistical analysis], correlations are observed and cause is established
post hoc through techniques measuring statistical significance. In both
scenarios, however, the aim is to reveal a pure relationship uncluttered by
extraneous and confounding factors through the elimination of bias.

Awareness of this problem has led to convincing postmodern critiques

of the successionist model, including the above observation that statis-
tical patterns can only reveal potential traces of causal links. However,
more radical postmodern perspectives have taken this point too far,
concluding that society, as a radically open and contingent system,
simply does not produce patterns, only fluid and situated realities. As
I argue later in this chapter, this view is also mistaken, for if we consider
the antecedent properties of structural realities such as money, educa-
tional systems, social classes, the ongoing oppression of women and
minorities around the world, and the resilience of ideological constructs
across the ages, for example, we cannot avoid observing that patterns do
exist in society and that, as with anything else we study, they also must be
52 J. Bouchard

explained in causal terms. The logical extension of this argument is that,

unlike the postmodernist overemphasis on fluidity and constant change,
some social realities can indeed be generalized beyond local contexts.
Goertz (2012: 86) provides an example of such generalization:

The social sciences have found strong generalizations that could be called
covering law generalizations. By far the most well-known generalization
in the field of international relations is known as the democratic peace
[…], which is typically stated in the form: democracies do not fight wars
with each other. So while democracies fight many wars (think of the
United States), they do not fight wars with other democracies. […] I call
generalizations of this type descriptive-causal generalizations.

Similarly, complexity theorist Mark Mason (2008: 42) observes crucial

patterns within educational contexts thus:

We know that feedback from teachers powerfully enhances learning. We

know that parental involvement in their children’s learning enhances
learning; that good school leaders create effective learning environments
through good management practices; that relevant and appropriately
pitched curricular activities enhance learning more effectively than those
that are not; that poor children provided with a school lunch learn more
effectively than students who do not benefit from such a policy; that
students who are likely to find employment learn more effectively than
those who perceive little likelihood of work.

The fact that we don’t reduce these facts to mere narratives reveals
our appreciation for historical and empirical phenomena beyond
discourse – i.e., for objective realities—which allow social scientists to
advance descriptive-causal generalizations regarding social processes and
phenomena. This does not imply a return to positivism: we only have
to think about our consideration for patterns and generalizations when
formulating policy proposals or making predictions to show that under-
standing patterns unfolding across social contexts has always been an
important part of how we understand and represent the social world.
Also, patterns—as well as structure, as will be argued later in the book—
should not be seen as rigid, for they rarely come without counter-patterns
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 53

or exceptions. Goertz (2012) takes this point as reinforcing the links

between the natural and the social sciences, arguing that the biologists
indeed face similar issues to those faced by social scientists.
Of course, observing patterns and generalizations is principally a
Humean exercise in causality, marked by adherence to the covering law
or successionist model of causality, and reveals little as to why such
patterns exist. Porpora (2008: 200) explains that “the covering law model
conceives of a cause exclusively as an event rather than a structure. […]
The covering law simply links events: If one thing happens, then another
thing happens. Thus, all that remains of causality is a conceptually thin
empirical regularity, itself not much more than a covariation.” Expecting
human processes to abide by a covering law inevitably leads to a deter-
ministic view of social processes as unfolding in linear and non-creative
fashion (Juarrero, 1999). Instead, AL scholars must conceptualize people
in AL worlds (language teachers, learners, policymakers, etc.) as non-
linear, dynamic, creative and adaptable entities (or complex systems, if
we adopt a CDST approach), and that their actions must consequently
also be dynamic and complex.
With this in mind, it is unlikely that AL researchers will find
strong, empirically supported descriptive-causal generalizations about
language-related phenomena. Nevertheless, possibilities are certainly
worth exploring. After all, if researchers in other areas of the social
sciences such as economics, history and political science (which also deal
with humans’ reflexive potential and the openness and complexity of
human processes) have been able to find some regular patterns in their
data, it is entirely possible that AL researchers can do so as well. It is, in
this sense, worth considering the possibility that few descriptive-causal
generalizations about language learning and language-related phenomena
have emerged in AL scholarship (at least according to the postmod-
ernists) because we have not been looking for them as actively as other
social scientists. Therefore, if we consider Goertz’s (2012) main crite-
rion for a descriptive-causal generalization—that it should remain robust
despite attempts to disprove it—then perhaps we can identify them
in the available body of AL research. In this sense, we can appreciate
the informative synthesis of AL scholarship by Ellis (2001) (and many
54 J. Bouchard

other similar ones published since) along these lines, as providing valu-
able insight into possible descriptive-causal generalizations in existing AL
research.
Greater commitment on this path would obviously require more
systematic approaches to identifying and assessing descriptive-causal
generalizations, and of course a considerably large body of data gath-
ered over time and in multiple contexts. There would also be a need
to characterize descriptive-causal generalizations more in terms of strong
probabilistic generalizations, or perhaps even mechanisms, rather than
“laws” in the stricter sense of the term. There would also be a need
for researchers to consider counterexamples, which help researchers eval-
uate the validity and strength of generalizations (Goertz, 2012). Also
importantly, this potential search for descriptive-causal generalizations
in AL research would need to reject the deductive-nomological model of
causality—i.e., deducing the existence of a causal “law” based on obser-
vation that A leads to B—and consider the very likely possibility that a
multiplicity of causes and underlying generative mechanisms are at play
in emergent and contingent language-related phenomena.

Interpretivist AL Research
So far I have identified problems with statistical analysis and the succes-
sionist model of causality in relation to AL research. In this section, I
critique the other end of the spectrum: interpretivist (or constructivist)
studies which concentrate, mainly through qualitative analysis, almost
exclusively on the construction and interpretation of social meanings
by situated individuals. Gaining increasing prominence in sociolin-
guistics and AL scholarship, this strand is generally associated with
paradigms including constructivism, postmodernism, poststructuralism,
critical pedagogy and socio-cultural theory. Cohen et al. (2007) iden-
tify the main goals of interpretivist social research as understanding,
explaining, and more importantly, critically demystifying social reality
from various perspectives. Rampton (1997: 12) explains and justifies
interpretivist AL scholarship thus:
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 55

Human reality is extensively reproduced and created anew in the socially

and historically specific activities of ordinary life, rather than being the
product of forces that actors neither control nor comprehend […] With
learning seen as an interactional process and reality viewed as a social
construction, the understanding of meaning in interaction becomes a
central objective, and the analysis of discourse becomes a potentially vital
tool.

The problem with this view, as I will argue in this section, is that there
are indeed multiple forces and mechanisms that actors do not necessarily
control or comprehend (e.g., the financial system, social class divisions,
globalization, etc.) yet which nevertheless act as powerful conditioning
forces in their lives. As such, to understand the complexity of people’s
lived experiences requires more than people’s understanding of meaning
in interaction.
Interpretivist AL studies generally look at the embodied discur-
sive construction of self (Kramsch, 2012) by concentrating on issues
including identity, ideology and power relationships which, in the
context of AL research, are studied in relation to language and discourse.
One of the preferred methodologies in this type of research is narrative
inquiry, which Norton and De Costa (2018: 104) argue can “illuminate
identity negotiation, given that narratives are co-constructed and shaped
by social, cultural, and historical conventions.” Other approaches include
conversation analysis, linguistic ethnography, and critical discourse anal-
ysis. To gain a clear sense of this strand of AL research, readers are
encouraged to consult the impressive Routledge Handbook of Language
and Identity edited by Preece (2016).
In terms of the structure-agency issue (to be discussed in the next
chapter), most interpretivist AL studies explore agency, specifically
people’s power to interpret and discursively construct their world. At the
same time, because they must account for the situatedness of agents (e.g.,
Park & Lo, 2012), interpretivist AL are bound to periodically refer back
to structure, even if the powers and properties of structures are often left
unaccounted for at the level of theory. When structure has to be dealt
with face-on, adherents of interpretivism in AL tend to diminish its rele-
vance by presenting structure as a convenient label for a collection of
56 J. Bouchard

individual experiences in an aggregate sense, and by characterizing talks

about the causal potential of social structures as deterministic, reduc-
tionist, or simply modernist. Within interpretivist AL studies, theoretical
modelling of analytical categories and causal structures is thus gener-
ally viewed as extraneous and somewhat suspicious; instead, the emic
viewpoint of participants, as revealed through a study of discursive prac-
tices, gains centre stage, particularly as it is thought to illuminate the
fluid and contextualized experiences of human agents. For these reasons,
interpretivist AL scholars tend to favour ethnographically based method-
ologies, notably the interview which allows participants to formulate and
express their own understandings, beliefs and hopes within the confines
of situated interaction.
The core analytical unit in interpretivist studies is discourse, and
spoken and written texts as its empirically accessible instantiations. Based
on these principles, “texts are deconstructed, read against themselves in
order to reveal their aporias (i.e., self-generated paradoxes) and to expose
the techniques and social interests in their construction. […] the deter-
mination of subjectivity [is conceptualized] as partial or incomplete in
that discourses also create the possibilities for autonomy and resistance”
(Morgan, 2007: 952, emphasis mine). Social realities under scrutiny are
thus thought to be constructed through (or by, according to radical
interpretivists) discourse, which is usually studied from spoken and/or
written texts. In much of interpretivist AL research, particularly its post-
structuralist strand, social contexts are seen essentially as sites within
which unequal power relationships emerge and unfold through discursive
practices.
While not necessarily designed to capture broader structural reali-
ties, a clear benefit of interpretivist AL research is its ability to reveal
insight into agency, specifically people’s understandings of their lived
experiences. As such, while generalizability is understandably difficult
to achieve in interpretivist AL, research outcomes can be very useful
to teachers and learners, for example. As Kincaid (2012: 5) points out,
this is a considerable advantage for the social sciences at large, for “some
of our best science does not emphasize laws in the philosopher’s sense
as elegant, context-free, universal generalizations, but instead provides
accounts of temporally and spatially restricted context-sensitive causal
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 57

processes as its end product.” For AL scholars and practitioners, inter-

pretivist research can bring richer and more granular insight into actual
language teaching and learning practices, and ultimately the design of
more effective pedagogical strategies. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 210)
explain,

the purpose of research becomes to discover which circumstances are asso-

ciated with progress for which learners. The replicability of studies is
much reduced in salience, since the search for covering laws can safely
be abandoned. This kind of research entails a case-driven methodology,
which is able to connect outcomes with contexts and causes.

Given that causal claims require causal models, which are themselves
products of conceptual work, interpretivist AL research should, in prin-
ciple, be effective at establishing a range of causal models of pertinence
to the study of AL phenomena. However, considering that interpre-
tivism—notably its more radical poststructuralist strand—is not wholly
committed to the idea of causality, this potential has yet to be fully
explored. Nevertheless, although Clegg (2006) offers a trenchant critique
of interpretivism and poststructuralism from the perspective of crit-
ical realist feminism, she also recognizes that interpretivist research has
enriched identity research in profound ways. Weideman (2015) goes
further by noting that interpretivist research has also introduced more
theoretical and methodological plurality and flexibility to AL scholarship:

The ascendancy of postmodernism created a willingness to acknowledge

differences and variety in theoretical approach within disciplines. It thus
introduced greater tolerance and recognition of a diversity in belief and
commitment in scholarly work, and in the adoption of paradigms that
express those commitments. Such recognition of variation took as its first
point of departure that science cannot escape self-interest and institu-
tional coercion, and is therefore never neutral. The reason for taking
non-neutrality as starting point, in opposition to the commitments of
modernism, was the demonstrable immersion of disciplinary work in
political power plays within disciplines, universities and the academic
publishing industry. (p. 4)
58 J. Bouchard

But as argued below, the inherent relativism within interpretivism has

led many researchers to adopt conceptually problematic views of the
social world and of their objects of study. In this section, I identify five
closely related problematic characteristics of interpretivist AL research:
its overemphasis on discourse as constitutive of social phenomena, its
marked preference for interview data, its empiricist tendencies, its onto-
logically flattened view of social processes, and its lack of commitment
to (and at times outright rejection of ) objective knowledge.

Overemphasis on Discourse

Partly explaining the ambiguous quality of some interpretivist AL

research is the tendency among scholars to use the term “discourse”
to refer to quite different things: as “whole-systems-of-thought-and-
action” (Rampton, 2001: 262), as “language-in-action” (Blommaert,
2005: 2) and at other times simply to what people achieve when
they communicate with each other. At face value, these varied under-
standings of discourse are not problematic, for they reveal different
aspects of discourse as a stratified and emergent social phenomenon (see
Chapter 4). Theoretical and methodological difficulties arise, however,
when scholars are unclear about what they mean when using the term.
From a realist perspective, Fairclough (2010: 3) provides a broad view of
discourse as,

a complex set of relations including relations of communication between

people who talk, write and in other ways communicate with each other,
but also, for example, describe relations between concrete communica-
tive events (conversations, newspaper articles etc.) and more abstract
and enduring complex discursive ‘objects’ (with their own complex rela-
tions) like languages, discourses and genres. But there are also relations
between discourse and other such complex ‘objects’ including objects in
the physical world, persons, power relations and institutions, which are
interconnected elements in social activity or praxis.
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 59

In order to be clear about discourse and recognize the important

differences and relationship between discourse and non-discursive real-
ities, the author recommends analysts to specify its internal and external
relations with other “objects”:

Discourse is not simply an entity we can define independently: we can

only arrive at an understanding of it by analysing sets of relations. Having
said that, we can say what it is in particular that discourse brings into
the complex relations which constitute social life: meaning, and making
meaning. (ibid.)

Unfortunately, this sort of conceptual refinement is often missing in

interpretivist AL research, yielding in some cases problematic conflations
between people’s variegated understandings of reality (epistemology)
and reality as it exists independently of people’s understanding of it
(ontology). This conflation is most evident in works by postmod-
ernist analysts, many of whom work from the assumptions that (a)
social phenomena are entirely constructed through discourse, and conse-
quently (b) analysing the discourse produced by research participants is
equivalent to analysing the social phenomena themselves.
To be fair, many postmodernist thinkers acknowledge in their theo-
retical discussions that discourse is not the only thing that shapes the
social world. At the level of analysis, however, the role of discourse
in the constitution of the self and its positioning within the social
realm (and to social continuity and change) tends to be overempha-
sized. Perhaps more troubling is a general lack of appreciation for the
important links between discursive and non-discursive “facts.” Discourse
also tends to be reduced to a situated performance. For example, by
using Weedon’s (1987: 40) poststructuralist argument that “meanings
do not exist prior to their articulation in language and language is
not an abstract system, but is always socially and historically located
in discourses” as justification, Kramsch (2012) essentially reduces iden-
tity construction to localized discursive processes. Also, by accepting the
problematic notion that meaning does not exist prior to its linguistic
articulation—i.e., meaning does not exist in books, dictionaries and
other cultural resources—she simultaneously suggests that human agents
60 J. Bouchard

can communicate—and thereby creating their worlds—entirely “from

scratch,” without considering structural and cultural constraints and
enablements, including those provided by language. As such, she over-
looks the causally important antecedent properties of language as a
relatively structured cultural resource, as well as the properties and
powers of both culture and structure. Although not explicitly recognizing
this conceptual problem in her work, Kramsch does admit that “a post-
structuralist stance is an epistemic stance” (Kramsch, 2012: 497). This
recalibration, however, simply reveals a lack of commitment to objective
knowledge on her part.
Even more problematic in this sense are the more drastic manifesta-
tions of interpretivism, which radicalize Berger and Luckmann’s (1967)
work on the intersubjective nature of everyday social reality, by placing
discourse as the sole generating force behind all social realities. As Elder-
Vass (2010: 203) points out, “in the most extreme formulations of this
tradition, language and discourse are taken to shape both individual
behaviour and everything that we understand as ‘the social’, making
conceptions of structure and agency redundant.” In other words, the core
problem in radical interpretivism is ontological, as discourse is invested
with causal powers it does not possess. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 178)
clarify in their discussion of linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992),

languages […] are human products, which, as cultural emergent proper-

ties, differ in important ways from objects in the material, natural world
[…] In our view much of the debate concerning language death and
linguicide neglects this distinction, making extravagant claims about what
language is, what it does and what it signifies. […] It is not, of course,
English as a language that has resources, but various groups of speakers
of English who do. It is not languages as languages that contribute to
knowledge, but rather human beings, whose knowledge is linguistically
communicated.

While there is no doubt that social reality is socially constructed partly

via discourse, discourse remains one of the many emergent products
of the structure–agency relationship. As such, it is not discourse which
shapes the world but rather people, since it is people who possess agentive
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 61

properties and causal efficacy. In addition, while society is partly discur-

sively constructed, it is also important not to conflate social reality with
people’s understanding of that reality. Those two layers differ ontologi-
cally in important ways, and to merge them together as one and the same
thing is to limit one’s ability to explain cause–effect relationships with
regard to discourse, the people who produce it, and the emerging social
realities which ensue. Likewise, by both enabling people to express ideas
and constraining what can be said and how, languages—as culturally
emergent products of human interaction—condition part of the context
within which social meanings and actions emerge, since they constitute
an important medium through which we access, share and shape our
“banks” of knowledge or the theories and beliefs we have about the world
and ourselves. However, languages do not determine social action: people
do. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 182) state,

languages are cultural emergent properties and as such are: irreducible

to either human agency (that is, languages are able to shape the context
of social action) or to the material world […]; partially autonomous of
individuals (that is, languages have some properties which are peculiar to
them); causally influential in shaping the contexts of human action and
linguistic choice.

In sum, missing from the interpretivist approach to the study of

language, discourse and related phenomena are crucial conceptual and
methodological distinctions between language, discourse, human agency
and social structure. In other words, interpretivism provides a social
ontology that is considerably flattened.

The Limitations of Interview Data

Much of interpretivist AL research in recent decades has concen-

trated almost exclusively on qualitative interview data, specifically inter-
view data. Since interpretivist AL research is specifically concerned
with people’s interpretations of lived realities and the discursive co-
construction of communicative meanings and identities, this preference
is understandable to some extent. Arguably, for AL scholars to reveal
62 J. Bouchard

processes located at the level of human agency, interview data is benefi-

cial and effective, since it can yield rich insight into how people make
sense of the complex worlds in which they operate, and how people
are not merely subjected to structural and cultural forces but rather
engaged reflexively and often critically with these forces to calibrate their
efforts in light of their goals and aspirations. In this sense, interview data
analysis—especially that which provides insight for research participants
themselves—can potentially offer valuable pedagogical and emancipatory
perspectives. In terms of the statistical prominence of interview analysis
in the social sciences, Briggs (1986) noted approximately 35 years ago
that 90% of social research was based on interview data, and considering
recent yet markedly growing interest by AL scholars in agency, it is fair
to suggest that an increasingly larger proportion of AL studies to date
adopts the interview as a preferred method of collecting empirical data
about people’s interpretations of their lived experiences.
However, the conceptual limitations of interview analysis must be
underlined. The main problem with interpreting interview data as
evidence of people’s interpretations of their situated experiences is that
such data tends to also be interpreted as revealing insight into broader
social processes and phenomena. For example, when teachers express
views about educational policies, textbooks or classroom practices, these
views tend to be interpreted as direct and unmediated explanations
of the latter. More alarming in some cases, interviewees’ statements
about broader structural and cultural processes tend to be considered
as epistemologically equivalent to statements by scholars and experts.
One possible reason for this problem is that interview data is rarely
subjected to the same analytical rigour as other samples of discourse
(e.g., policy discourse), as is expected in conversation, discourse and crit-
ical discourse analysis. Aware of these limitations, some interpretivist AL
scholars emphasize the triangulation of interview findings with survey
data. However, survey data—as self-report data—is also about people’s
interpretations of lived realities at particular points in time. Arguably,
the triangulation of interview and survey analyses remains an insufficient
strategy to reveal the full complexity of agentive and structural processes
within a contingent social realm. This lack of distinction between objec-
tive reality and people’s understandings of it, common in interpretivism,
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 63

arguably leads to an ontologically flattened view of social processes as (a)

constructed exclusively through discourse, and (b) existing in the minds
of individuals. Even if the claim is made that such research provides
an “epistemic stance” (e.g., Kramsch, 2012), such stance remains insuf-
ficient for the formulation of ontological statements about real-world
phenomena, which is a core scientific objective. The problem, it must
be stated, is not with interview data itself, but rather with how inter-
views are theorized and transformed into methodological and analytical
strategies.
Mann (2011) argues that in contemporary AL research, qualita-
tive interviews have gained importance, but that they have largely
been under-theorized. Also unfortunate is AL researchers’ often limited
reflexive engagement with their own analyses (a problem seen within
both successionist and interpretivist traditions). This lacunae has the
effect of presenting the researcher as neutral participant and analyst,
which is a considerable problem when considering the importance given
to complex factors such as age, race, gender, and issues of power in inter-
view data analysis (Mann, 2011), and how these also tend to be presented
as common-sense “facts.” Although there is arguably greater awareness of
researcher reflexivity as an important research element among contempo-
rary interpretivist AL scholars, precisely how this reflexive engagement
influences data analysis is often left unaddressed.
At the same time, while methodological issues related to interview data
analysis in AL are often the objects of critique, ontological issues in my
view constitute the core problem in need of sustained critical attention.
Specifically, we need greater theoretical unpacking of the claims made
by interpretivist AL researchers regarding causality. Although an explo-
ration of counterfactual possibilities is helpful—e.g., What data would
have emerged if I had asked this question differently, if I had asked a
different question altogether, or if I had made statements rather than asked
questions? —and while AL researchers working in multilingual environ-
ment certainly need to account for a range of complex issues including
translanguaging practices taking place during interviews, it is even more
important to justify why interpretivist AL scholars have reached those
conclusions about their data and not others. In Bouchard (2017), I
explore this issue in relation to my own data. During an interview, a
64 J. Bouchard

Japanese English language teacher working in a Japanese junior high

school stated that Japanese students of English have difficulty improving
their target language ability because Japan is an island country cut off
from other nations. As I noted in my analysis, this statement can be
interpreted in multiple ways: as an observation regarding Japan’s rela-
tive lack of ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity (compared with
other industrialized nations), as a statement regarding the relative lack
of resources available to teachers and students in the Japanese context, as
discursive evidence of ethnocentrism, as a discursive example of cultural
determinism, or simply as the result of a rather common tendency
among people of any culture to conveniently conflate culture, nation,
language and geography for the sake of simplicity and perhaps to avoid
a face-threatening situation. There are, of course, many other possible
interpretations of this statement, and mere data triangulation might not
suffice in establishing which interpretation is more valid than others.
This is precisely why interview analysts need to provide more robust
theoretical and methodological bases for their observations regarding
the causal links between various statements in the interview data (what
people say at a particular point in time in a particular context for a
particular purpose, compared with other statements made at different
times and places), actions on the ground (what people actually do regard-
less of what they say about their own actions and those of others) and
broader mechanisms and other social and cultural realities (e.g., ideolo-
gies, economic forces, etc.) which are not directly accessible through
interview data analysis alone. Ironically, there remain clear traces of
positivist thought in postmodernist and interpretivist AL scholarship.
Despite its clear potential to reveal insight into agentive processes, the
mere inclusion of reflexive statements about the presence of the inter-
viewer in the data, although necessary, is insufficient. Instead, analysis of
interview data must be grounded in a more robust social ontology which
helps us understand the distinct and emergent properties and powers of
people, structures, language, discourse and other research elements, so
that their interplay can not only be interpreted in terms of the discursive
elements at play, but also be studied in causal terms (the latter point will
be further developed in Chapter 4 on realism).
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 65

Empiricist Tendencies in Interpretivist AL Scholarship

Earlier I stated that successionism and interpretivism in AL are both

empiricist perspectives. Interpretivism’s overemphasis on interview data
and on what people say about their lived experience can be understood
as a manifestation of empiricism. Although not a markedly interpretivist
AL scholar, Kramsch (2015: 455) reveals this empiricist tendency in AL
research in the following statement:

For me, Applied Linguistics was never the application of linguistic theory
or any other theory to the real-life problem of language learning and
teaching […] it has been instead the practice of language study itself,
and the theory that could be drawn from that practice […] Rather than
‘applied linguistics’, I would have called it ‘practical language studies’.

One problem with that statement is that, even if she refers to linguistic
theory, it is rather unclear what Kramsch means by “theory.” Instead,
theory is simply posited contra empirical evidence, itself contained
within the broad category of practice. Later in her article, Kramsch
further reinforces this empiricist penchant thus: “[AL’s] object of study
is the living process through which living, embodied speakers shape
contexts through their grammars and are, in turn, shaped by them
[…] It is an eminently empirical field, from which emerges a theory of
the practice” (Kramsch, 2015: 455–456, emphasis mine). By reducing
a branch of the social sciences—applied or otherwise—to an empir-
ical practice, however, we lose sight of (a) the relationship between
theory and practice, and (b) the important and necessary relationship
and mutual influences between empirical “facts” and underlying causal
mechanisms, which as will be argued in Chapter 4 can be understood
principally through theoretical deliberation.
This problem becomes even more limiting in the context of critical AL
scholarship, a strand within which Kramsch is a well-known figure. In an
earlier paper, the author justifies her epistemological stance by comparing
it with modernism: “Modernist approaches to applied linguistics have
sought to empower the powerless—whether they be immigrants or
ethnic and social minorities, whereas postmodernist approaches seek
66 J. Bouchard

to eschew established binaries and resignify categories on a moment-

to-moment basis” (Kramsch, 2012: 498). Here, the author recognizes
modernism’s necessary attacks against systems of oppression; in her own
work, however, she dismisses those at the profit of an epistemology of
fluidity and pastiche. Because the concept of system is largely rejected
within interpretivism, this perspective is ill-suited to define and critique
various forms of social inequalities and oppression as systems. Within
interpretivism, oppression and its dismantlement are instead reduced to
empirically apprehensible discursive exercises.
In this sense, the critical potential of interpretivist AL research to
contribute to the broader project of social emancipation is unsatisfactory
because of its overemphasis on localized discursive practices. Although
people’s understandings of their world and their experiences within it
can be transformatory to some extent (i.e., people can indeed develop
new ways of seeing the world in both individual and organized fashion),
effects can only be local and considerably limited, for with empiri-
cism what is missing is the consequential relationship between agency
and structure/culture. From this ontologically flattened viewpoint, social
emancipation (and by logical extension social oppression) is understood
as emerging from people’s understandings of their lived realities. As such,
the critical agenda Kramsch advocates is incomplete because people are
only conceptualized as liberating themselves from systems of oppression
by merely “talking differently” about them, about themselves, and about
the world—i.e., by engaging in alternative modes of speaking, acting and
being as solutions to social inequality. One can think many different
things about systemic sexism or racism, and still be subjected to their
oppressive forces, and without these systems being challenged in any
significant sense.
In the same paper, however, Kramsch (2012: 499) argues that “it is
by understanding the deep contradictions of globalization that poststruc-
turalist scholars can help multilingual subjects interrogate the larger flows
of people, knowledge, and capital and their own vulnerability in playing
the paradoxical roles that are required of them. Such a query is indeed
an ethical transformative quest.” Although greater acknowledgement of
the distinct and emergent properties of structures and systems of oppres-
sion is noticeable in this statement, the outright rejection of modernist
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 67

principles in this statement still needs to be questioned. Specifically, one

should ask: What processes and resources facilitate these acts of positioning
in the first place? How can people “position” themselves if not in relation to
broader structural and cultural realities as powerful causal forces? How can
the deep contradictions of globalization be understood only through localized
discursive activities? And finally, how can this quest be considered ethical
if not based on a conceptual understanding of (a) portions of reality being
unjust and inadequate, in need of reform, and (b) a reality that does not
currently exist, yet which nevertheless guides our efforts to build a better and
more equal world for all human beings? Interpretivism simply has little
to offer in terms of viable answers to these questions. If critical social
research is about dismantling an unfair present, it must inevitably rely on
a vision of a present that could be—i.e., rely on a modernist viewpoint
to some extent. As Brumfit (1997: 92) rightfully argues, “Any concern
to redress linguistic inequalities demands some sense of universalities, for
the very concept ‘inequality’ makes claims about an indivisible concept
‘equality’.” As argued later in this book, understanding and redressing
social inequality and “the deep contradictions of globalization” requires
more than empirical data or evidence of people’s understandings of
inequality: it requires conceptually informed consideration for under-
lying causal mechanisms in society which, under certain conditions, serve
to reinforce unequal distributions of power and resources among people.
For that reason, any empiricist viewpoint must be deemed as ill-equipped
to fulfil this task.
Postmodernist critical inquiries are usually justified by a rejection
of modernism as ideological, fixed and essentialist. Although not an
entirely dismissible critique, postmodernist critique nevertheless contains
a contradiction: to be critical, it must rely on unacknowledged modernist
principles. Morrison (2008: 24) captures this contradiction as “the post-
modernist’s dilemma of proscribing fixity and firmness yet holding such
proscriptions fixedly and firmly.” Sayer (2000: 77) explains this odd
epistemological twist in the following way:

Too often, postmodernists fail to see that relativism is the flip side of
foundationalism, so it is no surprise that it can produce similar effects.
68 J. Bouchard

In other words, fragmentation plus relativism equals ‘ghettoization’. Rela-

tivism is no friend of feminism, anti-racism or any other kind of critical
social theory. […] the consistent proponent of the equality thesis would
have to grant equal status to racist and fascist beliefs.

Critical AL research—whether aligned with postmodernism, inter-

pretivism or otherwise—therefore needs something more than what
Kramsch proposes: it requires the ability to identify oppressive discourses
and practices (a) as morally inferior to egalitarian and emancipatory view-
points, and (b) as systems (and not merely the symptom of a “bad spirit”)
and therefore as more than empirical phenomena. To effectuate this shift,
critical AL inquiry should be grounded in understanding of discourse not
as a self-contained system responsible for producing the entirety of social
reality, but rather in relation to an objective, material reality as well. From
this basis, critical AL scholars would then be in a more conceptually solid
position from which to build their critique and advance moral claims.

Ontologically Flattened View of Social Processes

As suggested so far, overemphasizing interview (and/or survey) data,

and by extension prioritizing empirical data, leads to ontologically flat-
tened views of social processes. Such a view is made explicit by Heller
(2001: 212), a sociolinguist who rejects the macro–micro debate in
social sciences by arguing that “conceptualising social life in terms of a
dichotomy implies that there are different types of data for each, equally
observable (or not, as the case may be), and that, in addition, the link-
ages should be identifiable. And yet, empirical work fails to identify such
types.” In this statement, Heller is making three conceptual mistakes:
(1) presenting structure and agency as dichotomous phenomena (as
Chapter 3 will demonstrate, most strands of social theory have never
quite advocated such a viewpoint), (2) reducing research to the study of
empirical data and (3) assuming that the study of people and social insti-
tutions involves analysing the same kind of data, and that distinctions
between them are merely scalar. The radical interactionism proposed
by Heller is summed up in the following statement: “The problem of
linkage between macro- and micro-levels becomes a problem of linkage
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 69

among social interactions over time and (social) space” (Heller, 2001:
212). Here, the author reduces macro-realities to social interaction,
which constitutes an upward conflation (Archer, 1995)—i.e., a reduc-
tion of structure to human interaction in an aggregate sense. What is also
evident and problematic in Heller’s analysis is the claim that the material
and symbolic resources valuable to (and unequally distributed among)
human interactants can be explained exclusively through analysis of local
interactions. The main problem here involves how the author conceptu-
alizes structure. At times, she talks about exams and job interviews as
merely “kinds of interactions,” thus sidestepping the material, institu-
tional and structural conditions for exams and job interviews to exist
(e.g., school systems, educational and social policy, employment struc-
tures, organizations, social and professional roles, various economic and
social conditions, etc.). At other times, however, her discussion moves
well beyond situated interaction to include references to (a) complex
structural realities including “shifting economic conditions in Canada
after the Second World War,” or “contingencies of the labor market,”
(b) complex social and cultural mechanisms such as credentialism and
bilingualism, (c) society-wide ideological forces such as “economic, social
and political subordination and marginalization (for over 200 years)” and
“the logic of the Franco-Canadian mobilisation movement,” (d) complex
and broad historical processes such as a “modern world currently domi-
nated by English,” as well as (e) complex institutional realities such as
the “school as an institution of social and cultural reproduction.” The
fact that Heller needs to include references to these five complex cultural
and structural mechanisms and realities in her analysis shows that her
empiricist perspective is theoretically insufficient because it is ontologi-
cally flattened. At the end of her chapter, the author attempts to mitigate
her radically flattened viewpoint by stating that her study “has been
modest and relatively local [allowing her to] unpack the workings of at
least some dimensions of the construction of ideologies and categories in
the realm of Franco-Ontarian life” (p. 232). However, this late concep-
tual recalibration contradicts her earlier claim that her work effectively
dismantles the (said) macro/micro dichotomy.
Looking more specifically at the issue of causality, Ylikoski (2012: 36)
notes a similar problem in interpretivist research thus:
70 J. Bouchard

Those methodological individualists who have suggested that a micro

explanation somehow eliminates the macro properties are either meta-
physically confused or just choosing their words badly. The talk about
macro reducing to micro makes a little sense as the talk about reducing
effects to their causes. […] individualists tend to make the claim that the
causes have to be at the micro level. However, nothing in the notion of
causation implies that the real causal work is always to be found at the
micro level. Of course, […] every time we have a cause at a macro level,
we also have micro level facts that constitute it.

While some interpretivists do provide interesting insight regarding

the links between structure and agency (usually in the “Analysis” and
“Discussion” sections of their works), they rarely frame discussion about
structure and culture in conceptual and causal terms—i.e., within a
robust social ontology. An example of this comes from Kramsch (2012)
who, in part by adhering to Butler’s (2000, 2006) theory of perfor-
mativity, argues in essence that people nowadays can be whatever they
wish to be, and can do so via the deployment of specific discur-
sive practices. Uncomfortable with Bourdieu’s acknowledgement of the
importance of accounting for social structure and institutional power in
identity research, Kramsch claims that Butler’s poststructuralist approach
is better suited to explain “the agency of the subject in establishing
both his/her vulnerability and his/her authority” (p. 491). In the same
article, Kramsch criticizes Bourdieu’s work as placing undue emphasis on
institutions as “performants” rather than people—i.e., as endowing struc-
ture with agentive potential. In a later article, oddly enough, Kramsch
(2015) discusses Bourdieu’s work as a revelation because of his presenta-
tion of the language learner as active agent, with capacities for invention
and improvisation. What is more alarming in Kramsch’s argumentation,
however, is that in much of her work she (as with many interpretivist
AL scholars) does not conceptually explain the important relationship
between discourse and objective reality, which is after all an essen-
tial element in her analysis. This becomes evident, for example, in
her description of “a sophisticated [non-native-speaker] of English who
feels she lacks not the proficiency but the legitimacy to act like a
[native-speaker] because of her position in history, and who therefore
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 71

feels deprived of the agency to speak with authority” (Kramsch, 2012:

493, emphasis mine). She also makes the controversial claim—rightfully
critiqued by Pennycook (2019)—that poststructuralism has the capacity
to provide a fuller understanding of human agency. In the next chapter I
explain in more detail why poststructuralism provides a much-weakened
view of agency.
Within interpretivist AL research, discourse and people are thus rarely
conceptually positioned in relation to other social phenomena including
structural and cultural forces, which also tends to result in them being
attributed powers they do not necessarily have. This becomes evident in
Kramsch’s (2012: 484) critique of the concept of authenticity in which
she endows human beings with the capacity to “do as they please”: “Is
there still such a thing as an inauthentic or illegitimate ‘impostor’ in
a world in which you can be anything you want to be? ” In response,
one must ask: If people can be anything they want to be, why is there
enduring systemic oppression of the many by the few? Why are so many young
people unable to go to any school and get any job they want? Are home-
less people choosing to be so? This rather inflated view of agents’ ability
to choose from a wide range of subject positions—central to postmod-
ernism—is an example of a flattened ontology since it fails to consider
the existence of powerful underlying causal mechanisms in society and
that people’s choices and preferences are structured in important ways.
This problem is also noticed by Coupland (2001b: 203), who notes that
“when sociolinguists write about identity, they often interpret the term
in rather anodyne way, as if ‘having an identity’ or ‘negotiating an iden-
tity’ were selecting and displaying options from a repertoire of equally
plausible alternatives.” In agreement with Coupland, I must also note
the intrusion in Kramsch’s perspective of a marked neoliberal ideology,
particularly in the idea that identity alternatives are not only available
to all but that they are “consumable” states of being, and that agentive
choice entirely determines identity possibilities and work.
Although perhaps an obvious point, the reason why we need critical
AL research is precisely because, in our current society, people are not
free to be whatever they desire: they are structurally and culturally condi-
tioned in very important ways, and for many this complex process is not
to their advantage. Studying the lived realities of people thus requires
72 J. Bouchard

more than their interpretations of these: it requires looking at their struc-

turally and culturally conditioned existence, and the reflexive engage-
ments by people in light of structural and cultural constraints and enable-
ments. Sealey and Carter (2004) argue that social research, including AL,
is essentially about clarifying how people make constrained choices in
structured contexts, as structured social relations “make certain outcomes
more likely than others for the occupants of different class positions.
These probabilities, however, are always conditioning rather than deter-
mining, and each individual has some degree of choice about how to
respond to the contexts in which she finds herself ” (p. 119). Ylikoski
(2012: 38) echoes this view thus: “proper sociological understanding
requires that we understand both the mechanisms by which large-scale
social facts influence the local decision-making processes of individual
agents (the situational mechanisms) and the mechanisms by which
individual actions create and influence macro social facts (the transfor-
mational mechanisms).” By itself, interpretivism is therefore ill-equipped
to fulfil those purposes.
Moreover, the causal potential of discourse should also not be magni-
fied, as Morgan (2007) does for example when presenting a poststruc-
turalist approach to AL as effective in providing “an understanding of
how individuals use language to differentiate themselves or to resist and
transform their categorization” (p. 950). Although a noble and justifiable
point, we should also recognize that while language provides the context
and resource with which people can achieve these complex objectives,
people are the ones doing the resisting and transforming, not language or
discourse. Furthermore, these actions are not the only things people can
do with language. People also use language to reproduce the status quo,
oppress others and inhabit both oppressed and oppressive subject posi-
tions. Why they do so or not is a question best answered by looking at
the relationship between structure and agency, not by studying discourse
exclusively.
Especially within identity-based AL research, discourse tends to be
conceptualized as the engine making identity positions possible. Two
important points about identities as they relate to AL research must
therefore be stressed. Firstly, identities are indeed discourse-dependent
social constructions, although being so means that they are also about
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 73

a reality outside discursive activities—i.e., they are not neatly contained

within a self-sufficient discursive realm, created from scratch the moment
we being to speak: they are instead complex, emergent and enduring
outcomes of the structure–agency interaction. Secondly, our identities,
as contingent discursive social constructions, gain emergent properties
distinct from the discursive activities which lead to their creation over
time. As we construct and perform them over the course of our lives and
within social contexts populated by other identity-laden human beings,
identities become part of the vast and complex network of cultural
and ideational resources within the Cultural System (a realist concept
explained in Chapter 4), and as such they can acquire causal potential
of their own. For example, a young person coming to term with his/her
homosexuality does not have to invent or conceptualize homosexuality
from scratch: partners and role models in society already offer valuable
points of reference which considerably facilitate the fulfilment of that
project. In my view, this is what Coupland (2001b) means when referring
to identities as both inescapably fluid and relatively fixed entities: iden-
tities are—as with any other social phenomena—ontologically “layered”
entities.
In sum, perhaps the most noticeable shortcoming of interpretivist
epistemology is that, because it favours an empiricist viewpoint, resulting
analyses come without much needed ontological depth. With regard to
Norton’s (2000) famous and well-cited longitudinal study of immigrant
women in Canada, Sealey and Carter (2004) explain that “there is no
intrinsic reason why these accounts should be assumed to provide reli-
able information about, for example, the social structures which may
be constraining or facilitating language learning processes.” As part of
their theoretical deliberations, AL scholars must therefore conceptu-
alize agency not as a negation of but rather in relation with structure
and culture as powerful social forces. To this point, Archer (2011: 69,
emphasis mine) explains that,

structure and culture could only be deemed causally irrelevant if what

were being mediated was, in fact, invented then and there by actors
whose own personal powers were entirely responsible for it. [This] seems
as untenable as holding that the wires bringing electricity into my house
74 J. Bouchard

are entirely responsible for the workings of my lights and electrical appli-
ances and that the existence of a national grid and electricity generators
are causally irrelevant.

To avoid this conceptual problem in interpretivist AL research, a new

understanding of structure is necessary. Unfortunately in many interpre-
tivist AL studies, talks of structure are often dismissed with the rather
facile argument that they merely reify structure—i.e., the notion that
structure (not an empirical entity) is only a convenient term used by
scholars to facilitate their work. But as Elder-Vass (2010: 196, emphasis
original) explains, reification,

is sometimes also taken to imply that in treating something as a thing

we commit ourselves to the belief that it is static or unchanging and to a
denial of the causal significance of its parts or of the agents that contribute
to its causal significance. But neither of these […] reflects an accurate
understanding of the nature of things. Social structures, like many other
things, are far from static and like other things with causal powers, their
causal powers always depend on the interactions between their parts.
Social structures are indeed things, but they are dynamic things whose
powers depend on the activities of people.

In other words, the structure–agency debate is not a problem, as many

interpretivists would have it, for the debate is necessary to our under-
standing of causality in the social realm. The problem resides in how
structure and agency are discussed. As will be developed later in the book,
to transcend the complications imposed by interactionist AL, structure
and agency should be understood as complex, distinct and emergent
layers of social reality in constant interaction with each other, in the
ongoing production of social life.

Lack of Commitment to Objective Knowledge

What becomes evident from the above critique is that, in failing to (a)
account for agency and structure as distinct and emergent strata of the
social realm, and (b) explain their interaction in conceptual and causal
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 75

terms, interpretivist AL fails in its commitment to objective knowl-

edge. Postmodernists often justify this lacuna with arguments that social
research, as a form of discourse, is inescapably biased. Widdowson (2001:
15) formulates this position thus: “since all enquiry is skewed by precon-
ception and is never detached, no matter how rational it pretends to
be, then we should give up the pretence of impartiality and cleave to
our commitment. And the commitment, naturally, should be ethical.”
Although the ethical portion of this argument has clear value to AL,
social research is not exclusively ethical: it is also and necessarily about
understanding our world the way it is. As such, epistemologies are not
hopelessly relative: they are aimed at elucidating an objective reality we
are part of yet do not have direct and unmediated access to. While the
world exists independently from our understanding of it, epistemology
is necessarily about ontology. As such, while we should do our best to
get rid of biases in our work, we should certainly not give up our central
goal as scientists of aligning epistemology with ontology. Ylikoski (2012:
41) makes a similar point with regard to narrative analysis,

Explanation is factive. It is not enough that the explanation saves the

phenomenon: It should also represent the essential features of the actual
causal structure that produces the observed phenomena. So, if the expla-
nation refers to the goals, preferences, or beliefs of agents, the agents
should indeed have those mental states. Mere as-if storytelling does not
suffice for a mechanistic explanation as it does not capture the relevant
parts of the causal process.

Again, what social scientists say about their objects of study depends
on these objects existing independently of scientific interpretation and
explanation. As Porpora (1987: 49) explains, “a science cannot be
entirely made up of logical propositions. A science must specify causal
connections among events in addition to whatever logical connections it
advances. If a science does not do this, it is not going to lead anywhere
very interesting.” In this sense, all strands of social science, including
AL, are not merely narrative exercises, or mere collections of statements
about society: they are and must remain characterized by a commitment
to objective knowledge.
76 J. Bouchard

Although the notion of commitment to objective knowledge can be

controversial within some AL enclaves, maintaining such commitment
in our study of what actually happens when people (a) use language
to communicate with others, (b) formulate ideas about the world, or
(c) develop policies to maintain and improve language use and social
life, can facilitate our work in many different and profound ways. For
this to happen, interpretivist AL scholars must reconceptualize language,
discourse, people and society as more than subjective phenomena nego-
tiated in the moment. Sealey and Carter (2004: 119) help us in this
regard, by explaining that language itself has objective properties which
exist beyond the situated communicative moment:

What makes a theory, a book, an idea – or indeed, a language variety

objective knowledge is its ‘possibility or potentiality of being understood,
its dispositional character of being understood or interpreted, or misun-
derstood or misinterpreted’ […] An individual who seeks to become a
fluent speaker of a language not widely used in the locality faces obvious
practical difficulties, while adopting the speech style of those who are
widely seen as members of a different social category is likely to be viewed
as a form of ‘crossing’ […] which may attract social censure. Nevertheless,
such deviations from the supposed norms are possible, because language
has properties which make it potentially available to any human speaker.

The properties highlighted by the authors grant language (as well

as theories and ideas) a certain objectivity which can be noted in, for
example, the existence of dictionaries, grammar books and communica-
tive norms within a specific linguistic community. In Bouchard (2018),
I attempt to explain this stratified view by suggesting that language can
be conceptualized by AL scholars as a resource on the one hand and as
a practice on the other. This does not reinforce a dichotomous view: it
merely originates from a commitment to objective knowledge to state
that, as a layered social phenomenon, language has different properties
and powers depending on which social domain is under focus (Layder,
1997).
As social scientists, AL scholars’ commitment to objective knowledge
should not be seen as a throwback to positivism: it should instead be
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 77

embraced as a necessary condition of the work we set out to accom-

plish. As Elder-Vass (2012: 131, emphasis mine) points out with regard
to social research in general,

While our concepts are socially agreed upon through [a normative

process], one of the factors influencing that process is often that we have
a common interest in developing concepts that reflect the world accu-
rately and therefore enable us to intervene in it effectively. While our
perceptions of the external world are influenced by our concepts, this is
a two-way process in which we develop concepts that are ‘good to think
with’ because they tend to produce reliable ways of intervening in the
world.

Furthermore, for our commitment to objective knowledge to be

sustainable within AL scholarship, we need a social ontology which
helps us explain people’s understandings of their lived experiences as
structured —i.e., in light of structural and cultural constraints and enable-
ments. This robust ontology should also help us move beyond those
interpretations so as to better capture the full ontological depth and
complexity of processes under investigative scrutiny. In the next and final
section of this chapter, I discuss a new development in AL scholarship
which is even more radical than interpretivism in its ontological flatness.

Posthumanist AL Research
With its rejection of modernist principles, and its emphasis on frac-
tured and discursively fluid and negotiable subject positions, postmod-
ernism/poststructuralism claims to transcend the positivist and anthro-
pocentric tendencies said to have guided the social sciences since their
inception. Similarly, although with a greater emphasis on material real-
ities, posthumanism has come to be understood as an extension of
poststructuralism in its sharp critique of anthropocentric social research
and its emphasis on the embeddedness of human beings within a broader
natural world. Pennycook (2019: 34) defines posthumanism as “part
78 J. Bouchard

of that tradition of thought sometimes called postmodern or poststruc-

turalist that questions the ways in which humans locate themselves at the
centre of their own lives, thinking, making decisions, choosing, acting
as free-willed, independent and sovereign subjects.” The major problem
with this argument is that, on the one hand, posthumanism advocates a
radical form of relationism whereby objects and phenomena are deemed
as inexplainable (or “meaningless”) outside of their relationships with
other objects and phenomena (in Chapter 6 I discuss some of the prob-
lems associated with relationism), while presenting a view of human
beings as “free-willed” or as “sovereign subjects,” to use Pennycook’s
phrasing. This is a contradiction, for as Juarrero (1999: 23) explains,
saying that people have free will implies that “the mind does not require
anything external to activate it, not even a final cause.” Similarly, to say
that people are “independent and sovereign entities” is to refute that their
choices, preferences, dreams, expectations, actions and so forth are struc-
tured. It is also not particularly well aligned with the marked relationist
penchant within posthumanism.
Posthumanism, however, differs from other postmodernist paradigms
given its marked interest in understanding subjective knowledge. Specif-
ically, it builds upon the notion of assemblage (Deleuze & Guattari,
2005)—a philosophical notion which defines the relationship between
things, and between the constituting parts of things, as fluid, inter-
changeable and multiple—as the core process by which humans are
flexibly constituted in situ, in relation with non-human entities. It also
differs from postmodernism with regard to discourse. As discussed above,
the latter justifies a marked propensity to explain social processes and
phenomena as discursive products. By doing so, it advocates a form of
sociologism which stands in sharp contrast with posthumanism. Collier
(2011: 17) discusses sociologism as a prevalent form of “disciplinary
imperialism,” and as guided by the belief that,

all phenomena in the human world are to be explained socially, without

reference to biology, geography or individual psychology. An example
would be the idea that needs are socially constructed, a view which
ignores the fact that whatever else human beings are, they are also biolog-
ical organisms, which share numerous needs with other species. […]
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 79

Postmodernism, which linguistifies all reality, and sociologizes language,

is one source of contemporary sociologism.

In contrast—and perhaps to its credit—posthumanism rejects any

form of human exceptionalism, instead promoting a specific view of
the human agent as the “nomadic subject […] who transcends anthro-
pocentrism through developing a strong sense of always becoming, that
is, enacting ways of transforming his/her own vulnerable conditions in
conjunction with more collective and communal strategies including
the non-humans’ energy and participation” (Takaki, 2019: 584). This
particular view of human agency as “more than just human” rejects
the modernist tendency to place humans at the centre of sociological
analysis and at the top of a hierarchy which includes, at lower levels,
animals, other life forms and material objects. Instead, posthumanism
attempts to break down the divisions between human and non-human
entities by emphasizing their ontological similarities. Pennycook (2019:
16) suggests that, with posthumanist AL, “breaking down distinctions
between interiority and exteriority allows us to understand subjects,
language and cognition not as properties of individual humans but
rather as distributed across people, places and artefacts.” The relational
emphasis in assemblage theory thus introduces a form of relationism
within posthumanism, positioning it in contrast with realist perspectives,
particularly with regard to the issue of emergence.
Pennycook (2019: 13) opines that anthropocentric assumptions are
unfortunately part of the core of AL research, and can be denoted “when
we talk of linguistic or communicative competence, when we suggest
that people choose what items to use from a pregiven linguistic system
and when we assert that humans use language in particular contexts
rather than seeing these as profoundly integrated.” This anthropocentric
penchant, as the author points out, comes from assumptions long held
by AL scholars identifying language as the principal difference between
humans and animals. A posthumanist approach to AL thus involves
a redefinition of language as “embodied, embedded and distributed
across people, places and time and not a determinate or determinable
object of analysis” (Pennycook, 2019: 51). It redefines interaction as a
80 J. Bouchard

process involving “pluralized agents [assemblaging] the linguistic, multi-

modal, spatial and semiotic resources in contingent, heterogeneous and
centrifugal movements to renegotiate meanings” (Takaki, 2019: 592,
emphasis mine). In parallel, notions such as bilingualism and multilin-
gualism are replaced by metrolingualism, understood as a localized “semi-
otic relation in spaces in ways that meanings are associated with objects,
people, animals, affect and places, without a fixed hierarchy among the
senses and humans and non-humans” (Takaki, 2019: 593). It can there-
fore be argued that, when compared with postmodernism, the ethical
component of posthumanism is much more explicit, especially when
considered within the current context of climate change and environ-
mental degradation. Posthumanism is arguably also more assertive in this
respect because of its principle that, by rejecting anthropocentrism and
by breaking down the boundaries between human and non-human enti-
ties, a more sustainable future can materialize. As a whole, posthumanism
is potentially beneficial to AL because it encourages researchers to notice
anthropocentrism as a problem, and to appreciate the complexity which
inevitably surfaces when we study people in their social and natural
context.
At the same time, while this important ethical element in posthu-
manism aims to integrate humans within a broader natural realm in
constructive and sustainable ways, it should not be equated with the
types of social critique developed and conducted, for example, within
postmodernism and critical realism. For one, education—an integral
component of AL research and an inherently critical and emancipatory
endeavour—remains a deeply humanist project. While it is arguably very
important for learners to become aware of their biological and mate-
rial constitution and their relationship with nature, all forms of social
oppression (e.g., sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, etc.) remain essen-
tially human processes, even if related to material realities to some extent.
Also, while trees and animals do not need to grow or behave in accor-
dance with ethical principles, humans certainly do. While the interaction
between rocks and rivers does not lead to the emergence of structure or
culture, nor can rocks and rivers willfully bring about systemic changes to
their existence, humans can. This list of differences can be extended very
far, although these differences share the same ontological basis, as argued
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 81

by Archer (1995: 1) thus: “Social reality is unlike any other because of

its human constitution. It is different from natural reality whose defining
feature is self-subsistence: for its existence does not depend upon us, a
fact which is not compromised by our human ability to intervene in the
world of nature and change it.” Moreover, when we talk about the critical
elements of AL research, we are also necessarily talking about a specific
view of agency—i.e., a strong version of agency—and in my view this is
where posthumanism is insufficient. Posthumanism is often said to share
numerous parallels with Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005) and the
notion of distributive agency (Bennett, 2010), whereby not only humans
but non-human entities are also understood as “having” agency. The
problem is that, in attempting to soften the boundaries between humans
and non-humans, posthumanist AL scholars overlook humans’ reflexive
potential as part of their distinct and emergent properties and powers.
While no one can deny that “objects play an active role in human life”
(Pennycook, 2019: 43), they do so in the form of resources, constraints
and enablements, not as reflexively endowed entities. Equally important,
while possibilities and limits are indeed distributed across ontologically
heterogeneous social and natural fields, non-humans are not necessarily
“vibrant objects in temporary assemblages (that include chairs, table-
cloths, food, drink, cutlery, conversations) as actants that interpellate us
into diverse forms of socialization” (Pennycook, 2019: 121, emphasis
mine). Chairs and food can provide crucial resources, and both facili-
tate and limit human actions in important ways, but they do not act
within the social world as humans do, since they do not possess agentive
or reflexive potential.
These important differences between humans and non-humans matter
a great deal to how we approach the issue of emergence in AL scholar-
ship, and by extension how we formulate causal claims. If we think of
the numerous times we—as individuals and members of groups—have
made decisions based on moral principles, decisions which have led to
specific actions and changes in the social realm, we can begin to see how
causality in the natural world is different from causality in the social
world. As Juarrero (1999: 24) puts it, “agent causation must be different
from event causation if moral attributions are to be possible.” In light
of this, it is fair to conclude that agency remains an emergent property
82 J. Bouchard

of humans, not objects, and that this has profound consequences for
how causality is conceptualized in AL and the social sciences at large.
In a review of Pennycook’s volume, Sealey (2019: 962) also notes this
problematic understanding of the concept of emergence in posthumanist
AL.
Without denying the important links between human and non-
human realities, the critical realist scholar Kaidesoja (2013: 124) explains
that “there are specific ontological features that differentiate human
agents and social structures from natural entities and, consequently, […]
the specific methods of natural sciences are not directly applicable in
the social sciences.” Similarly, Layder (1981: 9) explains that “social
science, and sociology in particular, is concerned with the explanation
of social action by human subjects who are endowed with the capacity
to interpret and thus formulate or redefine their own actions […] these
capacities cannot be imputed to the objects of study of the natural
sciences.” These views echo Lass’s (1980: 134) warning that “it is a cate-
gory error to extrapolate directly from the biological to the cultural.”
Even if biology and AL are both devoted to understanding specific onto-
logical entities interacting with other open systems in context and over
time, and that because of this common emphasis both disciplines can
share a great deal of insight, they remain essentially different types of
endeavours: biology focuses on non-reflexive physical entities (the body
is non-reflexive while human consciousness is the domain within which
reflexivity unfolds), whereas AL focuses principally on language, a cultur-
ally emergent product of the relationship between humans, as reflexive
beings, and their social (and to some extent physical) environment.
Collier (2011) also stresses the importance of scientists recognizing that
the natural and the social sciences focus on very different phenomena.
He explains that, while social scientists can criticize ideologies, assump-
tions and theories held by people—as the very objects of their scientific
investigations—natural scientists cannot criticize natural objects such as
rocks or the weather:

Because one cannot reduce the social sciences to natural ones, there may
be ontological differences as well, due to kinds of being that the social
sciences explain which the natural sciences do not – for instance, human
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 83

minds. All sciences are theories, but social sciences are also in part about
theories in people’s minds. Among the theories commonly held in any
society, some will be about that society; and some of these may be false.
So a scientific account of that society may include both knowledge about
the theories held in that society, and knowledge that they are false. This
enables social science to criticize a society, not in addition to explaining
it, [but rather] by explaining it. (p. 8)

To say that the natural world is different from the social world does
not, in my view, constitute a form of anthropocentrism or a mani-
festation of modernist, positivist, dichotomous thinking: it is merely
an ontological statement which allows for a necessary conceptual basis
upon which we can begin to explore the important causal interplay
between the two. It is, however, a rejection of the radical relationism
within posthumanism, which reduces phenomena to their relation-
ship with other phenomena. This is problematic both theoretically and
methodologically because, again, we then lose sight of their distinct
and emergent powers and properties, knowledge of which remains of
paramount importance to the formulation of causal claims.
It is equally important to stress that the kinds of problems and issues
studied in AL are profoundly social, even if related to the material
and natural world to some extent. As such, it is entirely reasonable to
approach AL research by emphasizing the distinct and emergent prop-
erties and powers of humans. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 1) underline,
AL refers to “those areas of language description and analysis which locate
language itself within the social world, and which understand language
use as a form of social practice.” Extending this argument further, it is
important to remind ourselves—as AL scholars and social scientists—
that “human language is a human construct, so it is a truism that
when linguists analyse its grammar and vocabulary they inevitably do so
anthropocentrically” (Sealey, 2018: 224). As such, while understanding
of the fundamental relationship between human and non-human enti-
ties can elucidate important details and features of human existence
within broader social and natural worlds and hopefully lead to a more
sustainable future for all, diminishing the relevance of the distinctions
between the social and the natural—or even worse, dismissing these as
84 J. Bouchard

remnant of modernist thinking—is, in my view, mistaken and therefore

counterproductive to AL research.
In promulgating posthumanist AL as a new form of materialism, it
is important to note that Pennycook (2019) departs from many of his
earlier poststructuralist stances towards discourse (e.g., Pennycook, 2001,
2013) by stressing the need to “understand the relation between discur-
sive practices and materialization” (p. 32). In doing so, the author is
arguably moving towards a realist viewpoint. At the same time, by aiming
to collapse the ontological distinctions between human and non-human
entities, the author cannot quite escape the conflationary tendencies
which have marked his earlier works. This becomes clear when he argues
that understanding the relation between discursive practices and materi-
alization, and complexifying language and its relation to the world, are
best achieved through an emphasis on performativity. Despite claims by
the author to the contrary (notably his conceptually problematic sugges-
tion that posthumanism offers a unique approach to performativity), the
notion of performativity effectively reduces social reality to situated prac-
tice. Moreover, given that (a) trees and rivers do not “perform,” and
(b) performativity requires a strong notion of agency to be conceptu-
ally and methodologically meaningful, performativity thus contains an
obvious anthropocentric angle. Pennycook also fails to provide viable
strategies for researchers to analytically move back and forth between
the performance and the intransitive aspects of social reality, including
structure, culture and underlying causal mechanisms. Instead, he merely
mentions the need to “move beyond discourse towards materiality,”
which is a vague, non-committal, anti-realist and scientifically problem-
atic statement regarding structural and cultural forces as complex and
causally consequential elements in the production of social reality. In
sum, posthumanist AL currently remains an under-developed perspective
which requires considerable conceptual and methodological improve-
ments before it can offer viable solutions to the problems faced by AL
scholars.
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 85

Conclusion
In this chapter I have tried to provide fair and balanced accounts
and critiques of the successionist and the interpretivist strands of AL
scholarship, and while I have noted some of the benefits of a posthu-
manist approach to AL I have also been highly critical of its claims to
offer viable solutions to AL problems. I will argue in the next chap-
ters that AL research is fundamentally concerned with language and
related phenomena as emergent outcomes of the structure–agency rela-
tionship, and that to understand this complex process AL scholars need
complexity-informed concepts and theories grounded in a robust social
ontology provided by realism. This alternative does not merely fuse
successionism and interpretivism into a single and unified paradigm,
for while these two perspectives are two varieties of empiricism, they fit
rather uncomfortably with each other both theoretically and method-
ologically. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 107) argue, “empirical descrip-
tions of the world will always be incomplete, since that world is not fully
or directly intelligible to its inhabitants (including, of course, social theo-
rists and language researchers).” The complexity of phenomena studied
in AL must therefore be dealt with largely through theory—i.e., with
consideration for phenomena beyond the empirically accessible. A core
argument grounding this stance is that, for a practice-oriented science
such as AL, causal models are necessary, and for these we need theory.
At this point in the history of AL scholarship, with increasing interest
in elucidating the links between linguistic and social realities, and with
how individuals and communities experience and deal with social and
cultural forces, it is fair to note that interpretivism is becoming gradually
more prominent. The problem, as already suggested, is that under-
standing the connections between individuals and society requires more
than insight into localized human understandings. On this subject,
Maton (2013: 6) discusses the tendency among contemporary social
researchers to adopt a false dichotomy between positivist absolutism and
constructivist relativism:

That is, they posit a choice between understanding knowledge either

as decontextualized, value-free, detached and certain or as socially
86 J. Bouchard

constructed within cultural and historical conditions in ways that reflect

vested social interests. Of these options, they then choose the latter, and
thereby dissolve knowledge. In other words, having (re-)discovered the
obvious point that ‘knowledge is socially constructed’, many approaches
take this to also mean ‘… rather than related to something real’.
By committing the ‘epistemic fallacy’ of confusing epistemology with
ontology […], social construction is extended from knowledge to reality.

And when ontology and epistemology are conflated thus, under-

standing the connections between individuals and society becomes a
considerably difficult task. Specifically, it leads to knowledge-blindness,
or the overemphasis of the social influences upon knowledge. As
Chapter 4 will explain, realism makes this epistemic fallacy one of its
main points of critique (Maton, 2013).
As we attempt to move beyond anthropocentrism to understand
the interaction between individuals, society and nature, we are also
compelled to explain real causal mechanisms, not merely revealing
statistical regularities or simply formulating narratives about human
experiences. In this regard, Sealey and Carter (2004: 193) explain that
successionism and interpretivism are equally ill-equipped to fulfil this
scientific requirement.

While the quantitative approach indicates traces of structural distribu-

tions in the patterns it identifies, it does not provide evidence of how
social class relations are experienced by people themselves. By contrast,
the interpretive approach indicates how social actors experience social
class processes, but has little to say about the structural features of these.
[…] applied linguistics shares with many other social science disciplines
a need to respond to wider debates about how we can know the social
world, and, in broad terms, it also participates in the struggle between
methodologies which are more inclined towards measurement and those
which are more inclined towards interpretation.

In this chapter I have also identified specific reasons why AL—as a

relatively young area of the social sciences—needs a renewal, a critical
re-evaluation of its core principles, or as Weideman (2007, 2009, 2015)
suggests, a philosophy. Furthermore, while the ideas that knowledge and
 2 The Need for a Renewed Applied Linguistics 87

its uses in real-world contexts are closely related and that research should
aim to improve human life do have some credence, Kramsch’s reduction
of AL research to an empirical practice or to its practical uses is consid-
erably problematic. This viewpoint in our field is more than a mere
pragmatic approach to research: it is a problematic teleological stance
which runs the risk of relativizing theoretical knowledge to its practical
uses. Likewise, while I agree that value-free knowledge is an illusion,
acknowledgement of this should not diminish our commitment as AL
scholars to objective knowledge. On this note, Sealey and Carter (2004:
105) provide, in my opinion, perhaps the most convincing argument
for the need in AL research for greater and more consistent theoretical
engagement:

It is the very opacity of social life that requires us to develop theoret-

ical accounts if we are to grasp those features of it that are not given
in our everyday, phenomenal experiences. […] It is partly because the
social world is not transparent in this way that we experience its force
in the form of constraints – and its power in the form of enablements –
and that we need to develop novel, frequently counter-intuitive, theories
about what it consists of and how it works.

Indeed, claiming that theory can only be good if it is useful to prac-

tice is misleading. After all, how can interpretivist AL scholars claim
the epistemic privilege necessary to formulate ontological claims about
language and related phenomena, while criticizing this very privilege as
mere narrative, in the hope of valorizing the experience and understand-
ings of those they study (Sealey & Carter, 2004)? This position can only
be acceptable if grounded in an ontologically flattened view of the social
realm. More importantly, and as I will reiterate throughout this book, if
we accept the position that AL—as an applied field of inquiry—is mainly
about helping practitioners on the ground, we must then also pay closer
attention to how social processes and phenomena are caused . In other
words, AL’s practical mission necessitates causal models, which are devel-
oped at the level of theory. In the next chapter, I hone in specifically on
the structure–agency debate in social theory by highlighting core issues
related to social ontology as they relate to both social research and AL,
88 J. Bouchard

and explain the shortcomings of flattened ontologies and the benefits of

perspectives which attempt to provide stratified views of society and its
constituting parts. This work will form the basis for my analysis of both
realism and CDST in AL in subsequent chapters.

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 3
The Structure–Agency Debate and Its
Relevance to AL

The Vexatious Fact of Society

The structure–agency relationship has been characterized as a “vexa-
tious fact of society” (e.g., Archer, 1995, 2004; Archer & Tritter, 2000):
humans are the creators of, and responsible for, society, social stability
and change, while also being profoundly conditioned and structured by
it. It is vexatious because of the inherent ambivalence of society: if society
is neither the product of humans’ limitless freedom nor the total determi-
nation of their actions by forces beyond their reach, then what is it? It is
vexatious because we cannot explain one by reducing it to, or conflating
it within, the other. It is vexatious because the need to explain in detail
the very nature of that relationship stubbornly resurfaces at every turn,
yet clear and reliable answers applicable to the study of all or most social
“facts” seem to escape our grasp. The various ontological perspectives
available (notably those summarized in this chapter) are, in this sense,
attempts to deal with this vexatious fact by, in part, providing theories,
models and concepts to explain the complex and ambiguous interplay
between both strata of the social realm.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 95

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_3
96 J. Bouchard

Dealing with this vexatious fact is, in a sense, an inherent part of

social research, including AL. To understand the centrality of the struc-
ture–agency relationship to AL concerns, we must first identify AL as
a social science, thus as fundamentally concerned with the structure–
agency debate. The reason is simple: “as soon as we observe the ways
in which speakers use language we are engaged with the analysis of the
social world” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 34), and that to understand this
social world we need to understand how structure and agency are related
in causal terms. The relationship between language and social studies,
however, is not one-directional, since other areas of the social sciences—
sociology, anthropology, economics, policy studies, etc.—must also deal
with language as a socially emergent phenomenon. Yet, theories about
language and its social reality have necessarily followed their own devel-
opmental trajectories over time, which means that claims made about
language by social scientists at different periods of history have not always
been informed by the most sophisticated and complexity-sensitive theo-
ries about language. Part of this problem, as I have already mentioned, is
the reluctance among many scholars to fully engage in transdisciplinary
efforts. In light of this, Sealey and Carter (2004: 2) argue that all social
sciences must also be concerned with language and deal with insight
from linguistics—applied or otherwise—because of “the unique status
of language, as both an object of knowledge and the means by which
that knowledge is comprehended, expressed and discussed.”
The structure–agency debate, however, is certainly not new to AL:
whatever paradigm we choose to adopt—structuralism, social construc-
tionism, poststructuralism, critical realism, etc.—AL issues can be
understood as outcomes of the structure–agency interaction, or how
social forces influence language-related phenomena, and how agents
(e.g., language learners, teachers, policymakers, etc.) deal with struc-
tural constraints and enablements (e.g., tests, materials, language policy,
educational systems, socio-economic realities, etc.) in light of their goals
and aspirations. As such, limited conceptual engagement with the struc-
ture–agency debate by applied linguists comes at a cost. As Sealey and
Carter (2004: 34) rightfully argue, “insofar as the issue of structure and
agency is inherent in the concerns of applied linguists, neglect of the
work carried out by social theorists will lead to underdeveloped accounts
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 97

of the social world.” Neglect of social theory by applied linguists does

not come only in the form of avoidance: it also comes in the form
of sweeping claims about the death of an era and the emergence of a
new world out of the ashes of the old one. Larsen-Freeman (2015: 11;
2020: vii), for example, announces that “no longer can we be content
with Newtonian reductionism, a Laplacian clockwork universe with its
deterministic predictability and the use of statistics to generalize from
the behavior of population samples to individuals.” Although this state-
ment is justified with regards to perhaps the more radical applications of
successionism in AL, we must also remind ourselves that no social theo-
rist, and very few social scientists to date have adhered to such a hydraulic
view of human processes. If Larsen-Freeman is right—i.e., if such radical
tendencies are more common within AL circles—it would indeed be a
clear indication of a general lack of engagement by AL scholars with the
structure–agency debate.
It is worth pointing out that sweeping claims about deaths of eras and
births of new ones are rather common in the social sciences, and reveal a
unique feature of the field. According to Maton (2013), cultural studies
in general depend a great deal on the perception of radical schisms,
or critical deconstructions and transformations of knowledge previously
developed. Rather than building upon previous knowledge and fine-
tuning it over long periods of time (as would be more common in the
natural sciences), social scientists tend to declare new beginnings, redef-
initions and even complete ruptures with the past. The social sciences
then give the appearance of undergoing a permanent cultural revolu-
tion, and ownership of revolutionary ideas then becomes central to the
legitimacy of the researcher—or “expert interpreter”—within a specific
field. In parallel, progress in the social sciences tends to be measured by
the addition of new voices advocating the rejection of past paradigms
and theories and the introduction of new, often more radical ones. As
revealed in the previous chapter and further discussed in the present one,
clear evidence of this can be found in the passion expressed by so many
contemporary social scientists and applied linguists for anti-positivist,
postmodernist and posthumanist perspectives which, as I have already
pointed out and will do so in this chapter and subsequent ones, remain
largely underdeveloped, thus considerably problematic.
98 J. Bouchard

The following summary of the evolution of the structure–agency

debate demonstrates that, while AL theory and research practices at times
differ in important ways, there has actually never really been a time—
at least not since the beginning of the twentieth century—when people
were conceptualized in purely mechanistic terms—i.e., as mechanical
parts of a closed, deterministic system. It is also worth underlining
the point that positivism—the most common target of postmodernist
critique—has more or less become a defunct perspective, as Davis and
Sumara (2006: 68–69) observe:

The “sciences” that were rejected within much of 20th -century struc-
turalist, poststructuralist, and related theories were the sciences of 1700s
and 1800s—the orientations and emphases of which […] were actu-
ally dismissed or eclipsed through the 1900s within the sciences. […] to
assume that those accounts are still appropriately applied to all of contem-
porary scientific inquiry is to succumb to a crude parody or caricature to
the ever-evolving scientific project.

Also common and somewhat problematic among contemporary AL

scholars, particularly those who adhere to various forms of interpre-
tivism, is a rejection of the structure–agency “dualism” altogether. This
rejection, as Elder-Vass (2010: 3) points out, is indeed rather difficult to
maintain consistently:

Many contemporary authors […] reject the implication that structure and
agency represent a binary choice: that either social behaviour is deter-
mined by structural forces or it is determined by the free choices of
human individuals. Indeed, if we look more closely, it is striking that
many apparently structuralist thinkers have been unable or unwilling in
practice to dispense with agency and apparently individualist thinkers
have been unable or unwilling in practice to dispense with structure.

As the following summary aims to reveal, social scientists and social

theorists have, for the most part, considered both agency and structure
as important elements in the shaping of society (except perhaps adherents
to more radical strands of postmodernism and social constructionism). It
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 99

will also become apparent in this chapter that the social theories devel-
oped over the past century have never actually excluded either agency
or structure entirely; instead, what distinguish them are the different
emphases on one or the other, and their approaches to conceptualizing
how the structure–agency relationship unfolds. As such, to label talks
about the structure–agency relationship as products of “dichotomous
thinking” is mistaken. Layder (2006: 144) succinctly states that

the idea that some authors or schools of social theory are entrapped
in a false notion of an individual-society split is […] quite misleading.
The important question is not whether some sociologists posit a solitary
individual cut off from society. It would be odd indeed if any sociolo-
gists attempted to do this. The question is, which of the accounts most
adequately expresses the fundamental connectedness of the individual and
society?

To explain this tendency among some social scientists to reject talks

of structure and agency, the author explains that “many proponents of
‘radical new breakthroughs’ get carried away with the romance of being
on the cutting edge of discovery, rather than dealing in a systematic and
careful way with what theoretical knowledge we already have and using
its valuable aspects in a cumulative and co-operative manner” (Layder,
2006: 98). Although the lure of new scientific beginnings can indeed be
strong, it can unfortunately also encourage intellectual amnesia.
The short and selective history of social theory presented in this
chapter is partly aimed at encouraging AL scholars to become more
familiar with social theory in general and understand how it informs
their work. In the process, I hope that readers of this book—most of
whom I suspect are AL scholars and practitioners—will not see in this
summary a mere intellectual exercise distantly related to AL concerns,
but instead develop a sense of what is involved in the creation of a robust
social ontology, as a necessary basis for a re-evaluation and reshaping
of AL scholarship. It is also my aim to demonstrate how the structure–
agency discussion has evolved over decades as the product of a cumulative
and cooperative effort by social scientists from a variety of disciplines.
After reading this chapter and the next, I hope that readers can see how
100 J. Bouchard

ideas about the structure–agency relationship have always built upon

each other, not necessarily through outright rejection of ideas previ-
ously offered, but rather through an organic borrowing and fine-tuning
of existing insight, as is characteristic of most evolutionary trajectories
documented in the natural and the social sciences.
I begin with Talcott Parsons’ structural functionalism, follow with
Marxist social theory and structuralism, symbolic interactionism and
phenomenology, postmodernism, poststructuralism, structuration theory
and finally end with Bourdieu’s theory of social practice and Habermas’s
lifeworld/system distinction. Throughout this account, I will also make
the point that Bourdieu and Habermas, although not realist thinkers,
have nevertheless provided much insight of value in the formulation of
the stratified ontology provided by realism and which will be discussed
in Chapters 4 and 5. Much of the content for this chapter is drawn from
Derek Layder’s wonderfully discerning volume Understanding Social
Theory (Layder, 2006), which I encourage all readers to consult. At
the end of each section, I explain the links between social theory and
specific AL strands and/or studies. Due to limited space (and given that
this book is actually not about social theory), the following summary
only considers broad features of specific (i.e., selected) paradigms. This,
however, has the unfortunate effect of reducing the complex evolution
of social theory over the years. It is therefore important to remember
that all strands of social theory are characterized by both strong and
weak versions, and in some cases multiple varieties in between. For
example, weak social constructionism argues that our knowledge of
the world is socially constructed, while strong social constructionism
builds on that notion to reject the possibility of an objective descrip-
tion of reality external to discourse and human experience. More radical
social constructionists posit that social realities can only exist if they are
thought of and talked about by people. In general, stronger, more radical
accounts of the social world are easier to reject on the basis that they
provide flattened ontologies, thus doing violence to the complexity of
social reality. As a general rule, weaker versions of specific paradigms tend
to be compatible with the realist ontology summarized in the next two
chapters.
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 101

A (Selective) History of the Structure–Agency

Debate
In Understanding Social Theory, Layder (2006) provides a history of
how the structure–agency relationship has been collaboratively concep-
tualized over the years through multiple borrowings and fine-tunings
of ideas proposed by researchers and theorists over decades of intel-
lectual development. In sharp contrast with common portrayals of the
structure–agency relationship, Layder prefaces his work by arguing that
sociology and social theory has not been

beleaguered by ‘false’ problems and divisions (such as those expressed in

the pairings of ‘individual and society’, ‘agency–structure’ and ‘macro–
micro’). In my opinion these dualisms represent not so much false
problems as contested issues about which are the most adequate ways of
thinking about the interconnections between different features of social
life. (Layder, 2006: ix)

Despite divergences, the structure–agency “dualism” is not merely a

convenient conceptual distinction of salience to armchair theorists: it
identifies two social strata consequential to our variegated understand-
ings of society. To come to term with this viewpoint, we only have to
think of how human beings and society are different things—i.e., how
they differ ontologically—and how we need different terms and concepts
to talk about each of them. To illustrate this point, we can define an
education system as a human creation and as the outcome of collective
human effort on the one hand. On the other, while we can also say
that an education system (because of its distinct and emergent powers
and properties) can undergo processes such as restructuration, stan-
dardization, overhaul and dismantlement, human beings simply cannot
undergo the same changes. Likewise, while people can hate or fall in
love, institutions cannot. More importantly, and as Layder’s statement
above suggests, structure and agency are not realities inherently posi-
tioned against each other, pulling in opposite directions, in an ongoing
struggle for power and dominance: they are two core strata interacting
together in the ongoing production of social life. As such, the central
102 J. Bouchard

task in social theory is explaining specifically how agency and structure

are linked.
To conceptualize structure, Ylikoski (2012: 27) explains that “macro
social facts are typically supra-individual : They are attributed to groups,
communities, populations, and organizations, but not to individuals.
There might be some attributes that apply both to individuals and collec-
tives, but typically macro social properties, relations, and events are such
that they are not about individuals.” Similarly, one can say that structure,
or macrosocial facts, are not the mere aggregates of individual beings and
actions in context: they are emergent outcomes of those interactions,
with distinct and emergent properties and powers of their own. Sealey
and Carter (2004: 10–11) explain how structure and agency are different
things in the following way:

The distinctive properties of social structures include their anteriority: the

fact that, for example, legal systems and property relations precede us, are
always already features of the world into which we are born. This points
to another distinguishing property of social structures: they are relatively
enduring. Amongst the powers possessed by social structures are those
of enablement and constraint […] Amongst the distinguishing proper-
ties and powers of agency are self-consciousness, reflexivity, intentionality,
cognition, emotionality and so on.

Stated differently, structure refers to objective, pre-existing sets of

social and institutional relations we experience throughout our lives as
social beings and as a result of being and acting in the world. They
are also antecedent structured relations in that they existed before we
were born and will keep on existing after we die. Providing an explana-
tory account rather than a descriptive one, Layder (1981: 3) refers
to structure as the pre-constituted conditions of interaction, and as
“underlying generative mechanisms which give rise to certain observable
manifestations.”
The notion of structure as pre-constituted conditions of interaction
leads to the realist observation that structure and agency are related
to each other in a-synchronous fashion—i.e., processes and phenomena
within both strata unfold over different timelines. As a set of relations
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 103

providing material and contextual cues for the performance of people’s

multiple everyday behaviours, structure is also subjective in the sense that
it requires the enactment of social actions by people. Again, however,
structure is not merely the aggregate result of individual subjectivities or
agentive actions: it is also—and quite importantly to the making of social
realities—an emergent product of those actions, with emergent proper-
ties and powers of its own. For example, while an education system—as
one of the many emergent outcomes of human interaction—makes
specific social roles (e.g., teachers, students, school administrators, poli-
cymakers, etc.) available, it is people who occupy those roles. This does
not imply that people are only logs in the system. However, the educa-
tion system, as a structural entity, generally survives changes brought to it
(e.g., through policy and curricular initiatives, people retiring and being
hired, shifts in the socio-political landscape, etc.). People can continue
to enter and exit the system without the system losing its properties and
powers. In other words, social structures are relatively enduring. As active
agents in the real world, people can certainly combine their powers and
change social structures in fundamental ways, as the American, French,
Russian and other revolutions throughout history have clearly demon-
strated. However, we also depend on structures to operate and achieve
our individual and collective projects in society.
Two powers germane to social structures include the distribution of
resources in society (enablement) and the imposition of limits on human
action (constraint). The distribution of resources, of course, can be
unequal, in which case it can also serve to further constrain agency.
Structures, in a broader sense, allow us to do certain things, albeit
within certain limits, and this constraint/enablement combination differs
depending on socio-historical and socio-economic contexts. The study
of structure thus involves looking at organizational power, the deploy-
ment of social and cultural resources, and reproduced patterns of power
and organization in specific contexts and historical periods. Essential to
this study is an analytical distinction between constraints and enable-
ments, something which López (2001) sees as considerably difficult to
achieve. According to the author, failing to analytically distinguish struc-
tural enablements and constraints “leads to an association of ‘enabling’
with transformation, and ‘constraining’ with reproduction.” This is a
104 J. Bouchard

problem because, from this basis, some analysts then distinguish between
a desirable form of agency (“enabled” agency) and an undesirable one
(“constrained” agency). The study of social structures should therefore
begin with the notion that people are able to make some choices and
perform some acts in structured fashion. Two important observations can
be made from this notion: (a) people do not act entirely as they wish,
and (b) their hopes and dreams are also structured realities. From this
basis, scholars can then concentrate on the degrees to which structure
constrains and enables within a particular context, involving particular
agents, over a certain period of time.
Agency, on the other hand, involves both individuals and groups of
people with the power to do things in the world—i.e., to be actors.
A commonly cited definition of agency is provided by Ahearn (2001:
112), who defines it as “the socioculturally mediated capacity to act.”
However, as Bouchard and Glasgow (2019) explain, this definition has
often been used to justify the problematic view of agency as “free will,”
a view which Ahearn herself rejects. The problem with free will is
that it completely detaches agents from structural and cultural condi-
tions—i.e., only enablements, without constraints—and fails to consider
that our aspirations, worldviews, hopes and strategies for living in this
world are also socio-historically conditioned phenomena. It is therefore
somewhat surprising to see traces of the free-will paradigm in talks of
human agency in AL scholarship, notably among some contemporary
social constructivists and poststructuralists. As we saw in the previous
chapter, Pennycook (2019: 21–22) identifies a marked humanistic, or
anthropocentric tendency in AL research, noting

a strong emphasis on choice and free will: a central focus here is on the
freedom of the individual to make ethical choices free of religious dogma
and moral prescriptions. Such an emphasis on the freedom of the indi-
vidual clearly depends on a specific cultural and political understanding
of what it means to be human. […] In constructing this vision of the
emancipated individual it gave no space to all that inhibits such freedoms:
language, class, gender, race, sexuality, discourse, ideology, subconscious
desires, discrimination and much more.
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 105

Kockelman (2007) lists three common approaches to agency in

Western academic discourse: agency as free will , agency as resistance and
agency as mediating force, with the latter being exemplary of a more clas-
sical sociological tradition. He describes the view of agency as free will as
a product of “modern Western morality” thus:

The prototypic representational agent is usually a single human indi-

vidual who inhabits all three roles at once: thematizer, characterizer, and
reasoner. Depending on the semiotic process in question, we call these
prototypic agents ‘actors’, ‘speakers’, and ‘thinkers’ (even if it means, as
it usually does, that we radically decontextualize the ways in which any
individual act is enabled and constrained by a manifold of multiple and
distal, contingent and contestable acts). Moreover, we tend to categorize
and hierarchize entities as a function of the degree of agency we take
them to have […] And we positively valorize higher degrees of agency
than lower degrees of agency and hence more agentive beings over less
agentive beings. (Kockelman, 2007: 386)

A more nuanced, less culturally laden view of agency therefore needs

to gain prominence within AL scholarship, one which proposes that
while people are not passive recipients of social effects, neither do they
have the choice to sidestep all structural and cultural constraints when
desired. The study of agency thus involves looking at how people and
groups creatively mediate structural constraints and enablements, in the
pursuance of their projects within a contingent social realm.
With this basic understanding of structure and agency, let’s see how
their relationship—this vexatious fact of social life—has been tackled
since the late nineteenth century.

Parsonian Structural Functionalism

Structuralism is often understood as offering a view of human beings
entirely subsumed by structural forces beyond their control, reduced to
clogs in the vast engine that is society. In this particular interpretation of
structuralism, structure wins outright. Yet as this section will demon-
strate, structuralism, notably the version most often associated with
106 J. Bouchard

the works of Durkheim, Weber and Parsons’s structural functionalism,

agency never actually disappears from the equation, even if structure
clearly gains the upper hand. Moreover, a closer reading of works by
Parsons, Durkheim and Weber reveals an “attempt to think and to
provide concepts that might adequately represent the distinctiveness and
the specificity of the social level as some type of organized complexity”
(López, 2001: 87, emphasis original). In other words, the labelling of
structuralism as providing a deterministic view of the social world is
somewhat reductive.
Asking himself Why don’t people do more as they please or commit more
crimes?, Parsons (1949, 1951) attempted to explain social order and rela-
tively stable patterns in society. This perspective, as it pertains to the
social sciences, is captured by Davis and Sumara (2006: 66) thus:

Structuralist theories are principally concerned with the manner in which

certain phenomena – including culture, language, and individual cogni-
tion – are organized. These theories inquire into the relational webs
that afford such phenomena their coherence. While they are, of course,
concerned with the dynamics that give rise to and that inhere in their
objects of study, in the main those interests are secondary at best.

At the centre of structural functionalism is the idea that some

(although not all) of people’s values, beliefs and the social norms which
extend them to the social sphere, play a central regulating function in the
production of social life. Borrowing from the works of Durkheim, specif-
ically the notion of core beliefs as shared and bonding social elements,
Parsons developed a social ontology in which social order could be
explained as the outcome of people adhering to particular belief systems
which limit their tendency to prioritize self-interest, while helping them
mitigate the need for external social punishment. Within Parsonian
functional structuralism, Layder (2006: 22) argues that “processes of
socialisation serve to instil the central values and norms of society in its
members. These ‘pattern-maintaining’ elements reinforce the core values
in society, by promoting consensus and by ensuring that there is a basic
level of conformity.” According to Parsonian structural functionalism,
humans bridge individual and social realities by embodying particular
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 107

social roles, which in turn involves coming to term with both structural
and cultural “facts” of social life. People are able to live both private and
social lives by reaching compromises between themselves and the society
in which they live; and social roles both constitute the conduit through
which such arrangements become possible, largely by providing individ-
uals with particular sets of norms and values of relevance to particular
situations. As such, people do not exercise free will when attempting
to mediate structural and cultural constraints and enablements; instead,
choices become possible because of the very nature of the relationship
between humans, social roles, values and society. Put differently, social
roles demand certain choices to be made while condemning others. The
choices people make are thus largely understood from this function-
alist perspective as epiphenomena of the social roles themselves, thus
revealing a tendency within structuralism to reduce human agents to
passive assimilators of rules and norms associated with their specific social
roles.
Consensus is central to a Parsonian social ontology, essentially making
it an ontology of the status quo. Indeed, Parsons’ overemphasis on
consensus through adherence to specific role-mandated values and norms
fails to account for rather common instances in everyday life of people
and groups misunderstanding, flouting and even resisting cultural and
social norms and values. As Porpora (1987: 119) argues, “actual humans
often do not behave in the normatively prescribed ways. Even when
they do behave normatively they simultaneously resist and otherwise
circumvent the norms and structures that bind them.” Structural func-
tionalism unfortunately cannot account for these phenomena. It is also
ill-equipped to explain (a) how social/cultural norms emerge in the first
place, (b) the corruptive and coercive uses of social power, and more
broadly speaking (c) social change in any meaningful way. Given these
considerable shortcomings, the view Parsons offers must, to some extent,
be understood as a prescriptive view of the social world—i.e., less a
reflection of what social reality is than what it ought to be, from a partic-
ular ideological standpoint. As Layder (2006: 36) clarifies, at the core of
Parsons’ ontology lies the problem of reification, which refers to
108 J. Bouchard

the mistaken assumption that the products of human endeavour (material

objects as well as social arrangements such as institutions) are, in fact, the
work of non-human entities, such as Gods or mystical forces. In relation
to society, this involves the idea that social structures and systems ‘seem’
to have a life of their own, somehow disembodied from human beings
absorbed in their daily business.

It is precisely this notion of structural “detachment” which has

subjected structuralism to virulent criticisms for decades. There is no
doubt that presenting structural realities as the main forces behind social
processes constitutes a conflation of agency within structure. Although
Parsons never quite gave up on the idea of a social agent, he was never
able to develop an ontology capable of accounting for anything beyond
social order, with individual/social agents waiting to be called upon to
consent.
At the same time, the Parsonian focus on beliefs, values, norms, rules
and consensus in social life is not entirely dismissible. Indeed, some
paradigms developed after the emergence of structural functionalism
in social theory—notably Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, as will later be
discussed—owe a debt to Parsons. Moreover, structural functionalism
introduced an element crucial to realism—the idea that the social world
is stratified. As Layder (2006: 37) points out, “perhaps the great virtue
of Parsons’s theory is its appreciation of society as something which has
‘ontological depth’. […] society is made up of elements of fundamen-
tally different kinds, but which are completely and inescapably linked to
each other.” While we are justified in criticizing structural functionalism
for its weak version of agency, we should not dismiss its relevance to the
development of a stratified social ontology.
Structural functionalism finds many conceptual and philosophical
parallels in anthropological functionalism, which also draws much inspi-
ration from the sociological work of Durkheim, and with perhaps
Malinowski as its most illustrious theorist and advocate. In anthropo-
logical functionalism, society, institutions and related social roles also
constitute the focus of inquiry. Cultural life (populated by ideational
forces such as norms, beliefs, religions, etc.) is, by extension, conceptu-
alized within this perspective as an important domain within which the
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 109

preservation of social structures is achieved. Consequently, anthropolog-

ical functionalism also fails to conceptualize the distinct and emergent
properties and powers of agency; rather, agency is viewed very much in
terms of how it contributes to the maintenance of the social and cultural
status quo.
In linguistics, structuralism is most often associated with the works of
the Swiss linguist and semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure. A common
target of postmodernist critique, Saussurean (or structural) linguistics
begins with the notion that language is a system, a self-contained rela-
tional structure composed of langue (including the synchronic aspects of
phonology, morphology and syntax) and parole (the diachronic aspects
which include semantics, pragmatics, discourse, etc.). The focus in struc-
tural linguistics tends to be placed more on langue than parole, since
the latter is seen as subjected to multiple external influences, thus as
a less systematic, more fluid and complex domain of language. Conse-
quently, the central problem in structural linguistics, as explained by
Sealey and Carter (2004), is that meaning is defined as the result of
the relationships between the synchronic features of language, largely
leaving the diachronic features out of the equation. Saussure’s theory
thus fails to consider both how languages are actually used by real people
in real-world contexts, and by extension how social, cultural, political
and historical factors are also consequential to this process. Acknowl-
edgement of this problem (i.e., the setting aside of parole) allowed for
the emergence of a much needed postmodernist critique, which has
been rather successful at elucidating the fluid and complex nature of
language, as well as the links between language and politics, language
and colonialism and so forth.
Although warranted, many critics of structural linguistics up to this
day have shown a tendency to caricature Saussure’s work. Problems
surface when criticisms of his (said) lack of consideration for parole are
used by (notably) social constructionist, phenomenologist and poststruc-
turalist applied linguists to justify a rejection of the systemic features
of language altogether (i.e., reducing language essentially to its situ-
ated uses). This strategy, however, is not fully justified. Harris (2003:
8) clarifies that, “For Saussure, the system as (la langue) has no inten-
tions: it merely provides resources for those individuals who do have
110 J. Bouchard

intentions, i.e., its speakers.” In other words, there is acknowledge-

ment by Saussure of the important role played by the agent as language
user. Saussure’s main interest, however, is on langue, or the synchronic
features of language. This relative misconstruing of Saussure’s views also
reveals a seemingly persistent confusion regarding the langue/ parole (i.e.,
synchronic/diachronic) distinction, a confusion which may be explained
by (a) Saussure himself not providing a unified and consistent theory
of language; and of course (b) Saussure’s ideas travelling through history
not through his own writings but through notes taken by his students
during his three separate lectures at the University of Geneva between
1906 and 1911. As such, we must also recognize that various conflicting
interpretations and critiques of Saussure’s ideas potentially cloud our
understanding of his intentions and body of work. Concerned with this
particular problem, Harris (2003) concludes that contemporary inter-
pretations of Saussure’s ideas tend to be formulated in order to serve
the purposes of another theory, not necessarily that of Saussure. He
also observes philosophically that “the binoculars of historical hindsight
can distort and foreshorten, just as the contemporary microscope can
sometimes give a close but too restricted view” (p. 11).
In addition, not all critics of structural linguistics agree. Pennycook
(2001), for example, recognizes the important contribution made by
Saussure to AL, noting that structural linguistics was particularly effec-
tive in improving the zeitgeist of early twentieth century epistemology,
since it

helped move thinking away from a hierarchical view of values with prim-
itive languages, cultures, and societies on the bottom and developed
languages, cultures, and societies on the top. Instead, it urged us not
to judge or evaluate from some external position but rather to describe
from the inside. What mattered was how the internal structure of things
worked, not their external relations. Not only were linguists then able to
explore the complex inner workings of languages (showing indeed that
so-called primitive languages were highly complex), but they were also
able to argue that all languages were equal in that they served the needs
of their speakers equally. (p. 31)
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 111

What most critics of Saussure fail to recognize, and what Pennycook

acknowledges, is that Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole
remains “a major development in human consciousness, [because it is]
one of the first attempts at developing a stratified view of language”
(Bouchard, 2018: 5, emphasis mine). This notion is central to the realist
view of language presented in Chapters 4 and 5. In large part, the impor-
tance of this stratified view is that it allows for an understanding of
symbolic communication, or the emergence of an important abstract
“layer” of language, as explained by Layder (1997: 30) thus:

Instead of being restricted to ‘gestural’ or physical signalling as are animals

(such as the baring of teeth in dogs or the emission of various sounds in
fighting cats), the use of language in humans allows for truly symbolic
communication. This abstract feature of language enables a degree of
detachment from the demands and exigencies of the immediate circum-
stances and this creates a cognitive space in which a considered response
(rather than an immediate reaction) may occur.

To exemplify Layder’s point, we only have to think about the language

found in academic books such as this one. What structural linguistics
also makes rather clear is that, when people use language, they do not
create language “from scratch,” but rather with reference to language as
a culturally emergent resource, with constraining and enabling poten-
tials outside situated interaction. In other words, despite its consider-
able problems with regards to agency, structural linguistics nevertheless
manages to introduce a complex view of language by bringing attention
to its synthetic aspects as important features of human communication.
Chomsky’s work on language, notably his theory of universal
grammar, constitutes another notable example of structuralist linguistics,
although it is also widely credited for ushering in cognitive linguis-
tics, an important contribution which helps us distinguish the work
of Chomsky from that of Saussure. By emphasizing the centrality of
human cognition and of humans as entities capable of thinking, memo-
rizing, understanding and creating meaning, cognitive linguistics can
also be defined as placing a stronger emphasis on the human agent as
112 J. Bouchard

communicator and creator of meaning. Despite this important distinc-

tion, the similarities between Chomsky’s work and structural linguistics
are clear: both were indeed interested in analyzing the underlying reality,
or more abstract features, of language. Larsen-Freeman and Cameron
(2008) explain that Chomsky “invoked a different dichotomy [from that
of Saussure] motivated by the same goal, i.e., to get at the systematic
nature of language. Chomsky distinguished mental competence or the
idealized native speaker’s knowledge of his or her language from perfor-
mance, the actual use of the language” (p. 90, emphasis mine). Chomsky
wanted to develop a view of language as a system as represented in the
minds of language users (i.e., as a linguistic competence), which is why
Chomsky’s contribution has often been characterized as “mentalist,” with
limited concern for social influences on language use, and rooted in the
vision of an ideal speaker or language user—i.e., the “native speaker.”
Rampton (1997: 329) explains that the emergence of Western sociolin-
guistics in the 1960s was very much “an attempt to refute Chomsky’s
assertion that linguistics can be most sensibly defined as the study of the
ideal speaker-hearer in a homogenous speech community.”
In sociolinguistics, and more specifically within the field of inter-
cultural communicative competence research, principles associated with
cultural determinism—a conceptual feature of anthropological function-
alism which posits culture as determining agentive behaviours, thus
reducing agents to essentialized ethnic and/or cultural categories—have
long been rejected in principle, although we can still find echoes of it
here and there. Often cited as an authority in intercultural communi-
cation research, Hofstede (2009) provides a relatively recent example of
such conflationary viewpoint by reducing culture to a set of “unwritten
rules for being an accepted member of the moral circle” (p. 85), as well
as an unavoidable presence deeply ingrained in the minds and lives of
individuals. He also defines cultural communities as moral circles in
which members are understood as reproducers of shared standards of
moral rules. Similarly, Seargeant (2009: 36) defines culture as “shared
patterns of learned or symbolic behavior, the aggregate of which consti-
tute a culture, in so far as they are promoted as being essential for (or
linked to an essentialist understanding of ) group identity, and are seen
as distinct from the behaviors of others.” In Seargeant’s view, there is
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 113

the additional problem of culture being merely the sum of all cultural
“facts,” an aggregative view which does violence to both agentive and
cultural processes by overlooking their respective distinct and emergent
properties and powers.
In Bouchard (2017) I argue that the view of culture as “shared”
(a) excludes those who may not agree with the consensus, thus qual-
ifying them as “a-cultural”; (b) overlooks other important cultural
realities which may be seen as lying at the margins of cultural life
yet which remain vital to explaining cultural change, and (c) fails to
specify who specifically formulates the consensus and who does the
agreeing. Reducing much of social and cultural life to a consensus is,
in other words, tantamount to reproducing the myth of cultural integra-
tion, defined by Archer (1996: xvii) as “appropriated by sociology from
early anthropology, which perpetuates an image of culture as a coherent
pattern, a uniform ethos or a symbolically consistent universe.” Further-
more, in intercultural communicative competence research inspired by
anthropological functionalism, there is the related problematic tendency
to equate countries with societies, and then with cultures. Hofstede
(2009: 91) clearly succumbs to this tendency when arguing that “almost
all countries themselves try to function as ‘moral circles’.” Given its
enduring prevalence in sociolinguistics and much of the social sciences,
Archer is indeed justified in characterizing the myth of cultural integra-
tion as having “projected an image of culture which proved so powerful
that it scored the retina, leaving a perpetual after-image, which distorted
subsequent perception” (p. 2).
To sum up, anthropological functionalism promotes the idea that
human agents are cultural replicators, inescapably tied to specific, essen-
tialized ethno-cultural heritages which directly determine their cultural
choices and actions. The causal potential of human agents might still be
recognized in some form or other, but in a dramatically limited fashion.
A similar critique can be made with regards to structural functionalism.
114 J. Bouchard

Historical Materialism
Although one of the pillars of structuralism, historical materialism (also
sociological Marxism) differs from the approaches of Durkheim, Weber
and Parsons due to its explicit critical angle and its focus on the mate-
rial aspects of social life. The central target of Marxist critique is the
capitalist mode of production leading to class divisions, or the struc-
turally determined unequal distribution of resources in society, limiting
the ability of large segments of society to fulfill basic needs such as
shelter, food, clothing, etc., while privileging the very few at the top.
This emphasis on the material/economic features of society, according
to Marxist ontology, allows for a clarification of broad social processes,
including culture and other particular modes of thought germane to
a specific historical period, while offering a framework for under-
standing the very structure of social relationships. Historical materialism
is less concerned with norms/beliefs acting as regulating forces, instead
concentrating on economic inequalities which are understood as core
underlying mechanisms in the production of social life.
In this sense, Marx moves even further away from concerns related
to human intersubjectivity than Durkheim, Weber or Parsons. Instead,
he wants us to map out specifically how social positions and functions
are distributed as one of the many outcomes of the capitalist mode
of production. To do so, he proposes a historical approach to social
analysis, specifically one which attempts to describe how social classes
and related social positions and functions are achieved in a particular
period of human history, with reference to the period that preceded it.
The assumptions grounding this approach to sociological analysis are
that each period contains specific forms of social relations and class
inequalities, not only influenced by past forms but also being change-
able forms—i.e., they are not “natural” but rather modifiable conditions
of social life. Understanding these relations and how they work thus
requires a historical perspective which, in hindsight, has the clear advan-
tage of elucidating causal links—and by extension the potential for
developing models of causality—in the social realm.
Interestingly, certain aspects of historical materialism can be found
in critical realist ontology, notably a mutual appreciation for underlying
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 115

causal mechanisms and historical analysis. Porpora (2011: 164) explains

the critical realist approach to studying social structures and their causal
potentials thus: “Because the social world is open […] it should be no
surprise that history becomes the paradigmatic form of explanation in
the human sciences. Historical narratives not only capture the temporal
dimension of human life, they are uniquely able to encompass the oper-
ation of multiple causal properties of all sorts.” However, the crucial
difference between historical materialism and critical realism is that the
former is essentially concern with a single, overarching and determin-
istic source of causal power or causal mechanism—the capitalist mode
of production—whereas critical realism views causality as multiple and
the social world as non-deterministic. Critical realism therefore offers a
more complex view of social reality than the one conceptualized by Marx,
who saw history not as merely conditioning but rather determining social
“facts.”
Despite its emphasis on the material, objective features of society,
mainly through an emphasis on economic production and resulting
unequal social relations, historical materialism also includes some degree
of appreciation for the ideational features of social life. This element in
Marx’s theory surfaces in his attempts to explain the processes by which
capitalist structures are maintained. He argues that capitalism is effec-
tively maintained through a very specific type of ideological mechanism
understood as false-consciousness, a conceptualization of ideology intro-
duced by Marx, further developed by Althusser (1971), Lukács (1971)
and Freire (1972), and which still retains the attention of critical social
scientists today. Despite their stringent attacks on Marxist philosophy
and sociology, some poststructuralist thinkers including Butler (2000)
seem rather comfortable with Marx’s views on ideology. As an ideological
process often equated with hegemony, false-consciousness is said to be
generated, solidified and intensified by the bourgeoisie, aimed at control-
ling the proletariat by keeping them from developing awareness of their
own oppression. Since hegemonic power can be challenged by a well-
informed population, the purpose of ideology as false-consciousness is
to impede the dominated population’s access to knowledge of their own
subjugation. This goal is achievable by initially creating a system of delu-
sion which appears as nonthreatening (i.e., which appears to serve the
116 J. Bouchard

perceived needs of the population); and second, to convince the targeted

population that this system is the only “true” social reality available.
In short, false-consciousness facilitates social control through a form of
ideological pacification of the dominated population by the bourgeoisie.
One ontological question remains unanswered, however: how does this
population accept this pacification process?
To answer this question, one needs a strong version of agency which,
as with structural functionalism, is largely absent from historical mate-
rialism. As mentioned above, historical materialism is generally less
concerned with ethnographic accounts of the realities lived by situated
human agents, while the possibilities afforded by group mobilization
towards change attract much more attention. At the same time, the
negative impacts of unequal power and resource distribution are also
explained with reference to how people suffer within this oppressive
system. Specifically, the effects of capitalism (which again is seen not
as a natural but rather as a historically emergent mechanism of oppres-
sion) on human agency must also be conceptualized as psychological in
nature, effects grouped together within the larger category of alienation,
or a feeling of estrangement or loss of one’s humanity, as one realizes
(s)he cannot escape the oppressive, systemic and mechanistic effects of
social class divisions.
For postmodernist and poststructuralist thinkers, the emphasis on
the capitalist mode of production in historical materialism offers a
hopelessly reductive and essentializing view of social life. They are espe-
cially dissatisfied with “its attempt to give a comprehensive overview of
history and society” (Layder, 2006: 40), or a “grand narrative.” Much
of this critique, however, was originally not aimed at Marx himself but
rather at one of his followers, Louis Althusser, whose occasional critique
of structuralism itself led in part to his influential and controversial
work on ideology. Specifically originating from Foucault—a student of
Althusser—critiques of historical materialism and of ideology as false-
consciousness centered on the problems posed by the notion of ideology
as a “truth-excluding” mechanism. Seliger (1977) and Thompson (2007)
argue that, while ideology can reasonably be understood as a distorted
representation of reality, conceptualizing ideology as false-consciousness
transforms ideology into a tool used exclusively by the bourgeoisie,
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 117

thus characterizing the proletariat essentially as ideologically neutral.

This assumes the existence of a non-ideological state of affairs opposed
to ideology. The authors also argue that false-consciousness reduces
ideology to an instrument of coercion and deceit, leaving other impor-
tant aspects and effects of ideology (e.g., ideology as sense-making
process, ideology as a potential force for emancipation) unexplained.
Although important to the development of twentieth century thought
and to realism in particular, Marx’s work should be considered with
caution for the following additional reasons. Firstly, and as with struc-
turalism in general, historical materialism fails to integrate the creative
and generative powers of agency: “The individual is thought to be simply
a ‘support’ (although perhaps an unwitting one), of the economic and
political system in which she or he is enmeshed through ideological
delusion” (Layder, 2006: 48). Secondly, poststructuralist accusations of
“grand narrative” are justified to some extent in that much of the devel-
opment of historical materialism has been a rationalist endeavour fuelled
much more by theoretical deliberation than by empirical investigation
(notably ethnographic research). Thirdly, it is also clear to ethnographers
that power in society does not come exclusively from a single source,
as Foucault demonstrated convincingly by presenting power as “cap-
illary” acting through the social body, as part of our everyday social
practices. Although most realist thinkers would moderately object by
stressing that power occasionally does come from the top—e.g., wartime
acts, government interventions in the economy, a student being expelled
from a school for bad behaviour, etc.—it is undeniable that power
also unfolds in multiple directions at the local level, notably in the
ways we place expectations upon each other and regulate each other’s
behaviours. Fourthly, and closely related to the three previous points,
by reducing social life to economic production, historical materialism
overlooks much of the complexity of social life. As Layder (2006: 56)
underlines, “the range of cultural and counter-cultural activities that are
a routine feature of the everyday world indicates a diversity of forms of
life that go well beyond the exclusive and narrow terms of a critique of
political economy.”
At the same time, Marx’s work keeps on being discussed to this
day precisely because it has produced much valuable insight. Unlike
118 J. Bouchard

Parsonian functionalism, for instance, historical materialism is not a

paradigm of the status quo, as it affords room for resistance: “the indi-
vidual has a ‘dialectical’ relationship with the social order and may
actively resist its effects. The space for individual resistance, avoidance
and dissent is created because social relations contain contradictions
and there is never a perfect ‘fit’ between the individual and the social
order” (Layder, 2006: 53). However, how resistance is conceptualized
within historical materialism remains problematic nonetheless, largely
because, as mentioned above, it is not equipped with a strong version
of agency. While we can argue that false-consciousness largely overlooks
human agents’ creativity and powers, we must also add to our critique
that ideological effects on populations are never determining or total-
izing (Bouchard, 2017): contradictions between ideological structures
and empirical reality are bound to emerge throughout people’s varie-
gated experiences of social life. This important understanding of ideology
and human emancipation occupies a somewhat uncomfortable place in
Marx’s work, yet gains greater importance within ontological perspectives
developed subsequently, particularly in the groundbreaking work by the
critical discourse analyst Norman Fairclough.
In terms of the study of language, historical materialism has influenced
developments mainly within the domain of critical discourse analysis,
notably by conceptualizing language as a tool with which to achieve ideo-
logical effects (see Vološinov, 1986). Marx’s analysis, for one, was largely
focused on economic, political and historical texts, making him one of
the first critical discourse analysts in history. Fairclough and Graham
(2002) describe Marx’s view of language as sharing a dialectical relation-
ship with material social processes. Within AL more specifically, Block
(2015) calls for greater appreciation of Marxist principles, arguing that
AL is marked by a sort of social class denial:

What there has been, to be more precise, is social class erasure, as social
class has tended to receive little or no attention in publications that deal
with issues around identity and social life. And where it actually is intro-
duced into the equation, this is almost always done in a very cursory,
partial, and superficial way. (p. 2, emphasis original)
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 119

This view is also expressed by Block et al. (2012), who provide an

insightful and timely analysis of neoliberalism in AL scholarship. Specif-
ically with regards to sociolinguistic research, Block (2015: 14) sees a
rather generalized social class myopia among AL scholars:

It is difficult to study linguistic variation of any kind without linking it to

larger social structures, something which Hymes (1974) argued for long
ago. What sense does an analysis of language socialization make if no link
is made to how all social phenomena are linked to the economic base
of society (e.g., the means of production, in Marxist terms)? How can
one analyze immersion education without considering how it intersects
with the division of society along class lines? And, is it even possible
to develop a thorough understanding of the apparent choices made by
people with regard to speaking one language or another, or speaking one
variety or another, without acknowledging and exploring how ongoing
communication is always enmeshed in the material existences of those
making these choices?

A realist take on the issues raised by Block (himself a critical realist)

would suggest that the main value of historical materialism to AL
scholarship is its focus on underlying causal mechanisms. However, for
Marxism only one mechanism matters—the capitalist mode of produc-
tion—whereas critical realists would rather look at multiple intersecting
mechanisms at play in the production of both society-wide and localized
social phenomena.
In the next section, I summarise symbolic interactionism, a radically
different ontological perspective from that of Marx and Parsons due to
its departure from the notion of generative mechanisms and its marked
emphasis on local realities in the production of social life.

Symbolic Interactionism
Originally developed by Mead (1967), and further developed by Blumer
(1969), one of his students, the central concern in symbolic interac-
tionism is to counter structuralism’s perceived dehumanizing potential
by placing the individual as the centre of social life. The focal point
120 J. Bouchard

of interest for symbolic interactionism is two-fold: how people generate

and share meanings and how these symbolic worlds shape individual
behaviour in return, thus making symbolic interactionism “the approach
within social science that seeks most explicitly to develop Weber’s insights
about the meaningfulness of social action” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 36).
Society is conceptualized not as an objective reality (as in structuralism)
but rather as subjectively constructed, or as an aggregate of local inter-
actions between people. Society, in other words, is a shared project: it
exists and is preserved through ongoing interaction between individ-
uals. From this perspective, the notions of structure and system become
problematic because they are understood as both reducing and deter-
mining situated agentive acts. Sealey and Carter (2004: 8) explain this
aspect of symbolic interactionism thus: “social structures are sometimes
reduced to the status of convenient sociological descriptions […] or
viewed as simply the accumulation of habit and routine; or as the discur-
sive product of social conversation.” Therefore, social realities such as
norms, traditions, collective beliefs and so forth gain salience to explana-
tions of social processes when understood as emerging from networks of
relationships, particularly as they are “filtered” through many individuals’
sense-making capacity. In this way, symbolic interactionism locks society
and people together. Society does exist since it is already there when
people are born into it; however, its antecedence and causal potentials are
of limited concern. Rather, what matters most is society’s “ongoing-ness”
as experienced empirically through human interaction. Layder (2006:
73) explains that, from a symbolic interactionist perspective, “if there
is a general merger of the individual and society then it follows that the
distinction is a false one in the first place. Similarly, if there is no such
thing as society apart from the individuals who produce it in their daily
interactions, then the so-called distinction between macro and micro
processes is also bogus.” It is on these conceptual grounds that symbolic
interactionism can be identified as providing a flattened ontology.
In symbolic interactionism, since causal primacy is concentrated on
individuals, and that the “social” is conceptualized merely as an aggre-
gate of individual realities, structure is then robbed of its distinct and
emergent properties by being reduced to a mere product of agen-
tive processes, making the distinction between structure and agency
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 121

irrelevant altogether. This problem has attracted a great deal of justi-

fied criticisms against symbolic interactionism. With its impoverished
view of structures, symbolic interactionism unfortunately cannot afford
accounts of the emergent properties of collective decision-making, insti-
tutional processes and structural and cultural constraints and enable-
ments (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 8). In this sense, symbolic interac-
tionism is ill-equipped to deal with phenomena such as an educational
system, the global language learning/teaching industry, and of course
critical sociological and sociolinguistic issues such as language shift,
social injustice/oppression, intersecting inequalities, and quite impor-
tantly, why inequalities persist in society and throughout history (i.e.,
their antecedence and enduring properties). The only possible answer
offered by symbolic interactionism is that these are the outcomes of
“joint activities,” a clearly unsatisfactory answer (Layder, 2006).
Symbolic interactionism—as another instantiation of empiricism—
is also afflicted by a form of theory-blindness, because underlying
generative mechanisms and structural realities do not constitute impor-
tant analytical categories. Layder (2006) highlights the shared interest
in the process of situated and fragmentary meaning construction in
symbolic interactionism, humanism and postmodernism, and identifies
their “anti-theoretical strain and […] distrust of the search for objective
truth which is the hallmark of conventional scientific enquiry” (p. 73).
This, as we saw earlier, considerably complicates the study and critique
of systemic forms of inequalities. Moreover, a denial of structure does
not necessarily make way for a more comprehensive account of agency,
one of the central purposes of symbolic interactionism:

Agency too is a problematic concept. Some, at least, of the problems are

reflections of the problem of structure: some more voluntarist thinkers
see agency as the exercise of human reflexivity, of conscious decision
making about our actions, while other, more determinist authors see it as
flowing unthinkingly from sets of dispositions that are acquired, equally
unthinkingly, from our social context. (Elder-Vass, 2010: 2)
122 J. Bouchard

In other words, agency tends to be developed within symbolic inter-

actionism through the limiting conceptual lenses of either human
rationality or socialization.
Symbolic interactionism’s emphasis on language, symbolic communi-
cation and meaning-making has attracted a great deal of attention in
AL and sociolinguistics research, largely because of their shared interest
in language use. Specifically, symbolic interactionism has influenced
much research in pragmatics and conversational analysis, with grounded
theory offering a well-known conceptual parallel. Dillon (2013) asso-
ciates grounded theory with symbolic interactionism within AL research,
and explains its general methodological approach thus:

The analyst’s work is to view the problem under study through a flex-
ible lens, free to shift as new knowledge is gained, in order to correctly
situate the phenomena under study. Because of […] its focus on under-
standing the nature of experience, the importance placed on generating
theory grounded in reality, and the belief that researchers must get into
the field in order to understand phenomena, GT [grounded theory] is
termed fourth generation symbolic interactionism. (p. 2421, emphasis mine)

Interactionist research on second language acquisition was developed

notably by Pica (1994) into a perspective which, as Gass (2002) explains,
is mainly interested in elucidating meaning-making processes within
second language learning environments, and how “learners use their
linguistic environment to build their knowledge of the second language”
(p. 170).
Again, however, symbolic interactionism’s flattened ontology consid-
erably limits its potential to inform AL research beyond immediate
face-to-face interaction. For example, if researchers are interested in
explaining how specific phrases are used by interlocutors to achieve
specific effects (e.g., politeness), the only available sociological insight
is the notion that people are differently positioned with regards to power
and control over the communicative situation. It does not explain power,
or why people are differently positioned in relation to it. Furthermore,
the underlying mechanisms which lead to and reinforce particular social
positions, and how these affect the lives of their occupants, are left
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 123

unexplained (López, 2001). As such, symbolic interactionism is only

able to provide a surface understanding of interaction, and fails to
explain how interaction is related to action and how both discourses
and actions can be—and often are—structured . As the next section
reveals, these considerable shortcomings are even more pronounced in
phenomenology/ethnomethodology.

Phenomenology/Ethnomethodology
Originating in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, phenomenology is
mainly concerned with individual consciousness and how humans expe-
rience the world empirically, i.e., through sensory perception. Similar
to symbolic interactionism, phenomenology also reacts against structural
functionalism, particularly its emphasis on external social forces shaping
human actions. At the same time, we can find echoes of Parsons’ views
on social consensus in phenomenology, although these tend to reduce
consensus to localized agreement between people rather than agentive
consent with broader social and cultural forces. In phenomenology, “the
common, shared nature of social life is attributed to the ‘shared’ norma-
tive commitments that social actors are given by the processes of social-
ization” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 39). To elucidate how people deploy
this shared normative commitment within local contexts, researchers
adhering to phenomenology specifically look at how people perceive
society, and how these multiple perspectives help them make sense of
their lives, with the resources available to them in the moment. Layder
(2006) argues with regards to phenomenology that the ways in which
people experience reality is crucial to how they formulate goals and act
intentionally, reflexively and purposefully.
With this emphasis on individual consciousness and localized shared
commitment comes an even more radical rejection of the historical and
material conditions of social reality. While symbolic interactionism prior-
itizes social explanations emerging from analysis of human interaction,
phenomenology’s focus on the individual is even more pronounced, since
what matters to social analysis is how the world appears to people and
how they make sense of it. Human consciousness, from this perspective,
124 J. Bouchard

has two important social components. First, it is partly social because

“knowledge is socially distributed in the sense that different people know
different things because they deal with different things on a day-to-day
basis (accountants know more about accounting than they do about
nursing)” (Layder, 2006: 93). Secondly, individual consciousness also
depends on shared knowledge—i.e., the fact that we can understand
each other through the sharing of common-sense ideas—with language
understood as revealing the social aspects of individual consciousness.
In addition, the process of typification is seen as allowing agents to
collectively develop and share worldviews through social interaction.
Fernandez (2016: 41, emphasis mine) explains typification thus:

Whenever we experience something as something – which is to say, when-

ever we experience any meaningful entity at all – we necessarily experience
it as belonging to a type, kind, or category. [Typification] gives order to
an otherwise chaotic field of awareness, allowing us to discriminate and
make sense of the myriad people, objects, events, and situations that we
encounter in everyday life.

Typification thus involves tacit or common-sense knowledge shared

in everyday communication. Although there is some degree of recogni-
tion in phenomenology of social influences on individual consciousness,
the social never stretches very far beyond the individual. Structural
and cultural constraints and enablements are not of much interest to
phenomenologists, who see them largely as mere products of academic
discourse. Objective reality is thus “bracketed,” requiring individuals
to suspend all considerations of the natural world in order to fully
concentrate on their experiences.
While Husserl’s phenomenology offers a philosophical viewpoint, the
study of individual consciousness is conducted through ethnomethod-
ology, which borrows principles directly from symbolic interactionism to
elucidate how people construct common-sense notions through everyday
interaction. This interaction, in turn, is seen as including not only the
use of language but also and rather importantly, non-verbal means of
communication. Ethnomethodologists, however, see meaning as an even
more fragile, fluid and constantly negotiated phenomenon than symbolic
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 125

interactionists, requiring ongoing fine-tuning and adjustments by inter-

actants. Layder (2006: 101) explains that, from an ethnomethodologist
viewpoint, “the orderliness of interaction has to be understood as an
ongoing ‘accomplishment’ created by people from within situations.
Much importance is therefore attached to the accounts that people give
of their behaviour, that is, how they describe and explain what they are,
or were, doing in particular situations.” Together, phenomenology and
ethnomethodology help researchers unpack the complex internal lives
of human agents, thus offering a marked humanist perspective into the
social sciences. Layder (2006: 97) argues, however, that

this concentration on the individual’s experience is at the expense of

an awareness of the influences of wider and more impersonal structural
factors. […] in phenomenological sociology there is very little analysis,
if any, of social forms like organisations, political and economic institu-
tions and their structures of power and so on, which are partly (though
not wholly) independent of the activities of particular individuals and
groups.

With phenomenology/ethnomethodology, the rich internal lives of

individuals matter most, but they are lives conceptualized as unfolding
independently from an objective reality. Knowledge and symbolic
communication instead are seen as constituting the very fabric of society,
further reinforcing an aggregative understanding of society as a mere
collection of individual realities. This unfortunately produces an onto-
logically flattened view of individual human experience, for as Archer
and Tritter (2000: 8) point out, “one good reason why we cannot reduce
collective entities away is precisely because people think and act in terms
of them.” Harré (2001: 28) elaborates on this point to argue that

it is precisely because we are human beings that we are concerned to get

rid of structures such as Nazism, bureaucracy and the capitalism which
is threatening the very life of the planet. It is because we want to redeem
the situation that we have to take seriously the ontological question of
whether structures, either unconscious or social, are real.
126 J. Bouchard

Ethnomethodology’s ontologically flattened viewpoint, according to

Layder (2006: 103), leads to a fundamental contradiction:

ethnomethodology has two rather contradictory views on structural

phenomena. The first underlines (and probably overstates) the impor-
tance of human knowledgeability. This suggests that, unless people are
aware or somehow conscious of structural factors like power or class,
such factors have no place in social analysis. Researchers and theorists
who use structural concepts are operating with creations of their own
imagination. They are not real empirical phenomena. The second view
somewhat contradicts this by saying that anyway, even if lay people (as
opposed to sociologists) believe structural factors like class and power to
be real, this does not mean that they are real. The first view takes the lay
perspective to be the most authoritative while the second denies this.

In short, when phenomenologists refer to social structures they tend to

present them as empirical phenomena, as they appear to human agents.
Although this “view from the bottom” is justified by phenomenologists
as a way to overcome the said structure–agency “dichotomy,” one has to
seriously question this claim, given that only one side of the equation
is favoured over the other. In the ongoing perceived tension between
structure and agency, the latter clinches an almost total victory. As Layder
(2006: 108) points out with regards to phenomenology,

To reduce power, institutions, organisations and the distribution of

various resources to local practices is to confuse and conflate very different
kinds of social phenomena. It leads to a one-dimensional vision of society
and a form of social analysis that lacks penetration, explanatory power
and empirical scope. Such a position does not transcend the macro–micro
debate.

Instead, to an even more radical extent, phenomenology and

ethnomethodology limit our ability as researchers to develop a fuller
understanding of the interaction between distinct and emergent parts
of society as well as the local, institutional and global causal mechanisms
at play.
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 127

In AL scholarship, ethnomethodologists essentially see the systemic

and formal aspects of language as unimportant; what matters is the
study of localized social interaction. Zlatev (2010) posits phenomenology
as a potentially new philosophy for cognitive linguistics grounded
in experience, with a particular emphasis on the role played by the
living body. More concerned with sociolinguistic microanalysis which,
according to Erikson (2001: 177): “can show us how the more and
less solidary kinds of relations among interlocutors come to happen
interactionally,” ethnomethodologists prefer methodological perspectives
including narrative inquiry, autoethnography and conversation analysis,
three perspectives often used in teacher education and training. Defining
this approach to AL research is Barkhuizen (2008), who suggests a three-
dimensional narrative space including the participants in the story, the
time when the story takes place and the physical context where the
story takes place. Johnson and Golombek (2002: 3) describe this type
of inquiry as “an epistemology of practice that characterizes teachers as
legitimate knowers, as producers of legitimate knowledge, and as capable
of constructing and sustaining their own professional development over
time.” With autoethnography, we see researchers engaged in deeply
reflexive narratives unpacking not their experiences per se but rather their
own understandings of these experiences. Together, conversation analysis,
narrative inquiry and autoethnography are highly reflexive approaches
to social research, focused on the process of meaning-making, whereby
participants deploy personal practical knowledge of their experiences to
articulate and interpret stories of practice, with the aim of guiding future
behaviour. Given these important features, ethnomethodology is often
presented as an inherently transformational approach.
However, these claims are somewhat presumptuous. For one, while
people’s perceptions of structural and cultural forces are crucial to our
understanding of precisely how the latter constrain and/or enable agen-
tive movements, subjective knowledge does not actually explain these
forces. As Erikson (2001: 177) states,

we still do not have a good way of accounting for why […] interlocu-
tors are sometimes more and less cordial, more and less charitable in
their ‘readings’ of one another – within occasions of interaction and from
128 J. Bouchard

one occasion to the next and when the interlocutors come from similar
demographic backgrounds or different ones. The variability in how local
interlocutors treat one another is empirically apparent but not yet well
explained theoretically.

For example, I might understand the Stock Exchange as a specific

social phenomenon with particular effects in the world, but my under-
standing of it bears no relevance at all to what the Stock Exchange
actually does or does not do or how and why it affects my life, nor
does my understanding of it radically affects the influences of broader
economic forces on my situated existence. In other words, while it is
entirely possible for the Stock Exchange to impact my ability to earn a
living directly, my experience and understanding of it can only influence
it to an extremely minimal extent. I can learn to make different choices,
of course, but ethnomethodology cannot help me understand why my
choices are profoundly structured. In other words, while our lives are
profoundly influenced by broader social processes, our understandings
and experiences of these do not constitute evidence (or accurate reflec-
tions) of the latter, nor are they of much consequence to these. Despite
its emphasis on human agency, ethnomethodology offers a considerably
flattened ontology, which means that it can only offer a very narrow
perspective into both local and broader social realities.
In addition, narratives of personal experiences can be formulated
differently at different times, with different emphases and effects. Within
the context of language teacher identity, Norton and Early (2011: 421)
are clear in that narratives “do not necessarily create a coherent sense
of self, but highlight diverse identity positions in everyday interactive
practices, and are highly significant for identity work.” What needs
to be added here is that what people say and do are not necessarily
homologous phenomena. This is not to dismiss people as disingen-
uous or merely “liberal with the truth”; rather, it is a postmodernist
stance which acknowledges human agency’s limitations, either in terms
of their computational capacity, sense-making capacity, time and interest
(Gigerenzer, 2002; Simon, 1972), or in their ability to formulate a
vision of the world with much ontological depth. Larsen-Freeman and
Cameron (2008: 236) similarly question the modernist assumption that
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 129

agency “is always rational, that decisions are always based on accurate
information, that human behaviour is immune to cultural and individual
differences, and that it does not change.” Although phenomenology
rejects any claims of social phenomena being fixed, in placing agen-
tive rationality at the centre of social inquiry it paradoxically reaffirms
a positivist/modernist view of human agency.
These considerable problems and limitations remind us of the impor-
tance for AL scholars not to reduce social realities to mere identity work.
Contra Maulucci et al. (2015), it is also crucial to underline the limita-
tions of narrative inquiry in revealing the complex dialectical relationship
between agency and structure. Sealey and Carter (2004: 43) identify both
a radical empiricist angle and a radical moral neutrality in ethnomethod-
ology and conversation analysis thus: “by forcing attention on to the
practices of meaning production, rather than the meanings themselves
[…] these approaches avoid the problem of truth.” Consequently, it is
misguided for AL researchers adopting narrative inquiry, autoethnog-
raphy and conversation analysis to claim that these approaches allow for
the exploration of the socio-historically situated experiences of individ-
uals or small groups (e.g., Drew, 2005) since, again, these approaches
cannot provide conceptually robust accounts of mechanisms including
socio-historical forces. This means that they cannot explain why things
at both local and societal levels are the way they are and not otherwise.

Postmodernism/Poststructuralism
Although I have already discussed postmodernist and poststructuralist
AL earlier in the book, considering (a) its broad popularity in AL, (b)
postmodernist/poststructuralist AL scholars’ often inconsistent uses of
postmodernist/poststructuralist principles and (c) fundamental theoret-
ical and methodological difficulties these two perspectives impose, it is
worth revisiting this particular (and surprisingly dominant) strand of
social theory here, in part to understand its contribution to the struc-
ture–agency debate, but also identify a broad range of problems largely
left unaddressed within AL scholarship.
130 J. Bouchard

While structuralism and historical materialism emphasize structural

constraints, and symbolic interactionism and phenomenology emphasize
the creative sense-making potential of human beings, both strands do
recognize to some extent agency and structure as ontologically different
phenomena (e.g., human agents are seen as conscious, and so they must be
ontologically different from structure). However, postmodernism (more
closely associated with art and literature critique) and poststructuralism
as its recent offshoot (more closely associated with philosophy and social
research) reject agency/structure discussions as products of foundation-
alism, dismissing these as “grand narratives” or metanarratives. The
denial of ontological properties of structure and agency is thus radically
more pronounced. Sayer (2000: 72) explains the postmodernist aver-
sion to grand narratives by stating that they are perceived as “distinctive
of modernism and ‘the Enlightenment project’, in which the construc-
tion of a grand, overarching system would allow humankind to rid
itself of illusion and domination, and control its destiny and progress.”
According to postmodernists, research itself is a form of discourse, which
means that it is never neutral. Because grand narratives are said to impose
a particular order onto the world by identifying a “center” (or a main
engine) of social life, they are understood as privileging the voices of their
authors (Slater, 1992). By advocating the notion of a decentered human
subject, postmodernists/poststructuralists present scientific knowledge as
deeply discursive and power-laden, and therefore as necessitating critical
discursive deconstruction. Alternatively, they present social phenomena
as embedded in relationship webs, not navigating around any particular
centre such as the individual human being or institutions, but rather
localized and dispersed throughout society. This view is closely linked to
Foucault’s (1979, 1980) notion of power as capillary, which occupies a
prominent place in postmodernist/poststructuralist ontology.
Postmodernism emerged in large part out of what is commonly called
the “linguistic turn” in philosophy and the social sciences, and out of
recognition that both society and people are not fixed or patterned but
rather characterized by constant change, fluidity and a decentered hetero-
geneity. Instead of looking at people as autonomous rational beings,
postmodernists/poststructuralists concentrate on the discourse of ratio-
nality. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 45) explain, “this fragmentary self
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 131

spells […] the end of any unitary or mechanical relation between human
subjects and the class or power positions they occupy – this is the
‘post’ element of poststructuralism.” Postmodernism presents the human
subject as a social construction “produced through social discourses
(language, thought, symbolic representations) which position subjects in
a field of power relations and within particular sets of practices” (Layder,
2006: 117). Also within poststructuralism, ideology is no longer the
ubiquitous false-consciousness imposed by the powerful (constituting
one of the main divergences between the philosophies of Althusser and
Foucault), but rather part of a vast network of intersecting discourses
and practices, themselves outcomes of everyday competition and unequal
power exchanges. Within postmodernism, instead of trying to explain
human sense-making processes and motivations, researchers concentrate
on discourse because they see it as revealing, more importantly to their
eyes, the effects of power on how people construct identities and engage
in particular social practices.
Again, discourses are the main social movers, not people. Of partic-
ular relevance to postmodernist inquiry are localized manifestations of
discourse, because social life is itself reduced to a discursive practice.
Embedded in discursive contexts which stipulate specific sets of prac-
tices, people are “subjectified” by discourses throughout socialization
(Sealey & Carter, 2004). With poststructuralism, Clegg (2006: 314)
rightfully argues that “both ontology and epistemology are reduced to
effects of power. The result is perspectivism.” With discourse now occu-
pying centre stage, discourse and practice are fused together, becoming
a single analytical unit, and sociological inquiry then becomes invested
in studying the effects of discourse rather than its content. This radical
shift introduces numerous conceptual and methodological problems. As
Sealey and Carter (2004: 48, emphasis mine) ask,

how do we establish empirically what the effects of a discourse are? How

do we distinguish these from the effects of other discourses? [This] makes
difficult analysis of their specific properties and the ways in which these
may influence practices, and at the same time needing to render them
distinct in order to account for people’s decisions to construct certain
forms of identity or to utilize certain types of narratives. The status of
132 J. Bouchard

discourse is indeterminate: it is both a constitutive practice and yet it

circulates as a resource.

The reduction of social reality to discourse, or discursive effects to

be more precise, is considerably problematic and limiting. For one, if
society and the people and phenomena within it are discursive construc-
tions, then why is it extremely difficult for people to construct a better,
nicer, more equitable, more sustainable society simply by modifying their
approach to discourse? If people are oppressed, and if oppression is a
social construction, surely by “changing the conversation” will people
overcome oppression, but why isn’t it the case? If sexism, racism, homo-
phobia, ageism, ableism, etc. are mere discourses, how can we account
for their antecedent, systemic and enduring properties, including their
marked influence on material, objective realities, including the bodies
of flesh-and-blood human beings? Answering these questions would
require, as a starting point, acknowledgement of the following realist
concepts: (1) society is structured , partly as an emergent outcome of
human interaction, itself being in relation to an objective, material
reality; which means that (2) social structures and people are ontolog-
ically different; which means that (3) social structures possess antecedent
and enduring properties and powers not possessed by people, prop-
erties and powers beyond situated interaction; which also means that
(4) people, including their discursive activities, are also structured. As
Elder-Vass (2012: 138) cogently points out, there are important links
between natural and social (including discursive) realities which are left
unaccounted for in postmodernism:

It is not language alone that produces our sense of the kinds of things the
world contains. On the contrary, the world itself influences that sense,
and it can do so because there are natural kinds. While there are various
types of natural kinds, all of them depend in some way on the micro-
structural features – which we may call essences – that are common to
members of the kind, and the similar causal properties that arise from
these micro-structural features. Our categories – linguistic signs – arise
from social processes that are sensitive to our shared empirical experiences
of these properties. As a result they can sometimes reflect these natural
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 133

kinds and thereby refer to features of the world that exist independently
of our categorisation of them.

In addition to exaggerating the importance of discourse to social

life, poststructuralism offers a much-weakened view of human agency,
since through the effects of discourse agency becomes essentially deter-
mined by (unequal) discursive exchanges of power. Although statistically
speaking Norton and De Costa (2018) are justified in claiming that
the poststructuralist view of identity has become the approach of choice
for researchers looking at identity and L2 learning, the problem is that
identity-based AL research requires a strong version of agency, something
which poststructuralism simply does not provide. As Pennycook (2019:
34) points out, poststructuralism “has been critiqued precisely for its
lack of attention to agency (from a poststructuralist point of view, the
subject is a product of rather than a producer of discourse).” It is there-
fore paradoxical for postmodernists AL scholars to argue that agency is an
essential feature of language learners, and that poststructuralism allows
for a privileged view of it.
In my view, the most significant contribution of postmodernism to
social theory is the Foucauldian notion of power as permeating society
from within it (Foucault, 1979, 1980). Accordingly, people are not
“structured” by some kind of omnipresent and overseeing social force,
but rather conditioned into behaving in certain ways and not others
because of the gaze of others (Foucault, 1994). To say that power is
capillary is to say that it comes from multiple sources, operating between
people in local settings, within specific contexts and for specific purposes.
This view of power, it must be underlined, has considerably (and in
my view, rather productively) influenced the development of recent crit-
ical social research by radically recalibrating research strategies, including
how to identify the main agent(s) involved, the data to be analyzed and
how to analyze it, and how to develop emancipatory programmes. In
short, by bringing power from the top down to the level of people, post-
modernism has drastically influenced how social problems are explained,
and how transformative strategies are developed and presented. Martin
Rojo (2017: 77) raises important methodological issues arising from the
134 J. Bouchard

adoption of a Foucauldian view on power, two of which bear relevance

to the current argument:

First, if […] power is not concentrated in a single place, such as the state
apparatus, but is, instead, ubiquitous and at once visible and invisible,
present and hidden, research cannot focus merely on state policies, insti-
tutional regimes, and the discourses of the elites, but should rather focus
on a multiplicity of nodal points and/or relations in which power is exer-
cised. Second, if power is not a thing or substance but rather a network
of relations […] and if no one, strictly speaking, has an official right to
power and, as a result, power is not always exercised in a single direction,
with some people on one side and some on the other, it will be difficult
to ascertain who holds power in a precise sense.

However, in prioritizing this capillary view of power, postmodernism

does overlook the realities of state power, political oppression, legal
systems, armies and police forces, ministries of education, etc., as other
consequential causal forces in society. Concentrating exclusively on
power coming from everywhere and unfolding between people through
discourse introduces, in my view, an unproductive form of relativism
which does not allow researchers to distinguish between different sources
of oppression. It also limits researchers’ ability to conceptualize oppres-
sion in terms of systems, which is of central importance to critical social
research, as third-wave feminists have convincingly argued with regards
to intersectionality (e.g., Clegg, 2006; Crenshaw, 1991; Francis, 1999;
McNay, 2000; Walby, 2007). As Norton and De Costa (2018: 94) point
out, “intersectionality is important because social categories are often
overlapping and interdependent.” At the same time, and this must be
underlined, a poststructuralist take on intersectionality is considerably
limiting because, by defining oppression as a mere discourse, we lose
sight of its systemic properties.
Within poststructuralism, the capillary view of power—which has
important conceptual benefits, let’s not forget—unfortunately tends to
be interpreted by scholars to mean that discourse is power, and that it
constructs not only knowledge but also the knower (Erikson, 2001). This
problem is noted by the feminist scholar Clegg (2006: 322), who stresses
that
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 135

at the concrete level, if the and/and logic of poststructuralism is to be read

as anything more than a playful aside designed to tease the ‘other’ who
cannot think outside outmoded binaries, then the question of how we
might theorize agency as other than (just) a fiction becomes important.
The recalcitrance of the question is not just theoretical.

McNay (2000) similarly warns against what she calls the negative
formulation of the subject in poststructuralist feminism. Clegg (2006:
309–310) explains that “agency, both individual and collective, is at the
heart of the feminist, and indeed, all radical political projects. […] post-
structuralism as an ontology and epistemology is incapable of providing
the tools for the theorization of personal and collective agency, and self-
hood.” In defense, however, poststructuralists including Davies (1997)
argue that in critical, emancipatory projects the discursive construction
of the self is central, the core premise being that people can emanci-
pate themselves if they are discursively reconstructed as powerful. This
response, however, is unsatisfactory because it leaves three important
questions unanswered:

1. Who actually does the deconstructing and reconstructing of

discourses and subjectivities, what resources are drawn from in this
process, and where do these come from?
2. Are power inequalities only discursive, or do they also include non-
discursive, material elements?
3. Does discourse, as a cultural and ideational social phenomenon, actu-
ally possess causal powers to reshape social and individual realities so
profoundly?

In other words, there seems to be a general misunderstanding among

postmodernists of (a) the properties and powers of discourse, (b) the
decentered self and (c) capillary power.
In response, critical postmodernists merely move back to a symbolic
interactionist standpoint to reiterate that discourse is constitutive of
social phenomena. Once this basis is accepted, clarifying whether local-
ized shifts in discourse practices actually lead to broader social eman-
cipation matters less than the intellectual project of analyzing everyday
136 J. Bouchard

discourses and practices, specifically how discourse is said to allow for

alternative identity positions. While power relationships and acts of
resistance retain some analytical salience, the point in poststructuralist
critique is to reveal exactly how these are fragmented and negotiated
through discourse. This does not make much sense, for once we reach
the Foucauldian idea that knowledge itself is a product of power relation-
ships—a Nietzschean concept at its origin (Clegg, 2006)—the human
subject then becomes a product of social processes rather than the
producer of social realities, which again considerably undermines the
agent’s potential to achieve emancipation.
Clearly, systems of oppression in society—and one’s experiences of
them—cannot be reversed simply by “changing the conversation.” Rich
people are, after all, not simply “better talkers” or more aware of the
discursive forces at play in society than poor people, and persistent
social problems such as domestic violence and the oppression of minori-
ties around the world are not resolved simply by changing the way we
talk about them. Although there is no doubt that phenomena such
as identities, oppression and parochialism are, to a large extent, social
constructions, they have real—i.e., objective—effects on real people in
real contexts. Once we recognize this, we must then move beyond the
confines of discourse and ask different sets of theoretical and method-
ological questions than those proposed by poststructuralism. In this
sense, I entirely agree with Clegg’s (2006: 314) nuanced recalibration
of critical social research:

I am not seeking to deny or undermine the power of deconstruction

as a productive methodology, indeed not everyone who employs these
devises is a poststructuralist, but what I do want to claim is that at the
meta-theoretical level poststructuralism’s ontological claims make theo-
rizing agency problematic. […] The problem of poststructuralism lies not
in the uses to which it has been put in much of the work on gender
and education, but rather with the historical project of poststructuralist
thought as such, whose dynamic runs counter to the very idea of agency
(despite hints of a counter direction in the late Foucault).

In their critical endeavours, poststructuralist researchers are indeed

faced with the problem of “squeezing in” agency within a profoundly
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 137

anti-humanist ontology. Clegg (2006: 315) explains this problem with

reference to Foucault’s later works thus: “in attempting to theorize the
grounds of resistance, he too was beginning to wrestle with how to rein-
state a version of agency through the notion that power acts on some
form of pre-given subject.” In other words, the notion Foucault struggled
with in his later works is precisely the ontologically stratified or layered
nature of social phenomena. If people aim to extricate themselves out
of oppressive situations, they cannot remain “decentered”: they need to
act upon some knowledge of how the world is and how it should be (a
characteristically modernist concept). In order to do so, they must first
have a view of the social realm as ontologically stratified, then reflect on
how to deal with a broad range of structural and cultural constraints and
enablements. As Clegg (2006: 317–318) notes,

while poststructuralist analysis can show the subtle and multifaceted

changes taking place in the discursively constituted possibilities for newer
subjectivities, it cannot disentangle the conditions of possibility for these
new discursive frameworks and the need for carefully derived, historically
specific, forms of generalization. […] what is missing is a convincing
account of how to theorize the relationship between the discursive and
the structural.

Given these fundamental conceptual problems, it is rather confusing

to see postmodernist/poststructuralist sociolinguists and AL scholars
such as García et al. (2017), Kramsch (1998, 2015), Kubota (1999),
Kumaravadivelu (1999), Martin Rojo (2017), (the earlier) Pennycook
(2001) and Shohamy (2006)—to name only a few prominent voices
in our field—more or less claiming that poststructuralism is de rigueur
in critical AL scholarship. Particularly confusing is their shared argu-
ment that, unlike structuralism, poststructuralism somehow helps people
in periphery communities to assert their latent agency (Kumaravadi-
velu, 2006). Within the context of feminist scholarship, Clegg (2006:
313–314) explains why this appropriation is unjustified:

While feminist poststructuralists in their work in education have very

persuasively demonstrated aspects of unfixity, and the fragmented, the
theoretical resource to explore a non-unified, but nonetheless powerful
138 J. Bouchard

sense of self, and the powers that might flow from that self cannot
be found in poststructuralism. At the level of ontology this is because,
despite the seeming openness of the and/and formulation, rather than
either/or, there remains an ontological claim for the primacy of the
discursive, and the non-knowability of a prediscursive self.

More importantly, and as Block (2015) cogently argues, poststruc-

turalist AL research reduces social reality—including the reality of social
oppression—to discursive practices by considering only “the most imme-
diate interaction of individuals and their interpretations and construc-
tions of events and activities in their lives” (p. 27). This is a considerable
conceptual problem because structure can only be understood as an
objectification unfolding either in the minds of social agents and/or
through situated interaction (Bouchard, 2017). Poststructuralist AL
research also overemphasizes the indexical properties of language use
(i.e., the social meanings or implications related to the particular uses of a
language) while mostly sidestepping the referential properties of language
use (i.e., the fact that language also refers to an objective, material reality
beyond discourse).
Perhaps most alarming, the conceptual problems mentioned above
with regards to discourse reveal one of the central contradictions in post-
modernism: since AL researchers need to use language to make knowl-
edge claims about language and its real-world uses, and since language
cannot escape power issues, on what grounds can postmodernists or post-
structuralists formulate any claims about language, discourse, and the
world we live in? As Sayer (2000: 74) points out, “if all knowledge
is fallible, then the critique of foundationalism is as relevant to local
knowledges as it is to grand narratives. Neither epistemology nor anti-
epistemology can help us evaluate the relative qualities of grand theory
and local knowledges. It is an a posteriori matter.” The author adds
that this type of relativism leaves postmodernists unable to distinguish
between emancipatory and racist or fascist discourses on moral terms.
Furthermore, the poststructuralist overemphasis on situated language use
as complex, dynamic, unpredictable, personal and creative, and the asso-
ciated rejection of language policies as contrary to (said) “real” language
in the “real” world (see Pennycook, 2013; Shohamy, 2006) reveal another
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 139

glaring contradiction: poststructuralist AL scholars are able to develop

and publish their ontological claims and worldviews largely because
their work is deemed by an audience of peers as “academically valid”.
This accomplishment not only requires understanding and mastery of
standardized academic discourse (a phenomenon which exists in large
part in books and journals, thus beyond localized discursive practices),
poststructuralist academics must must also share a common commit-
ment to objective knowledge and consider the correspondence theory
of truth as a pivotal factor in the public acceptance of their work. As
a power-laden discourse on the one hand, and as a discourse made up
of ontological claims about the nature of the social world on the other,
postmodernism thus leaves researchers with insurmountable theoretical
and methodological contradictions.
There is also a marked relationist tendency in poststructuralism, a
conceptual problem discussed in the previous chapter with regards to
posthumanism, and in Chapter 6 with regards to some aspects of CDST.
Contrasted against structuralism, historical materialism, symbolic inter-
actionism and even phenomenology, poststructuralism is even more
radical in its relationist outlook. In their attempt to break free of the
(said and much reviled) structure–agency “dualism,” poststructuralist
thinkers have prioritized the relations between things to the point where
phenomena can no longer be understood outside their relations with
other phenomena. If we look at people from a relationist perspective,
for example, we would be compelled to overlook their distinct physical
attributes (e.g., body, brain, etc.), or their distinct worldviews and aspi-
rations, and instead claim that people only have sociological “meaning”
when in relation with other people. This drastically limits researchers’
ability to account for the rich inner and reflexively endowed lives of
flesh-and-blood people. In light of the numerous conceptual problems
it poses, poststructuralism has understandably received a great deal of
criticism in the social sciences, well before its introduction within AL
scholarship.
Recent examples of poststructuralist critical AL research are provided
by García et al. (2017) and by Martin Rojo (2017). Building on
Foucault’s view of power as capillary, the authors describe three technolo-
gies of power: normalization, governmentality and subjectivation (García
140 J. Bouchard

et al., 2017; Martin Rojo, 2017). Instead of being merely an oppres-

sive force (as it tends to be viewed within the Althusserian tradition),
power becomes a productive mechanism whereby subject positions are
generated and performed in everyday interaction, allowing interactants
to understand themselves, their relationships and meanings in a broader
sense. However, the authors cannot escape consideration for power
also as a top-down phenomenon, arguing that a “critical poststruc-
turalist sociolinguistics studies language practices in interrelationship to
the socio-historical, political, and economic conditions that produce
them” (García et al., 2017: 5). As I demonstrated in the previous
chapter, AL researchers including Heller (2001) and Kramsch (2012),
who adopt poststructuralism, are also compelled to make extensive refer-
ences to structural processes and phenomena beyond localized discursive
constructions of self, thus undermining the theoretical basis for their
work.
The view of language as a system of rules and norms is also strongly
rejected by poststructuralist AL scholars, leading some to even ques-
tion the ontological status of language altogether. García et al., (2017:
5) explain that, within poststructuralist sociolinguistics, the focus is on
“how and why speakers perform language practices in a framework of
complexity and unpredictability […] languages are […] linguistic human
work, the consequence of deliberate human intervention and the manip-
ulation of social contexts.” This view is aligned with that of Shohamy
(2006), another poststructuralist sociolinguist who defines language as
“a living organism, which is personal, dynamic, open, energetic and
creative, spreading beyond fixed boundaries towards freedom of expres-
sion” (p. 1). Of central importance here is the concept of translanguaging,
explained by García et al., (2017: 8) as “part of a larger movement within
critical poststructuralist sociolinguistics to challenge bounded notions of
language.” Translanguaging begins with a distinction between place (a
material, physical condition) and space (highlighting the centrality of
practice and the complex production and consumption of social meaning
not through language in a strict sense but rather through discourse).
Accordingly, languages are not anchored in specific geographical localities
but rather used and shared across physical locations. Online communica-
tion offers a very good example of this. Furthermore, associated with the
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 141

concept of translanguaging is the idea that communicators do not simply

reproduce a unitary, fixed and entirely rule-governed language but rather
use a broad range of linguistic and semiotic means at their disposal.
Arguably, these principles have much value to a CDST-informed
realist approach to AL research, although preference for the term space
in poststructuralist sociolinguistics reveals its rather exclusive emphasis
on language use, or the diachronic features of language. This view of
language, however, not only reveals traces of a functionalist, or teleolog-
ical, viewpoint, it also comes at the detriment of the distinct, antecedent
and emergent properties of language as a cultural resource, as well as
the material, objective features associated with language and its real-
world uses (e.g., objects of communication such as signs and printed
materials, the biological preconditions for human speech, etc.). Indeed,
AL scholars including Shohamy (2006) and Pennycook (2013, 2019) at
certain points in their argumentations go as far as to advocate a denial
of the very existence of languages such as English or Japanese and their
relation to geographical locations. While it is entirely appropriate to
claim that English is not a fixed entity found within fixed geographical
boundaries, it is also important to recognize that the locality of specific
languages and language practices also matters a great deal to sociolin-
guistic analysis. After all, specific languages also tend to be used in some
corners of the world and not others. Pushing this argument further,
we can also suggest that academic discourse, although not necessarily
contained within a specific location, nevertheless can be strongly associ-
ated with universities, which are also physical/material realities possessing
non-discursive properties. In short, when emphasizing the fluidity and
complexity involved in language(s) and related behaviours—i.e., their
transitive dimension—it is also important not to dismiss their intransitive
elements in the process.
Although it is perfectly reasonable to observe that languages are
dynamic, open living organisms in a metaphorical sense, it is crucial to
recognize that it is people who are creative, not languages or discourses.
This realization inevitably introduces a radically different view of human
agency than the decentered postmodernist subject. Moreover, while
Shohamy (2006) is entirely justified in presenting languages as personal,
languages are also deeply social. This point is made clearly by Sealey
142 J. Bouchard

and Carter (2014: 273) thus: “one of the properties of languages is that
they enable mutual intelligibility among their speakers, which means
that innovation is always constrained by the need to be understood.”
And to be understood, antecedent cultural points of reference and shared
worldviews (which also possess antecedent properties) are necessary.
The potential for poststructuralist sociolinguistics to deconstruct
discourse to reveal embedded forms of oppression should certainly not
be dismissed, for this potential is essential to a critical sociolinguistics.
García et al., (2017: 6) explain that “the language ideological perspec-
tive adopted by critical poststructuralists disrupts foundational notions
of classical sociolinguistics, including disglossia, the native speaker,
language policy and planning (including concepts such as language
maintenance, language revitalization, language endangerment, language
education policy), and multilingualism.” This is not a trivial contri-
bution to AL scholarship and critical social research. As discussed in
the next chapter, realism integrates to some extent the postmodernist
notion of social reality as constructed, and sees discourse as important to
this process. As such, both poststructuralism and realism are both anti-
foundationalist: they both reject claims of absolute truth. However, and
as Sayer (2000: 69) explains in his critique of postmodernism, “the rejec-
tion of notions of absolute truth need not stop us differentiating between
statements such as: ‘No one died in the Gulf War’ and ‘Thousands died
in the Gulf War’. Nor need we reduce the warrant for such statements to
pure agreement or power.” Layder (1981: 1) makes a related point about
the relationship between structure and agency thus:

The fact that human beings possess certain creative capacities, interactive
skills and intentions which in some sense enables them to apprehend,
come to terms with, and sometimes even ‘fashion’, the social realities in
which they are routinely engaged is by no means compromised by the
parallel idea that interaction is also governed by external constraining
structures.

In short, objective reality and our commitment to understanding it

still matters. Social research is not a simple power game whereby only
some narratives gain the upper hand in some contexts at the detriment
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 143

of others. Science remains our best attempt at understanding a world

which, it must be reiterated, exists partly independently of our under-
standing of it. Furthermore, although postmodernism provides valuable
insight into discourse as mechanism of empowerment/disempowerment,
Sayer (2000: 71) also reminds us that discourse and reality are indeed
different things: “names and concepts are important, but not as impor-
tant as the things (including people and practices) to which they refer.
Which should we fear more: war or the concept of war? What is needed
after the ‘linguistic turn’ is a further ‘practical turn’.” As we will see later
in this chapter, Bourdieu (who, it must be noted, has been erroneously
identified as a poststructuralist thinker by some scholars in our field)
devoted much of his work to the formulation of a theory of practice
which includes, to some extent, an ontologically layered view of social
reality.

Social Constructionism
Social constructionism is also rooted in a rejection of the modernist
project, and as with poststructuralism it questions the socio-political
and historical origins of social phenomena. In doing so, however, this
paradigm is (slightly) less concerned with discourse than with beliefs,
values and people’s understandings of social reality, how they experi-
ence it, and how they negotiate meaning through discourse and social
interaction. However, while symbolic interactionism is micro-oriented,
social constructionism looks at how beliefs and meanings are devel-
oped at the group level. Accordingly, humans actively create, invent
and (re)shape society, making social phenomena the products of inter-
pretive and productive discourses and actions in part by individuals,
but more importantly by groups. Social constructionism also highlights
the multiple roles played by language and discourse in conditioning
beliefs, which then constitute important elements in the formation
of norms, institutions and structures (Elder-Vass, 2010). It encourages
the exploration of how people invest behaviours, objects and processes
with specific meanings through discourse, and how this in turn leads
to the emergence of other behaviours, objects and processes. In short,
144 J. Bouchard

human beings are seen within social constructionism as possessing causal

primacy in shaping social reality, largely through their capacity to use
language, while structures are conceptualized as products of people’s
thoughts, habits, behaviours and discourses.
Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) volume The Social Construction of
Reality is perhaps the most widely quoted social constructionist refer-
ence in the social sciences. In this seminal volume, the authors expanded
on the work of Durkheim and Mead, although they rejected their struc-
ture–agency “dualism” by arguing that, while society is a human product,
humans are a social product. In other words, what matters is how the two
are related, not how they differ. As with postmodernists and poststruc-
turalists, the structure–agency debate is seen by social constructionists as
an artificial sociological issue largely dependent on the (said) inadequate
language of sociologists. Layder (2006: 141) explains that, within social
constructionism,

false distinctions between individuals and society, subject and object,

inner and outer and so on, are abandoned in favour of the idea of inter-
dependent chains or social networks between acting human beings. […]
There is no separate (or pre-social) individual: people are always inti-
mately interwoven with others through the interdependency chains that
form the fabric of society.

As such, there is a marked relationist tendency within social construc-

tionism. One of the conceptual implications is that, while agency gains
the upper hand over structure in social constructionism, the agent
remains very much a recipient or experiencer of socialization. The
problem with identifying socialization as the main force behind human
agency, as Hamlin (2002) argues, is that it still does not explain the
sense-making process necessary for agents to believe or act in certain
ways and not others, a crucial element if we want to understand why
people either follow social rules/norms or “do otherwise.” As the author
explains, social norms and beliefs have different values for different
people, since “the force of conviction comes not from socialisation, but
from the actor’s faith that the beliefs and actions are founded on reasons
which can be argued for” (p. 61). Instead, social constructionism gives
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 145

us homo sociologicus: it depersonalizes the agent by defining him/her as

inevitably subjected to the forces imposed by social roles. As Archer’s
(2004: 4) critique explains, the human agent is socially derivative, as
social constructionism

presents all our human properties and powers, beyond our biological
constitution, as the gift of society. From this viewpoint, there is only
one flat, unstratified, powerful particular, the human person, who is a
site, or a literal point of view. Beyond that, our selfhood is a grammatical
fiction, a product of learning to master the first-person pronoun system,
and thus quite simply a theory of the self which is appropriated from
society. This view elides the concept of self with the sense of self: we
are nothing beyond what society makes us, and it makes us what we are
through our joining society’s conversation.

Lack of concern for the structure–agency relationship in social

constructionism is problematic because the question of how society
and the self are intertwined is left relatively untouched (Layder, 2006).
This marked relational viewpoint is also inadequate in dealing with, for
example, the facts that people are also biological entities, and that they
also inhabit a private realm by engaging actively in ongoing internal
conversations through which they make sense of the world and their
place in it, capacities which are not possessed by social roles, institutions
or society.
Contra relationism, explaining social phenomena (including human
agents) in terms of their relationship with other phenomena requires
appreciation for their distinct and emergent properties and powers,
and for the different kinds of relationships they are engaged in. For
example, when language learners and teachers are engaged in a specific
classroom task, they are actually engaged in two different kinds of
relationships. First, they are committed to face-to-face communication,
building and negotiating meaning together in an organic fashion. They
are also sharing a necessary and impersonal social relationship between
themselves as human agents and the school, the Ministry of Educa-
tion and various educational, political and economic institutions, which
together provide the structurally (and culturally) conditioned context for
classroom-based language education. These broader and more abstract
146 J. Bouchard

institutional realities influence people on the ground in important ways,

namely by providing constraining and enabling resources. At the same
time, both these relationships and the participants in these relationships
are different. As argued in the next chapter on realism, this appreciation
is indeed central to explanations of causality in society, for if we fail to
conceptualize things first and foremost as ontologically different, and fail
to consider the type of relationship involved, we will have considerable
difficulties explaining how they can affect each other causally. Layder
(2006: 145) provides another example:

It is perfectly feasible to talk of the relatively independent properties of

individuals as long as they are understood to have an organic connec-
tion with social processes. […] For example, a concentration on the
socially constructed nature of sexuality or self-identity, as they can be
traced over long periods of development, must be distinguished from a
specific individual’s identity and sexual development.

In short, by arguing that society is a human construction, and that

humans are socially constructed, social constructionism offers a prob-
lematic view of the social world because it conceptualizes both humans
and society as possessing roughly the same properties and powers, thus
fusing structure and agency into one large social reality. The effect is a
blurring of the causal links between constituting parts and wholes. As
Layder (2006: 151) explains, adopting this viewpoint

is to radically misconstrue the nature of both situated activity and institu-

tions. […] the defining characteristics of institutions are not to be found
in the connectedness of people as such. Rather, they are defined in terms
of the influence of reproduced practices on the behaviour of many people,
many of whom have no connections with each other and are unlikely to
have face-to-face contact.

In addition to its relationist penchant, social constructionism also

holds an ambivalent view of objective reality. Archer (2004) explains how
social constructionists’ rejection of the objective (often material) condi-
tions of social life—central to their emphasis on interrelatedness—can
also lead to problematic conclusions:
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 147

Unsurprisingly, our physiological embodiment does not sit well with

social constructionism. Of course, social constructions may be placed
upon it, but the body is stubbornly resistant to being dissolved into the
discursive. It does not just lie back and allow society to trample all over
it. Instead, because it has properties and powers of its own, it is active
in the environment and the results of its activity challenge the passivity
accorded to it in this account which holds that all we are is a gift of
society. (p. 111)

Finally, radical social constructionism—e.g., von Glasersfeld (1998),

who posits that, since people have no way of knowing what reality is,
they can only construct their own reality—yields even fewer analytical
possibilities for researchers. Its markedly relativistic approach to social
research has inspired some of its adherents to claim that rational eval-
uations of and comparisons between diverging theories and concepts
are impossible because of their constructed nature. This position would
hold, for example, that the current chapter on the history of the struc-
ture–agency debate is but a pointless endeavour. More alarmingly, this
marked relativism would also fail to identify racist/sexist/homophobic
viewpoints as inadequate perspectives because they are morally inferior to
social emancipation, for example. In other words, social constructionism
does not recognize that theories can indeed be deemed as weak or infe-
rior to others precisely because their principles and concepts consistently
clash against objective reality (which again exists independently of our
understanding of it).
Despite its considerable conceptual limitations, however, certain
aspects of (weaker) social constructionism are compatible with a realist
viewpoint. The social constructionist approach to language, discourse,
culture and knowledge, for example, is useful to realism’s stratified
ontology in that it elucidates the role of language and discourse in the
formation of dispositions and beliefs, which then play an important
role in the emergence of normative institutional structures (Elder-Vass,
2010).
In AL scholarship, social constructionism occupies a rather comfort-
able place, given the field’s central concern with language and
148 J. Bouchard

discourse. Heller et al. (2018), for example, adopt social construc-

tionism/constructivism in relation to what they call critical sociolinguis-
tics. They justify their characterization of research in sociolinguistics as
“experience” with the argument made earlier that a constructivist view-
point “posits that knowledge is a human creation and that it takes place
in social contexts where persons interact with each other to achieve
specific ends” (p. 7). Later on, they present ethnography as the adequate
methodological partner of social constructionist sociolinguistics thus:

Knowledge is a social, historical and political animal – one raised, tamed

and produced by us. […] we see doing research as a fundamentally social
experience, in which everything we do is for interlocutors. […] we see
social life as produced by people as they engage with each other. This view
lies in opposition to some social scientists who consider that social mean-
ings, behaviour or social phenomena are the expression of underlying
structures, laws, norms or symbolic systems that operate at an abstract
level. To us, on the contrary, any social phenomenon is “located,” i.e.,
any form of organization, idea, role, norm, conflict, text must have been
produced by people at some moment and at some particular place (or
many have been reproduced by many people at many different moments
and places). Whatever is “social,” including language, stems from social
practice. (p. 8)

As this statement reveals, and as will be further explained in the

next chapter, the parallels between social constructivism and realism
are indeed limited, notably due to their opposed viewpoints regarding
underlying mechanisms, laws, norms and systems. More importantly
perhaps, they also differ in terms of their approaches to the structure–
agency debate: while realism provides a stratified view which considers
both the interrelationship between structure and agency (and, let’s not
forget, between discourse and objective reality) as well as their distinct
and emergent properties and powers, social constructionism simply
flattens the social landscape into a very broad network of human relation-
ships in which people and society possess more or less similar properties
and powers. As pointed out earlier, social constructionism simply rejects
the more abstract, intransitive aspects of social reality (e.g., causality,
systems of oppression, ideologies, etc.), which remain core analytical
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 149

elements in critical social research. Heller et al. (2018) reveal this partic-
ular shortcoming by arguing (rather oddly and a-critically in my view)
that their critical investigation “is not the place […] to discuss in full
how social science is inscribed in the political and the economic” (p. 9).
Indeed, social constructionism is “not the place” for such talk precisely
because, due to its flattened ontology, it remains a radically empiricist
paradigm with little to say about the sources of social oppression, which
are after all the objects of critical social research. This problem consid-
erably undermines the authors’ presentation of a critical sociolinguistics
informed by social constructionism because social processes (and their
analysis) are reduced to mere situated conversations.
The next section looks at structuration theory which, although
equally resistant to analytical dualism and almost exclusively devoted to
humanist principles, pays more attention to structure and agency, leading
Layder (2006: 157) to define it as having “a foot in both camps of the
dualism debate.”

Structuration Theory
The paradigms described thus far offer varying approaches and demon-
strate varying degrees of engagement with the structure–agency debate.
They can generally be distinguished from each other by how they priori-
tize either structure or agency. In contrast, Giddens’s structuration theory
(Giddens, 1979) constitutes a more comprehensive attempt at explaining
how both structure and agency are active forces in the production of
social life. To achieve this purpose, Giddens offers duality of structure as
a notion which, according to him, is aimed at overcoming the agency-
structure divisions by emphasizing the various points of convergence
between both strata of the social realm. Layder (2006: 164, emphasis
mine) explains that, in structuration theory, “rather than two separate
and opposed phenomena, we should think of one, in this case struc-
ture, which has a dual nature. [Structure and agency] are two sides of
the same coin.” Stated differently, structure and agency are two equally
important aspects of the same thing, and what bind them together are
social practices, or what people do every day. By combining agency and
150 J. Bouchard

structure through action, Giddens places social practice as the main point
of interest for social scientists.
Unlike Durkheim, Weber and other early sociologists, Giddens does
not adhere to the idea that sociology can directly adopt principles from
the natural sciences, with its search for universal natural laws, largely
because of humans’ reflexive powers and the resulting implication that,
unlike that of rocks, the weather and other natural phenomena, human
behaviour can never fully be predicted. One problem with this argument
is that social life and its components features are not hopelessly chaotic:
some degree of prediction can be expected. As Williams and Dyer (2017:
3) point out,

despite what the social constructionists would say, it is possible to explain

and predict the social world, partly because it is rule based and partly
because agents in it act inductively on past experience, which mostly
exhibits a large degree of predictability. In other words, in our everyday
lives, we are aware of and (mostly) obey social rules, and those people
with whom we interact also do this and exhibit relatively predictable
behaviour. This permits good enough lay explanations and predictions.

At the same time, this type of predictability is not of the same kind
found in the natural world. While people’s discourses and actions do
follow patterns to some extent, they are not as rigid and predictable as,
for example, water (almost always) freezing at zero-degree Celcius.
More to the point, Giddens’s theory is marked by a commitment to
humanist principles, as revealed by the prominent place occupied by
agency in structuration theory. Layder (2006: 159) explains structuration
theory’s attempt at delimiting agency’s distinct and emergent properties
thus:

People are intrinsically involved with society and actively enter into its
constitution; they construct, support and change it because it is the
nature of human beings to be affected by, and to affect, their social
environment. Unlike the molecules, atoms and force fields of the natural
sciences, people do not remain unmoved by their own feelings and moti-
vations. They are not simply compelled by forces outside of themselves
(as are natural phenomena), they do not act mechanically and blindly as
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 151

if compelled by laws of nature. By reflecting on their own behaviour

and circumstances they always have some choice in the matter. They
are always capable, to some degree, of resisting the constraints imposed
on them by society and of influencing and transforming their social
situations.

With these principles, structuration theory essentially rejects what

Giddens calls “objectivism,” or the idea that social structures act as
external constraints on people’s actions. This leads him to argue that
structures do not inhabit a life “outside” that of human beings. Method-
ologically, this position implies that structure possesses properties which
can only be analysed with reference to human reasoning and emotion-
ality, or how structure appears to and is appropriated by people on
the ground. Again, social practice is what matters most in structuration
theory. For Giddens, sociology and social theory should concentrate on
real-world behaviours by flesh-and-blood human beings, whose experi-
ence of social reality is crucial to its production. In this way, structuration
theory includes numerous principles from paradigms which emphasize
agency over structure, and despite its view of structure as possessing a
dual nature, structuration theory demonstrates a clear penchant towards
conflating or reducing structure within agency. Layder (2006: 164)
makes a similar point thus: “human beings create meaning and social
reality from within social settings, and therefore social forms such as
institutions and structures have no existence apart from the activities they
embody.”
A central problem with this overemphasis on agency in structuration
theory is that limited insight is afforded into social reproduction, or why
phenomena such as patterns, routines and systemic oppression emerge
and echo through time in society. Giddens is particularly concerned with
this issue, and again places social practice as a possible solution. Accord-
ingly, as people engage with others on a daily basis, they draw from
structural and cultural resources which have gained their attention as
a result of socialization and education, for example. Giddens identifies
these resources as part of people’s interactional skills. The effect of this,
however, is that structure and agency become even more inseparable. Yet,
152 J. Bouchard

while structural and cultural influences come into play, people’s individ-
ualities also introduce an important degree of complexity and creativity
within social life. As Layder (2006: 166) explains,

the rules and resources we draw on are the medium of our activity in
the sense that they enable us to do things and to have intentions. At
the same time, they also represent the outcome or consequence (largely
unintended) of our activities insofar as we endorse their value by using
them, and therefore contribute to their further continuance.

In structuration theory, there is thus limited space for a critical agenda,

including the study of ideology and hegemony, as consensus and collec-
tive endorsement of rules and norms tend to be the main points of
interest. At the same time, structuration theory does not actually give
us homo sociologicus:

Giddens is primarily concerned to show that whatever goes on in society

and its institutions does not go on ‘behind the backs’ of people. For
research purposes in particular, it is important to take note of the manner
in which actors’ reasons and intentions are centrally involved in the
creation and recreation of social life. […] In Giddens’s theory an essential
ingredient of human existence is ‘ontological security’, which refers to a
person’s elemental sense of safety in the world and includes a basic ‘trust’
of other people. (Layder, 2006: 167)

This is where the marked preference for humanist principles in struc-

turation theory becomes evident. However, Giddens also rejects the idea
that people are free to act as they please. Accordingly, while we engage
in a broad range of social practices on a daily basis, we engage in
specific social relations, meaning that we embody specific social roles.
This, in turn, implies that not only do we draw from structural and
cultural resources, we are also both limited and facilitated by these
antecedent social forces through the rules and obligations they impose.
Yet, for Giddens, humans are never at the mercy of structure or culture:
they always have the means and resources to extricate themselves from
unwanted conditioning and oppressive situations. To explain this, he
offers the notion of the dialectic of control as an inevitable process
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 153

wherever and whenever power is involved in the constitution of social

phenomena. Giddens sees structural constraints and enablements as two
different types of resources: allocative resources (i.e., what allows people
to do things) and authoritative resources (what can be used to control
human beings). These resources do not act against people’s intentions
and desires but rather produce the kind of power necessary for people
to generate social realities and change. In other words, they are also
potentially transformative resources. Yet, perhaps because of its marked
humanist penchant and its integration of structure within agents’ reasons
and motivations, structuration theory cannot quite escape the problems
associated with various forms of methodological individualism which
grant agency causal primacy over structure.
Even if structure and agency are understood within structuration
theory as different features of society, they remain conceptually indivis-
ible. As such, structuration theory commits a central conflation (i.e.,
fusing structure and agency together, as two sides of the same coin)
(Archer, 1996). Because structure cannot exist “outside” human action,
it cannot be understood in terms of its distinct and emergent properties
(e.g., its antecedence and relatively enduring properties and powers, the
fact that it unfolds within a different time frame than that of agency,
etc.). As Layder (2006: 171–172) explains, structure

is ‘internal’ to activity – it has no existence beyond the situations in which

people are acting. In this sense, structure does not have a continuous and
tangible (real) existence. Rather, it has a ‘virtual’ existence, which can be
understood first, as traces in the memories of the people who draw on the
rules and resources that constitute it. Secondly, structure exists only at the
instances in which the rules and resources are actually being employed in
the activities of people. This is what Giddens means when he says that
structure only exists in its ‘instantiation’ in human action.

To exist, structures must therefore be (re)produced continually

through practice, and so we come back to a relatively flattened ontology.
Indeed, the suggestion that structure and agency are two sides of the
same coin does not resolve the structure–agency debate: it more or less
nullifies it. The goal in structuration theory is not to explain the complex
154 J. Bouchard

causal interaction between structure and agency as ontologically distinct

and emergent features of social reality, but rather to concentrate on social
practice as the site where these two features are said to merge together.
This is a considerable problem for social research, for as Layder (2006:
174) points out, while

there is nothing wrong with saying that social relationships and practices
are produced and reproduced in the activities of people (their reasons and
motivations) […] there does seem to be something odd about the idea
that they have no existence beyond these things. This seems to imply that
reproduced practices are virtually the same thing as people’s reasons and
motivations. […] social systems have more durability and independence
than Giddens seems to want to admit.

By overemphasizing the interdependence of structure and agency, the

use of structuration theory in the production of causal claims is also
considerably limited. As Layder (2006: 176) points out, “the very fact
that it is possible to concentrate attention on either ‘institutional analysis’
or ‘the analysis of strategic conduct’ seems to suggest that these repre-
sent rather different aspects of social reality, even though we might also
accept that they are interdependent and interwoven.” In other words,
while underlining the fundamental and complex connections between
structure and agency as real and constitutive for both strata is crucial to
our accounts of causality in the social realm, we also need to remember
that causal relationships are such because they unfold between onto-
logically different things. Therefore, to explain the effects of one thing
upon another, we must begin by defining both strata as different—i.e.,
we must account for their distinct and emergent properties (including
their causal powers) before we begin to discuss their causal connections.
However, by claiming that structure and agency are two sides of the
same coin, structuration theory can only offer a rather weak view of
causality in the social realm. While structuration theory allows for expla-
nations of how rules and resources available to humans come into play,
it fails to consider the underlying generative mechanisms at play in the
production, reproduction and transformation of society, including the
antecedent and ongoing unequal distribution of power and resources in
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 155

social contexts around the world. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 10) explain
with regards to Giddens’ work,

since structure and agency are held to be mutually constitutive, their

properties are not real except in conjunction with each other, and it is
impossible to examine the interplay between them. […] we would also
argue that social relations shape such interactions in ways that the people
involved in them may not be fully aware of.

In contemporary AL scholarship, Giddens’s work has been used, for

example, in the field of translation studies by Van Rooyen (2013),
who notes multiple benefits of the theory, notably when exploring the
complex interaction between translation structures and translators as
agents. Block (2006) also sees value in using structuration theory to
the identity strand of AL scholarship. As the author argues, “identity
is an emergent process, taking place at the crossroads of structure and
agency. This means that while identity is conditioned by social interac-
tion and social structure, it at the same time conditions social interaction
and social structure. It is, in short, constitutive of and constituted by
the social environment.” However, in arguing that structuration theory
allows researchers to see identity as a fluid rather than fixed condition or
process, in my view the author unfortunately fails to make an important
distinction between structuration theory and poststructuralism.
In educational research, Shilling (1992) advocates the use of structura-
tion theory, presenting it as the most effective approach to overcoming
the structure–agency “dualism.” The author identifies two strands of
educational research: one which focuses on the study of social systems
and national policies (i.e., large-scale social phenomena), and another
strand which concentrates on case studies of individual schools and
localized, situated interaction. He then argues that this division is the
unfortunate consequence of a persistent dualistic mentality in the field,
an argument rather common among adherents of structuration theory
who share the consensus that analytical dualism constitutes the greatest
problem in the social sciences. On this basis, Shilling suggests that
Giddens’ theory offers a valuable way out by allowing for an account
156 J. Bouchard

of social change. In short, structuration theory’s fusion between struc-

ture and agency—again, a central conflation—is generally perceived by
its adherents as a reasonable resolution of the structure–agency debate.
From a realist angle, it is mistaken to conclude that Giddens’s theory
transcends the structure–agency “dualism” (Archer, 1996). Again, the
concept of duality of structure does not resolve the debate inasmuch
as it dismisses it by fusing both sides of the equation into one, thus
making it impossible to examine (a) the distinct and emergent prop-
erties of structure and agency, and (b) their causal relationship. As
Archer (1995: 87) explains, “the intimacy of mutual constitution thus
means that the only way in which structure and agency can be exam-
ined ‘independently’ is through an artificial exercise of ‘methodological
bracketing’.” This is achieved in part by Giddens with unsatisfactory
results, as structure and agency are distinguished in his work principally
in terms of face-to-face versus more distant forms of human interactions
involving groups rather than individuals. Moreover, Giddens’s emphasis
on language and discourse to explain social practice—echoing poststruc-
turalism, social constructionism and symbolic interactionism—fails to
consider physical, material and non-discursive elements closely linked
to practical consciousness. Archer (2004: 160) explains that practical
consciousness “comes in chunks or stocks rather than in linear sequences
such as sentences […] it is stored by being embodied in the seat of our
pants rather than in the declarative memory […] it may be accessed
by all of our senses.” Indeed, practical consciousness cannot be entirely
generated nor captured by language or discourse, since much of our
perceptions and actions in the real-world are physical (Bourdieu, 1990;
Bourdieu & Eagleton, 1992), while our communicative powers consti-
tute only one part of our distinct and emergent properties as human
agents.

Bourdieu’s Theory of Practice

Bourdieu’s theory of practice has influenced a great number of sociolog-
ical analyses and speculations over the past decades, and has often been
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 157

hailed as the most comprehensive account of the structure–agency rela-

tionship to date. This explains to some extent why his work has been
appropriated by a number of researchers and adherents of a variety of (at
times contradictory) ontological perspectives, with some labelling him
a poststructuralist thinker, others placing him within the structuralist
camp or identifying him as a realist. Although not entirely aligned with
Bourdieu’s ontology, the realist sociologist Elder-Vass (2012) claims that
Bourdieu successfully combines realism and social constructionism in his
account of social class.
Parallel to Giddens, Bourdieu (1990) proposes that social practice
binds structure and agency. Both theorists diverge, however, in their
views of objective reality: while Giddens is more comfortable reducing
social analysis to a study of discourse and interaction, Bourdieu leans
towards a realist standpoint by arguing that the objective world and
the realm of situated human communication and behaviour differ onto-
logically. An important element in Bourdieu’s theory is a critique of
the tendency among social scientists to explain actions as caused by
discourse, or human agents’ said capacity to consciously verbalise their
knowledge of rules, norms and relationships. Bourdieu and Giddens also
differ in how they integrate a critical agenda into their work. While
Giddens offers surprisingly limited insight into systems of oppression
and emancipatory programmes, Bourdieu (1990) explicitly emphasizes
the potential for sociologists and social theorists to clarify power rela-
tions, leading to the potential formulation of strategies for dismantling
them.
To bind structure and agency, Bourdieu offers the notion of habitus,
defined by Layder (2006: 195) as

a cognitive and motivating mechanism which incorporates the influence

of a person’s social context and provides a conduit or medium through
which information and resources are transmitted to the activities that
they inform. Thus the mutual influences of objective context and the
immediate situations of activity are translated back and forth through the
medium of the habitus. While the habitus sets the wider parameters of a
person’s activities, people have also to be understood as creative beings. In
particular situations people have to ‘improvise’ on background resources
158 J. Bouchard

(of the habitus) in order to be able to deal with the unpredictable

situations that are a constant feature of everyday life.

Bourdieu argues that habitus is developed through the family incul-

cating basic moral and practical rules and norms (primary socialization),
and in part through schooling (secondary socialization), in which we find
attempts to bring this baggage of unconscious knowledge up to the level
of consciousness. However, what largely takes place in schools, at least in
the view of Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), is social reproduction and the
production of a shared practical unconscious. Beyond schooling, people
share particular social roles and positions with other human beings at
work and in other spheres of social life (or “fields,” to use Bourdieu-
sian terminology). As such, they come to share very similar resources,
opportunities and constraints, or a common habitus. This process evolves
over time, and is often accomplished not through conscious, rational,
calculated judgement but rather “naturally”—i.e., through the body,
gestures, acts, etc. This position has led Bourdieu to reject the notion of
ideology as discourse, instead preferring the notions of symbolic violence
and doxa, the latter being a non-linguistic, naturalized, subtle hegemonic
force operating below consciousness (Bourdieu & Eagleton, 1992). As
a pre-disposition for action, or modus operandi, habitus is conceptual-
ized within a Bourdieusian ontology as the internalization of objective
structures (Mander, 1987). It does not determine what people do but
rather mandates specific actions as “appropriate” or the likes, and endows
human agents with a creative, generative capacity to act in specific ways
and not others, depending on the situation. Bourdieu talks about habitus
as a creative force instilling in humans a potential to improvise, not
necessarily through conscious, verbal deliberation but rather through
the body. It is “a spontaneity without consciousness or will” (Bour-
dieu, 1990: 56). Overall, through his extensive conceptual and analytical
work, Bourdieu offers extensive valuable sociological insight, notably in
terms of a critique of culture and the cultural industry, including educa-
tional systems and institutions. He also offers a thorough sociological
research programme which balances statistical and interpretive analytical
approaches.
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 159

However, Bourdieu essentially offers a theory of social and cultural

reproduction. Swartz (1997: 110) observes that this focus in Bourdieu’s
work also comes with a rather “hydraulic” view of causality: “Bour-
dieu sees the internalization through socialization of external opportunity
structures as a straightforward and nonproblematic process.” As with
social constructivism, the effects of socialization are not unpacked with
reference to people’s sense-making capacities—i.e., people accepting
and following social norms also because they make sense to them. In
Bouchard (2020), I observe in Bourdieu’s work a tendency towards
conceptualizing human agents as inescapably affected by socialization
and other forms of dominant cultural pressures, more or less forcing
them to reproduce oppressive social and ideological structures. This
problem is largely due to Bourdieu’s relative neglect of human conscious-
ness in the formulation and manifestation of habitus (Elder-Vass, 2010).
Granted, many things we do every day take place without the need for
active reflection and deliberation (e.g., preparing breakfast, showering,
putting our shoes on, driving, greeting people, etc.), but it is reductive
to describe human being as merely reproducing social and cultural life
unconsciously, as a result of being located within a field-specific habitus.
Political discourses and practices offer clear examples of how people,
being also purposeful and equipped with reflexive powers and meta-
awareness, are also conscious agents actively deliberating on the nature
of social reality and their discourses and actions within it.
Furthermore, Bourdieu’s acknowledgement of structure as distinct
from agency also has limitations, principally because he (as well as
Giddens, although differently) dissolves structure into activity. Layder
(2006: 196) observes that

this makes it very difficult to understand social systems as patterns of

domination which endure and have effects beyond the situations of their
actual implication in practice. Thus, wide-ranging and variegated fields
of influence such as gender, class, power and organisation, existing at
different levels of closeness to activity and producing variable effects on
practice, tend to be compacted into a flattened-out social terrain.
160 J. Bouchard

In short, by reducing both structure and agency to practice, Bour-

dieu envisages structure as embedded within individual agents, who
are mere reproducers of social structures. As with Giddens, Bourdieu
thus commits a central conflation. By extension, his theory limits our
ability to account for the full range of structural and agentive emergent
properties and powers. Archer (2004: 6) points out that the approaches
suggested by Bourdieu and Giddens

generically preclude one from disengaging the properties and powers of

the practitioner from the properties and powers of the environment in
which practices are conducted – and yet again this prevents analysis of
their interplay. Instead, we are confronted with amalgams of ‘practices’
which oscillate wildly between voluntarism and determinism, without
our being able to specify the conditions under which agents have greater
degrees of freedom or, conversely, work under a considerable stringency
of constraints.

This central conflation is avoidable by conceptualizing structure and

agency as distinct and emergent strata of the social realm, which then
provides more solid conceptual grounds upon which we can analyze their
interplay. More to the point, it is not only possible but necessary to
do so in our attempts to provide not merely descriptive but explana-
tory insight. Although the ways we talk and act in the world are closely
connected to broader, society-wide structures, systems and discourses,
the fact that we use different terms and approaches when analyzing inter-
action on the one hand and structure on the other reveals our awareness
as human beings that those layers of society are not homologous. Struc-
ture and agency also do not differ only in terms of scale, since they
possess distinct and emergent properties. Equally important, structures
are not mere echoes of situated interactions, and our everyday practices
are not simply micro-versions of structural and cultural processes: they
possess distinct and emergent powers and properties of their own which
need to be accounted for. As Layder (2006: 202) explains,

it is possible to study social relations from an objective viewpoint without

losing sight of the active subject. In this sense it is possible to talk about
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 161

properties of the social system or social organisation (or, indeed, the inter-
action order) without reference to individuals or activity as such, while in
no way denying the reality of subjects and their active implication in the
production and reproduction of social relations and processes.

Bourdieu has so far enjoyed a great deal of attention within AL and

sociolinguistics, partly because his own writings demonstrate a marked
interest in both language and education, but also because throughout his
body of work Bourdieu also provides numerous trenchant critiques of
modern-day linguistics. Contra Saussurean or Chomskian structuralism,
Bourdieu sees language specifically as part of social action, leading him to
reject, for example, the reification of language in theoretical linguistics.
Similar to Shohamy (2006) and Pennycook (2013), Bourdieu dismisses
the labelling of language in terms of essentialized and territorialized enti-
ties. He also rejects the notion of grammaticality, instead describing the
processes of symbolic power and the legitimization of specific language
outputs over others based on realities beyond the situated language act.
He also understands the meaning-making process not as static or arbi-
trary, as in the Saussurean sense, but rather as an emergent process
unfolding within specific and uniquely structured social spaces or fields,
with their specific sets of habitus and resources. Bourdieu therefore
rejects mentalist or cognitivist accounts of language and language-related
phenomena, because he sees the latter as inevitably taking place within
specific social contexts which offer a range of influences and resources.
Grenfell (2011: 55) explains that, within a Bourdieusian perspective
on language, “no one acquires a language without acquiring a relation
to language […] Such relations are then physical as well as mental;
paralinguistic aspects of language – such as intonation, gesture and
expression – are equally important in the operation of language as a
symbolic power.” Language is therefore both a source of power and a field
of its own, in which power relationships unfold. In my view, however, I
cannot see how Bourdieu’s view of language is possible without recogni-
tion of the emergent, antecedent and relatively enduring properties and
powers of language as a cultural resource, i.e., as distinct from practice.
Although rejecting Bourdieu’s views at times, Kramsch (2015) never-
theless draws connections between her work and Bourdieu’s writings. She
162 J. Bouchard

discusses how interaction with his work led her to focus on language
practice and speakers rather than speech per se, and how Bourdieu’s call
for a reflexive sociology (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) has provided
her with strategies to combine scientific objectivity and practical know-
how. As a surprisingly productive sociologist and ethnographer himself,
Bourdieu also provides AL scholars with valuable strategies for ethno-
graphically grounded language-based research. Grenfell (2011) similarly
explains the extent of the influence of Bourdieu’s work on contemporary
AL research, and summarizes Bourdieu’s view of language as constituted
of form and content thus:

Both form and content may exist in a way which favours certain ways
of thinking and expressing that thinking. Moreover, they both may act
as a mechanism for cultural transmission, which itself advantages and
disadvantages those who encounter it depending on their background
and the affinities (or not) this sets up when they enter a scholastic field.
(p. 39)

In my view, Bourdieu’s importance to AL and sociolinguistics has less

to do with his view of language, and more with his fascinating insight
into culture, particularly his convincing critique of the common assump-
tion among cultural anthropologists and many sociolinguists that culture
is shared by all within a specific cultural community. What is indeed
rarely shown in discussions on culture in AL and sociolinguistics is that
culture, cultural acts and cultural products are not distributed equally:
they are differentiated as a result of a range of pre-existing and enduring
structural and cultural influences and dispositions. His work therefore
provides an important theoretical basis upon which to improve existing
intercultural communicative competence research and further advance a
critical AL research programme.
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 163

Habermas and the Lifeworld/System

Distinction
Compared to the works of Bourdieu, Foucault and Bernstein,
Habermas’s sociological and philosophical works on hermeneutics reveals
an even stronger interest in language, as his theory of communica-
tive action (Habermas, 1984, 1987) attests. An important aspect of
this theory is the idea that all speech acts are characterized by a
telos, or purpose, which centres on the broader goal of mutual under-
standing. Habermas demonstrates in his work how human agents deploy
communicative competence to achieve this broad communicative goal.
According to Layder (2006: 217): “‘communicative action’ refers to the
co-ordination of the activities of two or more people on the basis of
a shared understanding such that each person tries to convince the
other(s) with the effect that the resulting action is motivated through
reason.” Given these emphases in his work, Habermas has often been
associated with a range of theories and paradigms such as hermeneutics,
pragmatism and postmodernism, although the latter label may not be
fully accurate given his adherence to, and extension of, Weber’s work on
modernity and human rationality. Indeed, a major part of Habermas’s
theory of communicative action is the idea that human agents coop-
erate together via mutual deliberation, a capacity defined by the author
as part of human rationality which, according to him, can be denoted
in language and the very structure of human communication. Accord-
ingly, successful argumentation necessitates the mitigation of coercive
forces, a shared interest in understanding, and people’s desire to develop
increasingly sophisticated and effective arguments. In this way, Habermas
not only emphasizes human rationality, but more specifically intersub-
jective rationality as a fundamental element in communication, making
his theoretical work the result of a rather productive combination of
modernist and postmodernist principles. Arguably, this particular feature
qualifies Habermas’s work as a major contribution to the structure–
agency debate, thus deserving further consideration.
Habermas also offers a strong and comprehensive critical approach to
hermeneutics. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 50) explain,
164 J. Bouchard

language, argues Habermas, is not just a means of communication which

mediates our experience of the world, but is also a medium of domina-
tion and social power. A social science cannot therefore be reduced to
interpretation, as is implied by hermeneutics. The second limit to the
hermeneutic approach, argues Habermas, is that it is inattentive to the
dependence of language on wider social processes.

This stance reveals the need to distinguish Habermas’s work from

other interpretivist strands of social research, notably how his critical
angle is rooted in depth ontology—i.e., the notion that society and its
component parts, namely structure, culture and agency, are distinct and
emergent entities, thus being stratified ontological phenomena—i.e.,
existing within, and drawing from resources situated at, multiple levels
of society. Specifically, he distinguishes between the lifeworld (closely
related to agency, but specifically referring to mutual, face-to-face inter-
actions and the collaborative development of shared norms and values)
and the system (closely related to structure, but specifically referring to
exchanges of materials resources, power, etc.). In doing so, Habermas
distinguishes himself from the theorists discussed in previous sections
of this chapter with his non-conflationary approach to communication
and social ontology, by emphasizing the need to conceptualize both life-
world and system as different things. He also agrees with the realists
on the point that conflationary approaches essentially obscure the causal
relationship between different social strata and phenomena.
From this laminated viewpoint, Habermas purports that, in late
modernity, the system demonstrates a marked tendency to “colonize”
the lifeworld, so that the emphasis on mutual understanding within the
lifeworld is gradually eroded by the encroachment of capitalist value
systems. By emphasizing the importance of both the lifeworld and the
system to the production of social life, by giving importance to the
analysis of both systems and situated interaction, and by not reducing
his critical agenda to a mere study of discourse, Habermas offers a
view aligned in many ways with the realist ontology explained in the
next chapter. Layder (2006: 220) makes a similar observation regarding
Habermas’s work thus:
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 165

The idea of an objective world as distinguishable from a social world

which is, in turn, distinct from a subjective world is something which is
denied in many, if not most, action theories. Habermas is not claiming
that these worlds are separate and unrelated to each other. On the
contrary, he sees them as interfused, but at the same time it is impor-
tant to distinguish them as constituent features of a seemingly unitary
whole.

Habermas’s hermeneutic approach specifies that the objective features

of reality are mediated by humans in symbolic fashion, which creates
a separation between humans and the external world necessary for the
emergence of human reflexivity (Sealey & Carter, 2004). From this
basis, Habermas also stresses that our ability to sense the world is not
inherently individual but rather importantly a shared experience largely
unfolding through our use of language. He also points out that people
do not experience reality symbolically “from scratch”; instead, this reality
comes to them already structured. In other words, people experience the
social world as an antecedent and enduring reality, as something which
has already been pre-analyzed and interpreted symbolically, or again as
already meaningfully structured. In this argument we can denote a clear
rejection by Habermas of empiricism. Layder (2006) also denotes traces
of complexity thinking in Habermas’s work, notably in how the philoso-
pher presents society as undergoing an evolutionary trajectory towards
increasing social complexity. As the author explains,

in the context of increasing rationalization of the world, that is, the devel-
opment of expert areas of knowledge concerned with the newly formed
sectors of society (new occupational groups, the rise of scientific knowl-
edge, development of new skills and expertise), the lifeworld becomes
‘overloaded’ so to speak. The complexity of validity claims in the context
of growing specialisation in society (political, economic, occupational)
makes it more and more difficult to reach shared understanding. There
is pressure for sub-systems such as government and markets to become
detached from the lifeworld and to operate on the basis of codified law.
(Layder, 2006: 223)
166 J. Bouchard

Through ongoing social shifts and developments, people on the

ground are seen as experiencing increasing strain and confusion, as a
result of being related to increasingly complex social processes, thus
losing their sense of control in the process. As the system increasingly
encroaches upon the lifeworld, human rationality loses grounds. Yet,
Habermas’s intellectual roots in the Frankfurt School and his acknowl-
edgement of the Enlightenment project—which informs his critical work
to a large extent—lead him to argue that this process of alienation can be
countered by ongoing debates and protests. Layder (2006: 225) points
out that,

in Habermas’s view, it is always possible for social resistance to be

marshalled against the colonising tendencies of the system. In this way
the critical potential of new social movements such as feminism, green
politics, and anti-nuclear lobbies can be maintained without discarding
altogether the project of modernity. This, of course, puts Habermas at
some odds with both ‘anti-’ and postmodernists.

Indeed, Habermas has come under criticism from many different

directions. Modernists accuse him of offering a slightly divergent yet
essentially similar ontology to that of the interactionists, while postmod-
ernists decry his marked penchant towards rationality and reproach his
attempts at reviving modernist principles. Realists are encouraged by his
attempts to balance modernism and postmodernism, but critique his
concept of the “ideal speech situation” as idealism, and his emphasis on
shared understanding and communicative consensus as denying other
important, perhaps more conflictual processes in the formulation and
exchange of meaning. Layder (2006: 233) also underscores these missing
elements in Habermas’s theory:

While the thesis of colonisation is intriguing and suggestive of testable

propositions, it does need more specification in an empirical sense. It
needs to be able to specify which areas of the lifeworld are more suscep-
tible to colonisation and which are more resistant. These questions cannot
simply be settled on a priori theoretical grounds, they must be connected
to empirical research.
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 167

Despite these problems, Habermas’s theory of communicative action

has profound consequences for AL and sociolinguistics, not only because
language and communication occupy central stage in his work, but
also because it is grounded in depth ontology. In my opinion, what is
also worth noting about Habermas is that, in the evolution of twen-
tieth century social theory (and if we make abstraction of realism for
a moment), his work manages to offer a much needed respite from
postmodernist/poststructuralist relativism.

Summary
This chapter is obviously incomplete. Many other social theorists have
much to offer to the study of language, notably Basil Bernstein and his
theory of language codes, which is arguably similar to that of Bour-
dieu. Moreover, while AL scholars may find much of interest in the
evolution of social theory over decades, “it is difficult to discover in the
founding figures of the sociological tradition more than the raw mate-
rial for treating language sociologically” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 36).
Direct and unmediated use of social theory in AL research is therefore
not only difficult but also not recommended. In the above summary,
I have tried to draw the links between different theoretical paradigms
and AL/sociolinguistic concerns, although those connections were not
always evident. One reason, of course, is AL scholars’ general ambiva-
lence towards theory (as discussed previously). In addition, clarifying the
links between social theory and AL research is rather a complex task
requiring extensive referencing to actual research in our field. Conse-
quently, further analysis and discussion of these links are certainly
warranted in the development of a renewed and more sociologically
informed AL scholarship.
There are, however, important lessons we can draw from the above
summary. Firstly, while most postmodernist and social constructivist
thinkers reject the need for a structure–agency debate altogether, soci-
ology, AL and the social sciences at large have mostly (at least in
some form or another) been invested in discovering how structure and
agency—as distinct and emergent strata of the social realm—interact
168 J. Bouchard

to produce the linguistic, language-related and social phenomena we

observe and study. As Layder (2006: 143–144) rightfully argues,

to suggest that there is a widespread view among sociologists that stresses

an individual-society split […] is misleading. All the major figures (and
most of the minor ones) in the history of sociological thought have under-
stood individuals and society to be intertwined and inextricably fused.
Indeed, this is perhaps the founding assumption of sociological thought
itself. However, these figures have produced very different ideas about the
degree to which the enmeshment of people in social processes allows for
levels of individual creativity and independence, particularly in instances
of social transformation.

Hamlin (2002: 29, emphasis mine) goes further by stating that

“although the [structure-agency] debate is sometimes believed to rest on
a dualism whose terms are stated as being totally incommensurable and
heterogeneous, this view only makes sense in conflationary frameworks
that have been set up in terms of a radical holism or radical individ-
ualism.” It is therefore important for AL scholars to remember that
social theory is not about reifying or cancelling the structure–agency
debate. Rather, social theory has undergone increasing sophistication
over decades precisely because intellectual exchanges among scholars
(as the above summary has hopefully revealed) have prompted them
to formulate diverging accounts of precisely how agency and structure
are related in the ongoing production of social life. Our job as AL
scholars and social scientists is thus to make conceptually and empiri-
cally grounded decisions regarding which account(s) of this relationship
is/are most adequate (Layder, 2006) to what we study. This is indeed a
rather different approach to social theory to that which has commonly
been taken by AL scholars to date. As Sayer (2000: 79) argues,

charges of ‘totalizing discourses’ or logocentrism sound rather impressive,

if not intimidating, and it is especially important to go into the argu-
ments behind them rather than merely parroting these terms. Otherwise
academic debates may become debased to the point where, instead of
engaging with the substantive accounts of others, one simply disqualifies
 3 The Structure–Agency Debate and Its Relevance to AL 169

them by accusing them of assuming some privileged vantage point or

foundationalism.

Also important for AL scholars to remember: while the different

paradigms discussed in this chapter provide various accounts of both
agency and structure, these accounts usually result in ontological confla-
tions (a notion developed and further critiqued in the next chapter).
Arguably, much of the structure–agency debate has been characterized
by various attempts at dealing with ontological conflations in some
form or another. As the next chapter on realism explains, the tendency
towards conflationary thinking in social theory and research must be
dealt with head-on, for it considerably constrains our ability to account
for complexity, emergence and causality in the social realm.

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 4
Social Realism and Social/Cultural
Morphogenesis

The core argument has been made so far that AL is necessarily involved
in the structure–agency debate from a variety of angles, whether it is with
regard to (a) understanding the relationship between language learners,
teachers, institutions and society, and between learners and the language
being learned, (b) determining which variables to study and explaining
what their properties and powers are, (c) revealing how language learners,
teachers and language users—as reflexive and causally efficacious human
agents—understand their lived experiences and construct subject posi-
tions, (d) clarifying causal relationships between social entities and
phenomena in order to improve complex and wide-ranging processes
such as language education, language policy and language maintenance,
for example, and (e) engaging in transdisciplinary scientific efforts in
collaboration with scientists from other scientific fields. As a branch
of the social sciences, AL is also necessarily involved in the study of
social stability or morphostasis (e.g., the establishment and recognition of
language policies; language as a relatively rule-based system; the language
testing industry and its general adherence to neoliberal principles) and
change or morphogenesis (e.g., language learning, curricular change,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 177

Switzerland AG 2021
J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_4
178 J. Bouchard

language shift, the emergence of language varieties) in language-related

phenomena within and across multiple domains of social life.
To facilitate these complex tasks, social theory has been shown to
provide much valuable conceptual insight, which can then be used
to formulate middle-range theories and strengthen methodological
approaches relevant to specific AL phenomena. From Parsonian func-
tionalism to Habermas’s lifeworld/system theory, paradigms summarized
in the previous chapter have been shown to conceptualize structure and
agency as important to the production of social life (except perhaps
the more radical postmodernist strands such as poststructuralism and
certain versions of social constructionism), and differ principally in
their accounts of their relationship. While most paradigms put greater
emphasis on either structure or agency, others (e.g., interactionism,
structuration theory and, to some extent, complexity theory) emphasize
their interrelationship in the hope of overcoming the dualism said to
divide them. Some even go as far as to claim that the structure–agency
discussion is meaningless, a burdensome heritage of positivism.
Given the existence (and somewhat surprising popularity) of this more
radical tendency among contemporary AL scholars, I have also argued
that dismissal of the structure–agency debate is a considerable problem,
for as Layder (2006: 98) argues, “doing away with the macro–micro
distinction by claiming that it is false does not prove it to be so. It
merely avoids making the effort to work out the relations between the
two domains.” Again, there are important ontological reasons why the
same terms, theories and analytical strategies cannot be applied equally
and indiscriminately to the study of individuals, groups, institutions,
societies and social mechanisms. The main reason is that these different
social phenomena possess distinct and emergent properties and powers,
and recognition of this fact is fundamental to how AL scholars conceptu-
alize and study causal interactions in their data, and formulate strategies
for improving language education and language-related practices. When
specific ontologies are adopted by researchers, specific epistemologies
follow (Longshore Smith, 2006), which then leads to specific theoret-
ical and methodological choices and ultimately to specific conclusions
about the data under investigation. These issues are not merely theoret-
ical: they affect AL practices on the ground in profound ways. Precisely
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 179

because it is applied and concerned largely with practical realities such

as language learning and teaching, the point has also been made that AL
needs theory, including social theory, to understand how phenomena are
causally related and how practice can be improved.
In this chapter, I present realism as (a) “a robust philosophical and
applied perspective, which has been embraced and debated in philosophy
of science, sociology, health, history, information sciences, and manage-
ment and organization” (Cochran-Smith et al., 2014: 108), (b) an
emergentist social ontology particularly mindful of the need to account
for structure, culture and agency in the study of social realities, and
(c) “an explanatory model in which the interplay between pre-existent
structures, having causal powers and properties, and people, possessing
distinctive causal powers and properties of their own, results in contin-
gent yet explicable outcomes” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 12). Realism is
characterized by commitment to objective knowledge, thus as helping
to overcome some of the problems posed by anti-realist perspectives
including interpretivism and postmodernism. Realism, in short, reaffirms
the centrality of ontology in our work (Williams & Dyer, 2017). Sealey
and Carter (2004: 14–15) explain realism’s commitment to objective
knowledge thus:

Following Popper, we would distinguish between subjective knowledge

– what any particular individual knows – and objective knowledge –
knowledge expressed in theories, propositions, conjectures. The impor-
tant feature of objective knowledge is that it is ’totally independent of
anybody’s claim to know; it is also independent of anybody’s belief, or
disposition to assent, or to assert or to act. Knowledge in the objective
sense is knowledge without a knower; it is knowledge without a knowing
subject ’ (Popper, 1972: 109). The second sense in which we understand
objective knowledge is that, precisely because it is ’knowledge without a
knower’, it is capable of refinement and methodological development.”

The authors also explain that such commitment does not constitute a
form of objectivism, an ideological perspective rooted in the belief that
there is only one truth to be revealed and that there is only one way
to apprehend it. Instead, following Bhaskar (1998), the realist position
asks What are the characteristics and powers of the world which lead us to
180 J. Bouchard

formulate those particular claims about it and not other claims? Dealing
with this fundamental scientific question becomes possible with the
adoption of a stratified ontology afforded by realism. In doing so, and
by accepting both the existence of an objective reality beyond human
perception and understanding and the postmodernist principle that our
understandings of reality are cultural or inherently ideational (thus as
socially constructed), realism also offers a way to combine positivist
and postmodernist perspectives, similarly to a Habermasian ontology,
yet also resolving a broader range of conceptual tensions than that which
Habermasian ontology manages to achieve.
Given these important benefits, realism can thus be considered as
adding further sophistication to social theory because, as Haig and Evers
(2016) underscore, it provides solutions to the problems posed by most
other paradigms available, which show conflationary tendencies. Specifi-
cally, realism’s stratified ontology—also called “layered” or “laminated”—
(a) explains why determinism is insufficient to explain the complexity of
social realities, (b) brings attention to processes unfolding within and
between structure, culture and agency as distinct and emergent strata of
the social realm, and (c) provides solid conceptual grounds upon which
to explore causality in the social realm. Bouchard and Glasgow (2019:
25–26, emphasis mine) explain that, in common parlance,

the term stratified is used to refer to a structuring of a particular object or

reality into layers. Juxtaposed with the adjective social or the noun society
, stratified can potentially be (and has often been) understood as referring
to social castes, classes or levels, each one with different status and access
to particular resources and forms of privilege. In contrast, [the realist] use
of the term stratified considers society not as a single and unified object
but as an entity composed of multiple layers or strata, with the three core
social strata being structure, culture and agency.

Cochran-Smith et al. (2014: 109) explain that a stratified reality

has layers, some immediately perceivable and some that are hidden.
People’s observable behavior is underpinned by other layers such as tacit
belief systems, patterns of social interaction and organizational structures,
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 181

and deep and contingent causal mechanisms, which are not immediately
perceptible but which do lead to patterns that we can see.

In Bouchard (2017), for example, I look at the Japanese English as a

foreign language (EFL) context from a realist perspective and argue that
realism’s stratified perspective allows researchers to

highlight the distinct and emergent properties of the various constituents

of the Japanese EFL system: texts (EFL policies, government-approved
EFL textbooks, teacher-produced materials, newspaper articles, external
EFL proficiency tests, etc.), beliefs (interpretations of government poli-
cies, exams, textbooks and classroom discourse by classroom actors,
etc.), and processes (EFL classroom practices, localized uses of EFL
textbooks, etc.). These various constituents include objects (textbooks,
language policy documents and tests), intangible elements (beliefs, ideolo-
gies, values, etc.), human agents and/or actors (teachers, students, school
administrators and policy makers), and institutions (schools, govern-
mental organisms concerned with education, institutions involved in
generating and administering tests, etc.). All of these social components
can be organized within specific layers of the social realm and provide
insight into the Japanese EFL system as a whole. Because of their inter-
relatedness, however, constituents can simultaneously belong to two or
more strata at a time. (p. 77)

Also central to the critique of contemporary AL scholarship in this

volume is the core argument that realism offers a meta-theory of
causality. Aside from its insightful and much-needed account of human
reflexivity as important causal force in society (Archer, 1996, 2004,
2012), one of realism’s most important contributions to the social
sciences is a more explicit emphasis on underlying generative mecha-
nisms. Examples of the latter include the conservative powers of social
inertia, vested interests as well as the combination of competition and
collaboration in explaining social stability, the material and symbolic
interests associated with innovation as well as the complex network of
contingencies, complementarities and divergences within the cultural
system to explain social change. These underlying causal mechanisms
are seen from a realist perspective as important forces generating causal
182 J. Bouchard

links and phenomena within the social realm. The realist approach
to explaining causal relationships is hereby presented as cognizant of
and responsive to the stratified nature of society and its constituting
parts. Realism is also presented in this chapter less as a theory than a
broader ontological perspective which “favours the language of causality
to describe the world, even though it accepts that any analysis of causality
is partial at best” (Gerrits & Verweij, 2013: 171). To reinforce this
argument, insight from prominent realist thinkers is hereby summarized
and used to build the argument that realism provides solid conceptual
grounds upon which social researchers, including applied linguists, can
“generate provisional explanation of how events follow from previous
events, what drives processes, and the mechanisms by which human
behaviour transpires” (ibid.).
Different realist approaches are, of course, available—e.g., ontological
realism, metaphysical realism, semantic realism, epistemological realism,
axiological realism, institutional realism, naturalistic realism, global and
local realism (see Haig & Evers, 2016, for discussion). In this chapter,
I only focus on two strands of realism that have influenced my own
work. The first one is critical realism which shapes much of the argu-
mentation regarding underlying causal mechanisms in this chapter. Social
realism, on the other hand, provides in my view a much stronger and
useful account of human agency, notably by emphasizing human reflex-
ivity, or the ongoing sense-making internal conversation we hold within
our own minds, as endowing agency with considerable causal power in
the ongoing production of social life. As stated by Archer (2003) and
underlined by Elder-Vass (2010), reflexivity is a causal power possessed
by human agents. By reflexively deliberating on a number of issues in
our lives, with regards to structural and cultural constraints and enable-
ments, we, both as individuals and as part of collectivities, can (although
not always) reach decisions that can then affect our behaviours. From
that point on, our behaviours can then affect the course of social life,
and over time, have causal effects on structure and culture. Although
reflexivity has been discussed since the very beginnings of philosophy (see
Lawson, 1985), social realism gives reflexivity central importance in the
formulation of causal explanations. As an applied linguist and educator,
I cannot help but conclude that this particular emphasis on people as
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 183

powerful particulars (Harré & Madden, 1975) in social realism is crucial

to AL research, a large proportion of which tends to focus on localized,
smaller groups of thinking and learning classroom agents.

Distinguishing and Appreciating

the Relationship Between Things
Realism begins with acknowledgment that reality exists independently
of our understanding of it (an objectivist principle), while accepting
that much of social reality is a human creation or construction achieved
largely through discursive means (a subjectivist, constructivist prin-
ciple). Realists recognize that, as researchers and people, we do not
have direct access to objective and unmediated truth; although diverging
from postmodernist thinkers, they also maintain that a commitment to
objective knowledge must also characterize scientific inquiry. Longshore
Smith (2006: 192) presents the critical realist stance towards objective
knowledge thus:

The interpretivist rejection of the causal power of the natural and social
worlds belies their inclusion of this world in their research. If we reject
any regulation of our knowledge by empirical data afforded us by the
objective world, we have given up on the practice of science. This is
neither an argument for the infallible nature of knowledge nor that we
should not maintain a healthy epistemic skepticism. Instead it is an argu-
ment for an alternative conception of science that resolves this disjuncture
through a new set of ontological premises.

Realism, in this sense, proposes a third option, beyond objec-

tivism and subjectivism, which maintains its commitment to explaining
causality in the social realm while recognizing the central importance
of human meaning-making processes, of humans’ fallible interpretative
capacities, and the undeniable influence of context and culture. This
principle is captured by Huckle’s (2004: 37) definition of realism as
acknowledging “that the mind only knows the world by means of percep-
tion, thought and language, but clings to the ontological assumption that
184 J. Bouchard

there is a real objective knowable material world.” Unlike the common

postmodernist critique that objectivism, or positivism, can only offer a
deterministic, machine-like view of the social world, the realist acknowl-
edgment that there is a realm out there beyond our understanding of
it is not a form of capitulation to determinism, for “the nature of real
objects at a given time does not predetermine what will happen. Instead
the structures of objects enable what can happen through the workings
of their mechanisms within geo-historical contexts” (Longshore Smith,
2006: 202). The fact that there is a realm beyond our understanding
which influences our actions and experiences in important ways does not
mean that we are inescapable victims of machine-like forces, as in radical
structuralism, nor does it mean that we should be concerned exclusively
with our experiences and our individual understandings of these experi-
ences, as in radical forms of interactionism. Rather, a realist social science
is, at its core, the pursuit of knowledge regarding how people make
constrained choices in structured contexts.
Realist thinkers often ground their work on another fundamental
distinction between the transitive and the intransitive dimensions of
social reality and scientific knowledge. Bhaskar (2008: 6, emphases mine)
explains both dimensions thus:

A transitive dimension [is one] in which the object is the material cause
or antecedently established knowledge which is used to generate the new
knowledge; and an intransitive dimension [is one] in which the object is
the real structure or mechanism that exists and acts quite independently
of men and the conditions which allow men access to it.

If we concentrate on the question of knowledge, for example, the

transitive dimension of knowledge includes all our evolving ideas about
the world, or the ideas we express and share with others on a day-to-
day basis, while the intransitive dimension of knowledge includes all the
antecedent and relatively enduring ideas about the world (e.g., religions,
scientific ideas and concepts). The intransitive dimension of ideas also
includes our formulations of the underlying causal mechanisms which
exist regardless of whether or not they are perceived and understood by
us. A fitting metaphor for the intransitive dimension would be a library
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 185

containing books resting on bookshelves, regardless of whether or not

they are actually read by people.
From this distinction emerges the additional realist principle that our
variegated discourses and understandings of social reality are not exclu-
sively about the transitive realm (e.g., human knowledge as an ongoing
“narrative”): they are inescapably in relation to the intransitive dimension
as well as the material realm. It is fair, for example, to claim that a tree
has no inherent or given meaning since it is humans, as meaning-makers
and interpreters, who label it and invest it with particular meanings.
However, the formulation and interpretation of the tree as meaningful
object would be impossible without the tree existing outside the realm of
subjective meaning. Stated differently, our capacity for meaning, which
is indeed part of our distinct and emergent powers as human agents, in
large part requires an objective reality. It is from this perspective that we
can appreciate scientists’ necessary commitment to objective knowledge.
Discourses also gain emergent properties of their own over time,
moving from the transitive to the intransitive. We can see this process
unfold as ideas, concepts, beliefs, ideologies, identities, intentions and
meanings come to occupy a more stable place within the Cultural
System (see below), or become naturalized within particular contexts,
thus acting as powerful influences onto human being’s sense-making
activities. The library metaphor above serves to explain this particular
process of emergence. Ideas can therefore be understood not merely as
social constructions with transitive (which can be interpreted to mean
ephemeral ) qualities: they can also be considered as real as rocks or
the weather, precisely because of their emergent properties and real
causal powers to influence both agency and structure. If ideas can gain
emergent properties and powers over time, for example, by influencing
people’s lives and social/natural phenomena in consequential ways, we
must therefore understand them as real and as possessing intransitive
properties beyond situated interaction.
To untangle these conceptual complexities and avoid conflationary
conclusions, knowledge and truth must also be conceptually distin-
guished, to highlight the social roots of knowledge on the one hand
and the truth as independent of belief on the other. This strategy
makes realism a relativist perspective regarding knowledge while rejecting
186 J. Bouchard

relativism with regards to truth (Elder-Vass, 2012). Again, this impor-

tant nuance is grounded in recognition of the differences between the
transitive and intransitive dimensions. However, this apparent dualism
between knowledge and truth should not be alarming to social scientists,
for as Elder-Vass (2012: 249) rightfully points out,

if we have access to a social or symbolic world, then we have access to

at least some part of the world that exists beyond us, and so it cannot
be true that we are incapable of access to reality “out there”. If, on the
other hand, we are incapable of access to any reality out there, then we
are incapable of acquiring the conceptual scheme that is said to structure
reality as we know it.

Within realism, there is no doubt that our ability to access and under-
stand the social world is deeply influenced by culture, or our powers
as human beings to generate and consume meaning; there is also no
denying that much of this involves social constructions. At the same
time, these principles should not lead us to the limiting (because rela-
tivist) conclusions that (a) society is merely a tightly knit realm of
human-generated meanings, or that (b) everything we sense about the
world “out there” is entirely the product of our meanings and concepts.
As social researchers, explaining the intransitive dimension still remains
our primary target. If everything about society was included in the tran-
sitive dimension, made up entirely of concepts and ideas, we would
indeed inhabit a rather deterministic social world. This is an unaccept-
able conclusion, for the social realm and the people who populate it
constitute an open system in large part because it possesses both intran-
sitive and transitive dimensions in relation with each other, which also
means that deterministic accounts of it are necessarily mistaken.
In terms of causal explanation, the realist orientation towards objec-
tive knowledge is therefore far from deterministic, yet also committed
to the view that phenomena do cause other phenomena to happen in
society. It would be incredibly pessimistic and limiting, for example, to
think that nothing which takes place within school walls ever leads to
learning, or that language learning has never been improved or influ-
enced by AL research. As explained below, realist thinkers question both
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 187

extreme positivist views of causality which present causes-effect relation-

ships in hydraulic ways, and the rather defeatist, anti-realist denial of
causality altogether, common in constructivism and other postmodernist
strands. In parallel with CDST to a very large extent, realism looks at
causal mechanisms as complex, multiple, situated, and produced by a
combination of multiple interacting mechanisms. The issue of causality
is explored further below and in subsequent chapters on CDST.
Core to realism, obviously, is the issue of how we define reality. For
some especially in the interpretivist camp, since reality can never be
apprehended through our senses, reality is therefore whatever people
see, experience and understand. For example, real language is under-
stood from this perspective not as a set of rules and items included in
dictionaries, grammar books or state-mandated language policy docu-
ments, but rather as whatever people on the ground use to communicate.
Understandably, this vision of language sees any language policy or plan-
ning effort, including attempts to explain the structures of languages
in normative ways, as intrusive and counterproductive. This popular
empiricist viewpoint notably promulgated by Shohamy (2006), Penny-
cook (2013) and other poststructuralist AL researchers has led to the
increasing prominence in AL scholarship of the notion of languaging
(Swain, 2006), or the complex use of different linguistic and semi-
otic resources in everyday communication. Ironically, these authors are
often reluctant to distinguish between language and communication on
ontological grounds.
In contrast, while realists accept that languaging is empirical and
actual (see below), and that it is quite different from antecedent language
rules, norms and policies, they also consider the intransitive dimension
of language as also important to a study of languaging practices and to
AL research in a broader sense. While situated language acts are certainly
part of reality as we experience it, realists also note that the empiricist
view restricts us to what our senses allow us to perceive, and therefore
cannot account for the full range of ontological properties and powers
of language. In addition, realists recognize that, in everyday commu-
nication, people do more than use a variety of linguistic and semiotic
resources: they also talk about objective realities and are also cognizant
(at least to some extent) of norms, rules and processes as relevant to their
188 J. Bouchard

communicative actions. Realism sees these norms, rules and processes

as important regulating forces existing beyond the immediate commu-
nicative act which, in large part, have emerged and gained salience over
long periods of time. There are also numerous social, political, economic,
ideological, natural and biological elements that play important causal
roles in situated interaction, and not all of these can be perceived or
understood by situated communicators. “Real language, from a realist
perspective, must therefore be something more than what is contained
within the empirical realm, or embedded in situated communicative acts.
Although postmodernists would reject this example, we only have to
think of Chomsky’s “concern with the hidden operational code which
makes instances of language behaviour possible” (Sealey & Carter, 2004:
68) to get a sense that language is more than an empirical reality. To
rephrase this argument about language differently and more succinctly,
people do not entirely reinvent language and communication “in the
moment”: other layers or strata of knowledge and resources beyond
their reach are also involved in this process. In short, to account for
real language, one must deal with both its transitive and intransitive
dimensions.
To clarify the notion of the “real introduced above, the realist philoso-
pher Bhaskar (1998, 2008) identifies three different layers of reality: the
empirical , the actual and the real . The empirical usually includes “facts”
which exist within our sensorial reach, or what we perceive through the
senses and through the application of data gathering techniques. Inter-
view, survey and statistical analyses are very much concerned with this
layer of reality. The actual, however, includes all the phenomena which
exist as opposed to others which could have existed but did not. These
include events that take place everywhere in the world, whether or not
we are aware of them or able to perceive them empirically. Finally, the
real constitutes the intransitive layer of reality, the realm where we can
locate underlying generative mechanisms. It includes the more abstract,
conceptual elements of society that, despite their intangible or intran-
sitive nature, have very real causal effects on people in context. For
example, while it is impossible for us to feel, delimit or measure a
social class (income alone being an insufficient indicator of social class
positions), social class divisions are nevertheless real in that they have
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 189

real effects on people’s lives. To understand social class division as an

underlying causal mechanism, we therefore need more than empirical
knowledge. Sealey and Carter (2004: 70) also distinguish between

what causes things to happen in the world, which we often cannot

observe (the real), and the instances of experience of which we are imme-
diately aware (the empirical). The intervening domain, the actual, is that
part of reality events – which actually happen, as distinct from all those
things which might have happened but did not. The reasons why the real
does not inevitably coincide with the actual are attributable to the fact
that the world is an ’open system’.

In other words, to explain why we cannot describe society (as an open

system) in the same way we describe a car—i.e., as a machine with fixed
parts and pre-set patterns of energy transfer—requires important concep-
tual distinctions to be made between these different layers of reality: the
car is empirical, whereas much of society is not. The notion of society as
open system will be revisited in subsequent chapters as we explore CDST.
Table 4.1 shows how underlying causal mechanisms, social events and
human experiences are differently distributed among the empirical, the
actual and the real.
Elder-Vass (2010: 44) notes that, in dividing reality thus, “Bhaskar
clearly intends the domain of the empirical to be a subset of the domain
of the actual, which in turn is a subset of the domain of the real.”
Bhaskar’s distinction is valuable to the development of human under-
standing and experience of reality, for while the empirical can be accessed
though the senses and through our measuring instruments, processes
located at the level of the real can mainly be felt through their effects
on empirically accessible and measurable phenomena. Some in the post-
modernist camp claim on this basis that, if things can only be understood

Table 4.1 Bhaskar’s ontological domains (Bhaskar, 2008: 46)

The Real The Actual The Empirical
√
Mechanisms
√ √
Events
√ √ √
Experiences
190 J. Bouchard

through their effects on other things, they cannot essentially be consid-

ered “real. The problem with this view is that the real is reduced to
the empirical. Not only does understanding the differences between the
empirical, the actual and the real help us avoid this form of empiri-
cism, it also helps us understand three important points about reality
and our variegated understandings of it. Firstly, people’s experiences,
events and mechanisms can unfold through different timeframes, thus
be “out of synch” with each other, which can lead to contradictions
and the potential for change. Secondly, there is thus no one-to-one rela-
tionship between reality and people’s experience and understanding of
it. Thirdly, recognition of the latter point means that commitment to
objective knowledge requires a stratified perspective.
By conceptually separating the empirical from the actual and the real,
realism also allows for the development of richer and more sophisti-
cated theories and statements about the social realm. Collier (2011: 4,
emphasis original) presents Bhaskar’s brand of critical realism as postu-
lating “greater depth to reality than some other theories: it postulates real
causal mechanisms beneath events.” This highlights the need for social
scientists to engage actively in evidence-based theoretical deliberations
to capture and understand the intransitive layer. What realism indeed
makes clear is the need for social scientists to “discover these mecha-
nisms, as opposed, on the one hand, to simply registering the obvious
[i.e., what we perceive], or on the other, inventing them” (Collier, 2011:
5, emphasis mine). In other words, while we cannot access much of
the intransitive layer, empirical knowledge nevertheless offers important
points of entry as well as evidence against which theories and concepts
can be judged and improved. In Chapter 2, the same argument was made
to explain that, while statistical analysis cannot generate theory, it can be
used to test theories. This is precisely where realism departs from inter-
pretivist or subjectivist paradigms. Huckle (2004: 37), however, explains
that although realism is not antagonistic to constructivism, it is not
simply another version of it, for realism “accepts a weak social construc-
tivism […] by recognising that social reality is pre-interpreted and that
language, discourse and ideology shape its production and reproduction.
At the same time it rejects a strong social constructivism that denies
the material reality of nature.” This nuanced balance becomes necessary
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 191

when attempting to relate phenomena at the empirical level to processes

and mechanisms at the level of the real, by considering the contingent
factors located at the level of the actual. Citing Layder (1993), Sealey
and Carter (2004: 194) explain that the realist approach to AL research

stresses the links between theory and the empirical world, seeking to
steer between an approach in which the world tells us, as it were, what
theories to have, so that ’the whole thrust and meaning of theory is irre-
sistibly driven by the empirical world as it appears to our senses’ (Layder,
1993: 61) and an alternative approach which suggests that the connection
between the empirical world and theory formation is arbitrary or contin-
gent; that is that theories can be of little help with developing knowledge
of the empirical world. Our belief that the world extends beyond our
empirical knowledge of it does not imply or entail a reduction of the
empirical simply to a portal through which access to ’deeper reality’ is
enabled. The empirical, in other words, is no less an element of reality
for being directly present in ways that other elements of the social world
are not. Our central point here is that forms of measurement and clas-
sification are critical to research which seeks to explicate the connections
between the empirical, the actual and the real dimensions of social rela-
tions. The aim, then, is an elaboration of the kind of ’...theory which is
guided rather than limited by empirical evidence’ (ibid.: 63).

Bhaskar’s distinction between these three layers of reality helps us

further distinguish realism from both objectivism and idealism, especially
in how realism emphasizes the central role of theory in an explo-
ration of the real. As Clegg (2006: 316) explains, critical realism rejects
crude realism and its unified subject, and “entails the view that the
world has depth and that the real cannot be reduced simply to expe-
rience, including of course the simple experience of the subject.” It
is thus appropriate to conclude that charges of reductionism or posi-
tivism aimed at realism simply miss their mark. Very much aligned with
complexity theory on this point, realism embraces the full complexity of
the social realm by, in part, making clear ontological distinctions between
phenomena under investigation.
192 J. Bouchard

Rooted in its commitment to objective knowledge and its intention

to reveal insight into the real, a realist social science builds on the prin-
ciples outlined above to conceptualizes structure, culture and agency as
different social strata, with distinct and emergent properties of their own.
Elder-Vass (2010: 50) explains the consequences of a stratified view of
social phenomena to an understanding of causality and social processes
in a broader sense thus:

Any given higher-level entity, then, can be seen as a pyramid of succes-

sively lower-level parts and the causal impact of the higher-level entity as a
whole includes the causal impacts of those parts. At each level, the entities
formed from the lower-level parts have causal powers in their own right
by virtue of how those parts are organised. The total causal impact of a
higher-level entity conceived of in these laminated terms, then, includes
the impact of all its lower-level parts as well as the causal powers that are
emergent at its highest level.

Counter determinism, the task of revealing the properties and powers

of structure, culture and agency is therefore crucial in realist social
research, because it is the basis upon which scientists can then explore
how wholes are organized through sets of relations between their emer-
gent parts. Elder-Vass (2010) also explains how a stratified view of the
world leads researchers to appreciate multiple determination, or the idea
(also found in CDST) that social realities are the outcomes of a combi-
nation of multiple causal forces interacting in complex ways. Counter
relationism, the task of distinguishing between things should also not be
considered as a form of capitulation to outdated modes of thinking, for
it remains one of the central purposes of scientific endeavours in general.
As Layder (2006: 106) argues,

It is perfectly in order to say that society is a product of human activity

while at the same time suggesting that people and society are very
different. […] To say that people and society (social structures) are
different things is merely to point to different aspects of social reality.
This is similar to making distinctions in the natural world – such as those
between air, earth, fire and water.
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 193

Equally important, by acknowledging both the constructed nature of

social phenomena and their emergent and at times material and intran-
sitive features, realism (critical, social or otherwise) “does put rest to the
myth that there is no alternative to poststructuralism except a reversion
to a crude version of the unified rational subject, which poststructuralism
has so ably deconstructed” (Clegg, 2006: 316). What Bhaskar’s (2008)
intransitive/transitive distinction and empirical/actual/real layering also
offer is an explanation for why differences are consequential to the task
of explanation, and also why both natural and social scientists will never
be able to reduce reality to their accounts of it. Realism, in this sense,
constitutes a powerful anti-empiricist critique of both successionism and
interpretivism, the two broad perspectives that have guided much of AL
scholarship to date.
Earlier in this book and in the above section, I have argued with
regard to relationism that conceptualizing social phenomena as closely
interrelated with other phenomena, although of undeniable scientific
necessity, should not distract us from depicting them also as distinct
from each other. Realism, in this sense, is equally interested in differences
and interrelationships. However, by highlighting the important point
that relationships unfold between ontologically different phenomena,
realism avoids the common tendency among relationists to present rela-
tionships as entirely constitutive of these phenomena—e.g., the premise
that language cannot be understood apart from its real-world uses, or
that “policy is practice and practice is policy” (Shohamy, 2006: 165), for
example. It is worth noting here that interactionists (and to some extent
CDST adherents as well, as will be discussed in Chapter 6) strongly
advocate a relational sociology. The constructivists, however, are more
radical in their depictions of relationships as “transactions” that can be
unpacked through analytical narratives. This is a considerable problem,
for as Donati and Archer (2015: 18, emphases original) explain,

‘Being in relation’ is an ontological expression that has three analytical

meanings: (i) it says that, between two (or more) entities there is a certain
distance which, at the same time, distinguishes and connects them; (ii) it
says that any such relation exists, that is, it is real in itself, irreducible to
its progenitors, and possesses its own properties and causal powers; and
194 J. Bouchard

(iii) it says that such a reality has its own modus essendi (the modality
of the beings who are inside the relation which refers to the internal
structure of the social relation and its dynamics) and is responsible for
its emergent properties, that is, relational goods and evils. These three
meanings are analytical, because – from an empirical viewpoint – every
relation contains all these aspects, which are closely interlinked.

Realism thus suggests that relationships are possible when they unfold
between ontologically distinct and emergent phenomena, and that conse-
quently studying these relationships necessitates a study of their differ-
ences. In addition, since their causal effects can vary depending on the
nature of that relationship, the relationship itself must also be consid-
ered real and distinct from the two phenomena it connects. Recognition
of these principles thus allows us to avoid the relationist trap—i.e., to
reduce social phenomena to their relationships with other phenomena,
which can lead to upward, downward or central conflations (Archer,
1995).
At the same time, relationships matter a great deal to the constitution,
maintenance and transformation of society and the phenomena within
it, for it is within social relationships—notably the structure–agency
relationship—that the powers of causal mechanisms can be deployed
(Donati & Archer, 2015). Complimenting this relational perspective
is the related principle that the absence of relationship can also bear
causal significance to social events. In this sense, explaining society only
in terms of existing networks of relationships between existing social
phenomena is reductive because it overlooks the importance of disso-
ciative relations, which are indeed relationships but not in the sense
contained within a relationist perspective.
As is perhaps becoming clearer to readers at this point, realism requires
scholars to both clarify and maintain important analytical distinctions
between things, between the different layers or strata of social reality,
and between different dimensions of knowledge, before launching into
the study of social phenomena and their relationships. This perspective
goes against recent postmodern argumentations rejecting differences as
‘dichotomies”. But as Cilliers (2001: 141) rightfully points out, “we often
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 195

fall into the trap of thinking of a boundary as something which sepa-

rates one thing from another. We should rather think of a boundary as
something that constitutes that which is bounded. This shift will help us
see the boundary as something enabling rather than confining.” Realism,
particularly its social strand, is clearly on the side of a relational sociology,
but not one where relationships subsume everything to the point where
distinctions become untenable. Rather, social stability and change are
both understood as emerging from relationships in the social world. Yet,
just as the related phenomena are also understood as different, given their
emergent properties, so is their relationship. Donati and Archer (2015:
29) explain that

the relation has properties and powers that generically surpass ‘social
interactions’ […] Among various properties and powers of relations to
be accentuated are at least two that are connected to one another. First,
the social relation is intrinsically reflexive, in the sense that it ‘is always
bent back’ on to the subjects that are in the relation. […] Second, and
in parallel, this means that the social relation can never work purely
mechanically because it has a ternary, not binary, structure.

To further understand why the study of relationships between social

phenomena also implies a study of their differences, we need to unpack
the notion of emergence, fundamental to both realism and CDST
although not necessarily in identical ways.

Emergence
As the title of this book suggests, understanding the notion of emergence
is pivotal to efforts towards a renewed AL research. This view is directly
aligned with Gerrits and Verweij’s (2013: 169) argument that “emergence
serves as an ontological vehicle for thinking about the nature of causa-
tion.” According to Sayer (2000: 12–13, emphasis mine), emergence
involves
196 J. Bouchard

situations in which the conjunction of two or more features or aspects [of

an object, system, or phenomenon] gives rise to new phenomena, which
have properties which are irreducible to those of their constituents, even
though the latter are necessary for their existence. The standard phys-
ical example of this is the emergent properties of water which are quite
different from those of its constituents, hydrogen and oxygen. In the same
way, social phenomena are emergent from biological phenomena, which
are in turn emergent from the chemical and physical strata.

When we consider emergence as it relates to learning, for example,

we can say that mental properties cannot be fully explained as outcomes
of the interaction between the physical/chemical/biological elements in
the brain. Rather, people’s mental capacities emerge from these elements,
gaining distinct properties and powers which cannot be reduced to
or fully explained by these constituting elements. Moreover, emergent
mental properties can in turn impact the physical/chemical/biological
elements in the brain, creating a feedback loop (to use CDST termi-
nology). At the social level, while individual beings possess emergent
properties which can influence the groups to which they belong to,
these groups and communities can also be said to possess emergent
properties of important causal consequences to their members (e.g., the
emergence of rules, patterns, roles, power structures, etc.). When we talk
about emergence as a crucial element in our analyses, we are not merely
concerned with explaining how things evolve over time, or how they are
different from other things: we are also trying to explain how phenomena
are causally linked.
For emergent properties to exist, a specific structure of relations
between the constituting parts of an object, system or phenomenon must
be in place. This criterion can be referred to as intrastructuration, whereby
“the properties of an entity are altered as a consequence of its having
become part of a particular type of whole” (Elder-Vass, 2010: 27). Sealey
and Carter (2004) list three core features of emergent social phenomena:
(1) they are generated from their constituent parts but cannot be reduced
to them; (2) the relations between their constituent parts are necessary
rather than contingent; and (3) their emergent properties can have a
causal influence on the context for subsequent social interaction. With
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 197

regards to the structure–agency interaction, the authors argue that “emer-

gence is what makes the identification of structures possible, for the
irreducibility, endurance and autonomous influence of emergent proper-
ties entails that they pre-date any particular set of incumbents” (Sealey &
Carter, 2004: 13). Their argument further clarifies why the concept
of emergence is pivotal to causal explanation, and why determinism
or other conflationary understandings of the structure–agency relation-
ship are inadequate to account for complexity and causality. Because of
this necessary relationship between emergence and causality, it would be
contradictory to discuss emergence as a property of social phenomena on
the one hand, while dismissing the concept of causality as “determinis-
tic” on the other, as interactionists (and some CDST adherents) do. The
importance of emergence to causal accounts is discussed further in the
next section.
Here are three examples that further explain emergence in the social
realm. While the emotional life of human beings depends on the
activation of certain regions in the limbic system—a process itself depen-
dent on the existence of a flesh-and-blood human body—emotions
cannot be reduced to or fully explained by these flows of energy, since
emotions are both physical realities and part of the ideational realm
of human existence. Likewise, language might be partly structured by
grammatical rules and other linguistic items which have gained relatively
enduring properties over long periods of time, although the individual
components of language cannot—either separately or together in the
aggregative sense—account for the full ontological scope of language and
its centrality in human communication. The third example is the high
school graduate who enters a university and must consequently develop
knowledge of and adopt different roles, responsibilities and strategies for
learning. This example also shows that the university itself, and that indi-
vidual students who populate its classrooms, are emergent entities. As
Elder-Vass (2010: 28) clarifies, “sometimes, when a person acts, they do
so both as an individual and as a part of a structure. In such cases, the
structure acts through the person and the person implements the struc-
ture’s causal power.” In other words, we cannot reduce the university
simply to the sum total of its members precisely because, as an emer-
gent entity, it exists (or emerges) out of a specific set of relations between
198 J. Bouchard

its parts (e.g., students, faculty members, administrative staff, etc.), who
would normally be unable to fulfil their functions in the university if the
university itself did not act through its individual and collective members.
In short, to understand how things affect, influence or cause other things
to happen, we need to consider the emergent properties and powers of
phenomena under scrutiny.
There are, of course, different understandings of the notion of emer-
gence, and these differences can indeed influence how causality is
understood. Elder-Vass (2010) distinguishes between temporal emer-
gence—the development of a new state or phenomenon over time, often
due to changes in context/conditions—and synchronic emergence—the
relationship between the whole and its parts at any given moment. As
the author suggests, it is crucial to distinguish between these two types
of emergence:

The temporal sense of emergence refers to the first appearance of a thing,

or its development over a period of time. Anything that exists (unless
it has always existed) must have emerged at some time in this temporal
sense; but this does not necessarily mean that it possesses emergent prop-
erties. [Instead] synchronic emergence […] is a relationship between the
properties of a whole and its parts at a particular moment in time.
(Elder-Vass, 2010: 5, emphasis mine)

Equipped with this understanding, the realist emphasis on synchronic

emergence recognizes that “collective phenomena are collaboratively
created by individuals yet are not reducible to individual action” (Sawyer,
2001: 552). In other words, collective realities are not epiphenomena
of individual realities, and so must be conceptualized as different real-
ities from individual ones on the basis of their emergent properties.
In contrast, methodological individualists tend to view emergence as a
property of individuals and their relationships. Sawyer (2001) explains
that “methodological individualism’s focus on micro-to-macro processes
is explicitly considered to be a study of how social properties emerge from
individual action”, and argues that these are two contradictory contem-
porary understandings of emergence which lead to very different analyt-
ical observations and conclusions. This distinction between synchronic
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 199

and temporal emergence, according to Elder-Vass (2010), matters a

great deal to causal explanations, because looking at causal mecha-
nisms—elements which again are part of the real—requires consideration
for synchronic emergence. The author justifies this position with the
following arguments:

It is not the case that new emergent properties are created from nothing
the first time that they appear and are then somehow available for further
instantiation. […] Furthermore, in most cases there is no significant sense
in which subsequent instances of an entity ‘inherit’ an emergent property
from the first one. (p. 46)

In short, accounting for how elements with causal powers are—i.e.,

their constituting properties and powers—and how they become over
time are two different types of causal explanations based on two different
understandings of emergence.
The notion of emergence not only contradicts all deterministic view-
points, and has fundamental implications for research, for as Elder-Vass
(2010: 19) explains, emergence is inherently compositional: “any given
entity, then, can be seen as internally stratified into many different levels
or layers, each level representing sets of parts that are combined into the
entities at the next level up.” Collier (2011) also relates the realist view of
emergence with the idea that society and its constituent parts are strati-
fied entities. Elder-Vass highlights five core questions of relevance to the
study of emergence:

Any claim that an entity possesses an emergent property must be

supported by the answers to five questions: (a) what are its parts?; (b) what
are the relations between those parts that are characteristic of this partic-
ular type of entity?; (c) what set of morphogenetic causes has produced
the entity in its current form?; (d) what set of morphostatic causes
stabilises the entity and ensures its continued survival?; and (e) through
what mechanisms do its parts and relations produce the specific properties
of the entity?” (Elder-Vass, 2010: 38–39)

Together, these questions serve to further elucidate both emergence

and the causal links between social phenomena. As Elder-Vass (2010: 40)
200 J. Bouchard

argues, “the theory of emergence matters because it provides the essential

foundation for understanding how causal forces operate in the world.”
This places emergence—a necessary condition for causality—at the heart
of a realist social ontology.

Emergence and Causality

As a non-conflationary social ontology, realism holds that, because
of their emergent properties, social phenomena (e.g., people, beliefs,
mechanisms) can cause—or at least create the conditions for—other
phenomena to emerge, or changes in other phenomena to occur.
Reversing this claim, if social phenomena did not possess any emergent
properties or powers whatsoever, they would essentially be determined
entities, rendering explanation irrelevant.
The notion of causality is often understood by contemporary social
scientists, particularly interactionists, constructionists and certainly post-
structuralists, as somewhat deterministic. Some CDST adherents have
also demonstrated moderate support for this view. For example, Larsen-
Freeman and Cameron (2008) define causality as a heritage of the
Enlightenment and the product of a “logic of determinism,” a statement
which comes from a particular understanding of causality—namely the
deductive-nomological model of causality—which explains cause–effect
relationships in linear terms, thus as relatively predictable. According
to this model, if researchers can demonstrate that one outcome always
results from the interaction between two phenomena, they can then
postulate the existence of a causal “law”. As the discussion on statistical
analysis in Chapter Two has demonstrated, constant conjunctions are not
necessarily evidence of causality.
Yet, while Larsen-Freeman and Cameron are justified in their critique
of the deductive-nomological model, causality is not fully explained by
this model alone. When social scientists reject the deductive-nomological
model, they often adopt relativistic views of causality, leading many to
argue that, unlike the natural sciences, the social sciences have little
to do with causality altogether. Grounding this perspective is the argu-
ment that, unlike natural phenomena which can be predicted with more
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 201

certainty (e.g., unless it is very pure and very still, or unless we add
pressure or additives to it, water will freeze once reaching zero degree
Celcius), social realities are very difficult to predict because humans
are also somewhat unpredictable. Although realist thinkers also consider
the unpredictable nature of human beings as an important element to
consider in the study of social realities, acceptance of this point does not
lead them to reject causality altogether, nor the possibility for patterns
to emerge in society. As Collier (2011: 7) counters, “since social causes
will co-determine the course of events with natural causes, social sciences
must be causal in the same sense as natural sciences are.” Stated differ-
ently, and recognizing at least one of the points made by posthumanists,
the natural and the social worlds are not entirely different or mutually
exclusive. For example, classroom language learning, while a fundamen-
tally social endeavour, nevertheless depends on and is deeply influenced
by objective realities and natural events. The Covid-19 outbreak in
2020 demonstrates this relationship rather clearly, as millions of students
around the globe were directly affected by school shutdowns, and educa-
tion around the world gradually moved from face-to-face to online
interaction, thus fundamentally affecting educational realities all over the
world. Of course, whether one is a realist, a postmodernist, a posthu-
manist or a CDST adherent, common sense and everyday experience of
social realities should reveal that causality in society is not identical to
causality in the natural world. Nevertheless, instead of rejecting causality
altogether, social scientists sometimes need different terms, concepts and
models to account for it than those used in the natural sciences.
Despite these important differences and challenges, realism remains
committed to explaining causality in the social realm. This element in
realist social ontology emerged largely through the work of Bhaskar
(1998, 2008), who holds that because causality is real, it can also be
researched. Bhaskar’s distinction between the empirical, the actual and
the real provides grounds for this type of inquiry, for “external events,
processes or behaviours [at the level of the actual], the effects of under-
lying mechanisms [at the level of the real], can be observed [at the
level of the empirical] as they unfold” (Gerrits & Verweij, 2013: 172,
emphases mine). In their common rejection of determinism, realist social
scientists thus advocate provisional causal explanations which consider
202 J. Bouchard

how a phenomenon follows from previous phenomena, and the mecha-

nisms which motivate causal processes as well as human behaviour and
action. Elder-Vass (2010: 178) unpacks this notion of provisional causal
explanation in realism thus:

A good explanation will seek to focus selectively on the most relevant

causal factors and there are at least two important criteria of relevance:
first, the aspect of the event that we are seeking to explain, and secondly,
which powers make the most significant contribution to this aspect of
the event. In practice, we do not seek to explain all aspects of an event,
even as simple an event as selling something in a shop. Instead, there are
specific things we want to know.

And while realist accounts of causality remain partial at best, they

nevertheless remain committed to objective knowledge. Layder (1993:
16) offers a similar argument, pointing out that a central feature of
realism is

its attempt to preserve a ‘scientific’ attitude towards social analysis at the

same time as recognizing the importance of actors’ meanings and in some
way incorporating them in research. As such, a key aspect of the realist
project is a concern with causality and the identification of causal mech-
anisms in social phenomena in a manner quite unlike the traditional
positivist search for causal generalizations.

Complexity theorists including Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008)

hold somewhat parallel views, and while they justifiably reject the
deductive-nomological model, they also do not reject the importance
of causal relationships to explanations of social phenomena. In sharp
contrast, postmodernists generally disagree with such approach, instead
holding on to a reductive view of causality as deterministic and ill-
fitted to the study of social realities. Exploring a Foucauldian approach
to educational research, for example, Olssen (2004) reveals a tendency
among poststructuralist thinkers to associate causality with the philoso-
phies of Hegel and Marx, and in the same argumentation, posit any
concern with causality as a philosophical “trap”, or a digression from
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 203

the more important task of identifying logical or epistemological rela-

tions within discourse practices. These sorts of conceptual problems
are common in ontologically flattened social ontologies. Critiquing the
common postmodernist rejection of causality as linear, deterministic and
essentialist, Sayer (2000) argues that if the concept of causality is rejected,
or if one cause is not established as more important than another cause,

our hair colour would have to be deemed just as vital for our survival
as the functioning of our hearts. If all causes are equal, it is not clear
how we could explain anything, or how one could ever hope to achieve
anything (cause something to happen) by acting, for if no cause is more
important than any other, then doing nothing is as effective as doing
something. To say that A was caused by B, not C, is not to claim some
kind of ultimate truth; like any other such claim it is open to revision,
but that doesn’t mean that we can remain agnostic about causal priority.
Our survival depends on identifying it – not ‘ultimately’, but well enough
to be able to meet our needs. (p. 73)

We can therefore summarize the general realist view of causality as

based on recognition that “causal relations are relations of natural or
metaphysical necessity, rather than of contingent sequence” (Groff, 2008:
2). This view attempts to explain the “non-law-like”, or unpredictable
quality of causality in the social realm, not as evidence that causality
is irrelevant to scientific sociological explanation, nor as a particular
kind of freedom possessed by a complex social system, but rather as the
outcome of society being an open system on the one hand, and social
phenomena possessing emergent properties on the other. Stated differ-
ently, in attempting to explain causality, the realist approach considers
factors both internal and external to the social phenomena in question,
and as indicated earlier, this is where the notion of emergence gains
primal importance in the formulation of explanatory statements.
Perhaps more specific to the realist view of causality is the idea that
causal mechanisms act as powerful entities in the social realm, although
again not in a linear or deterministic fashion but rather through multiple
causation. Also found in CDST, this view is captured by Longshore
Smith (2006: 203) thus: “The flux of events is always co-determined
by a myriad of interacting mechanisms. This co-determination renders
204 J. Bouchard

accusations of determinism irrelevant.” Included in these multiple causal

influences are human agents as powerful particulars, with the power
to make things happen in society. Kaidesoja (2013) provides a parallel
argument whereby humans’ capacity for reasoning constitutes a causal
mechanism: “reason can be interpreted as generative mechanisms that
produce behavior in a way analogous to the ways in which the gener-
ative mechanisms studied in the natural sciences produce observable
effects” (pp. 125–126). This further highlights the need to draw onto-
logical distinctions between structure and agency in order to explain how
reflexive engagement by human agents unfolds (Perez-Milans, 2017).
Donati and Archer (2015: 17) explain the realist view of causality
as “an explanatory framework for the transformation of social and
cultural structures as a process that is continuously mediated by human
agency, with agents themselves becoming transformed in the course of
social transformation.” Social structures, on the other hand, are not
necessarily powerful particulars; instead, they are conceptualized as the
material causes of social actions (Lewis, 2000), and as such, as providing
the conditions, resources and often the motivations for social change
and/or stability. To put it differently through an example, schools and
educational programs do not cause learning to take place, although
learners manage to learn in large part because of the resources and
constraining/enabling influences afforded by schools and educational
programs.
Just as there are multiple causes to social phenomena, we must also
recognize that patterns and regularities do emerge in society, as the
example of democratic peace (Goertz, 2012) discussed in Chapter 2
has suggested. However, these important elements of analytical interest
for researchers are not understood from a realist perspective as regular,
expectable outcomes of hydraulic causal forces. As Elder-Vass (2010: 47)
states: “even when they are actualised by being instantiated in actual
things, however, mechanisms and powers […] tend to produce certain
effects, but this tendency may be blocked by countervailing powers,
and so there is no guarantee or necessity that these tendencies will be
realised in any given case.” Therefore, a particularly important point
of interest for social scientists is the interaction of causal powers which
lead to the emergence of specific social phenomena in specific contexts
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 205

and at specific times. This view clearly goes against a Humean view of
causality as mere constant conjunction; instead, it is based on the prin-
ciple that causal powers are not mere concepts but rather the real sources
of real effects in the real world. As Kaidesoja (2013: 106) points out,
“the natural necessity that connects causes to their effects in causal rela-
tions is […] a real feature of the world, not a feature that the mind or
human understanding has somehow imposed or projected onto reality,
as Kantians might argue.” In addition, the realist view of causality “also
precludes relativism about knowledge – for if the world is not all possible
ways, then all competing claims about it cannot be equally sound.”
(Groff, 2008: 4).
Again, explaining causality in society requires an account of the emer-
gent properties of social phenomena. Explaining causality begins with a
conceptual distinction between structure and agency not as “two sides of
the same coin”, but rather as

different kinds of emergent entities, as shown by the differences in their

properties and powers, despite the fact that they are crucial for each other’s
formation, continuation and development. Thus, an educational system
can be “centralized”, whilst a person cannot, and humans are “emotional”,
which cannot be the case for structures. (Archer, 2011: 62)

With this emphasis on the distinctive features of structure and agency,

we then need to distinguish causal claims from compositional claims (the
latter being characteristic of a Giddensian view of causality). Elder-Vass
(2010: 141) summarizes this point thus: “to say that structure “enters
into the constitution” of knowledge is to move smoothly from the plau-
sible causal claim that structure (in the sense of our external normative
environment) causes our normative beliefs and dispositions to the utterly
untenable compositional claim that structure is therefore a part of us.”
The section on underlying causal mechanisms which follows highlights
a similar distinction between causal and constitutive explanations of
causality.
The corollary principle is that structure and agency unfold diachron-
ically, or within different time frames. Archer’s (1995) morphogenetic
approach—a core element of social realism—stipulates that “structure
206 J. Bouchard

necessarily predates the actions which transform it; and that structural
elaboration necessarily post-dates those actions” (p. 90). The following
succession of causal events outlines the morphogenetic cycle:

Structural Conditioning → Social Interaction → Structural Elaboration

Depicted in temporal terms, structure and agency must then be

understood not as simultaneously related to each other, but rather as
operating in asynchronous fashion. Archer (2011: 67) adds that, within
the morphogenetic cycle, what we see is double morphogenesis:

Not only is structure transformed but so is agency […] As it re-shapes

structural relations […] agency is ineluctably re-shaping itself: in terms of
domination and subordination, of organization, combination and artic-
ulation; in terms of its vested interests and these in relation to those of
other agents; in terms of the new roles and positions that some occupy
and others do not; and in terms of the novel situations in which all agents
now find themselves, constraining to the projects of some and enabling
to the projects of others, yet of significance to the motivation of all.

The notion of double morphogenesis (and in my view the parallel

notion of feedback loop in CDST for that matter) underscores the
realist view of causality within a stratified social realm which allows
researchers to consider different units and timescales involved in the
ongoing production of social reality (Layder, 1993). This stratified view
of society and its component parts is based on the idea that causal
explanations require insight into emergence, and from a different angle,
insight into underlying causal mechanisms, a notion which has surfaced
a few times in this book and which I now turn to.

Underlying Causal Mechanisms

As discussed previously, AL as an applied field of inquiry necessitates
theoretical engagement because (a) society and its constituting elements
are emergent, stratified and complex, and interact with other emer-
gent, stratified and complex phenomena, (b) guiding social practice and
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 207

solving social problems require models of causality, and (c) empirical

knowledge does not provide all the information required for the devel-
opment of such models. By considering both the opaqueness of society
and social transformation as core social research principles, AL scholars
must therefore consider not only human agency as powerful particular
but also underlying mechanisms as causally meaningful to the realities
they study, mechanisms which it must be stressed are located at the level
of the real.
The opaqueness and indeterminacy of social phenomena has led some
within constructivist and postmodernist circles to claim that, unlike
the natural sciences, the social sciences are not about uncovering law-
like orderliness but rather about understanding the constantly changing
complexity found at the local level. From this angle, if generalizability
is ever possible in the social sciences, it would only involve the replica-
bility of research methodologies. Although not entirely misguided, this
view is somewhat defeatist, for as already discussed in Chapter 2 society
reveals patterns and some degree of orderliness, and scientists must
consequently account for these both theoretically and methodologically.
Abrams (2012: 195) disagrees even more strongly with postmodernist
relativism by pointing out that, despite the seeming indeterministic
nature of society and social phenomena, “many social systems have a
causal structure which makes it difficult for any but a narrow range of
frequencies to be produced over a wide range of initial conditions.” Later
on, the author comments on statistical regularity thus: “when frequen-
cies are stable, however, there would seem to be something systematic
about the underlying social system that produces that stability. Since such
systematic facts would generate stable frequencies, it’s reasonable to view
them as playing a role in constituting objective probabilities inhering in
the social system” (p. 218). It is in large part from this understanding
that realists, particularly critical realists, look at underlying generative
mechanisms as causally efficacious social phenomena.
Further grounding this stratified view are Sealey and Carter (2004:
184), who argue that, given the rather abstract nature of social structures,
“research entails discovering the world as opposed to revealing it. That
is to say, the very abstractness of social structural relations makes their
theoretical apprehension both more critical and at the same time more
208 J. Bouchard

fallible. Appeals to empirical evidence in these domains must always be

indirect.” To consider phenomena beyond the empirical, at the level of
the actual and the real, researchers must consequently be equipped with
causal models. As Sørensen (1998: 239–240) explains with regards to the
theoretical quality of mechanism-based explanation,

developing theoretical ideas about social processes is to specify some

concept of what brings about a certain outcome – a change in polit-
ical regimes, a new job, an increase in corporate performance, a gain
in status, or an increase in score on an academic achievement test. The
development of the conceptualization of change amounts to proposing a
mechanism for a social process.

Also clear from this statement is that underlying causal mecha-

nisms are not exclusively society-wide but can also be rather local. For
example, extending Kaidesoja’s (2013) point that humans’ capacity for
reasoning can be a causal mechanism, the learning process can be consid-
ered a causal mechanism. Although direct evidence of learning cannot
be gathered empirically—given that test results, for example, are only
possible traces of learning at particular points in time and not evidence
of learning itself—learning can be understood conceptually, and can
certainly affect other processes such as mental growth and the emanci-
pation of learners. As will be discussed further below, human reflexivity
can also be considered a causal mechanism of a local nature.
To sum up, the following three assumptions help clarify the realist
view of underlying causal mechanisms developed in this chapter: (a)
causality involves a range of processes that lead to a particular outcome,
(b) if there is causality, causal mechanisms must therefore be involved,
and (c) detecting and understanding causal mechanisms—as intransi-
tive phenomena—requires a combination of empirical and conceptual
knowledge. From this basis, scientists concerned with causal explanations
then formulate hypotheses regarding the possible cause(s) which might
bring about the outcome in question.
An early reference to causal mechanisms, more closely aligned with
structuralism yet which fits rather well within a critical realist ontology,
is provided by Merton (1968), who defines social mechanisms as processes
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 209

with specific consequences on specific structural elements, and that the

goal for researchers is to describe and explain the conditions under which
these mechanisms operate (or do not). Elster (1998: 45, emphasis orig-
inal) explains that social mechanisms are “frequently occurring and easily
recognizable causal patterns that are triggered under generally unknown
conditions or with indeterminate consequences. They allow us to explain
but not to predict.” In other words, referring to causal mechanisms is
valuable to explanations of both local and broader social phenomena
because of the particular causal patterns they elucidate and because we
can identify them across various situations. A more general viewpoint
is provided by Sørensen (1998: 240), who defines a mechanism as “an
account of how change in some variable is brought about – a concep-
tualization of what ‘goes into’ a process.” Mechanism-based explanations
are thus crucial to the social sciences, and help us move beyond postmod-
ernism’s rather hopeless relativism because they provide a view of reality
that is more general than the phenomena they lead to (Elster, 1998).
They are, to put it differently, fallible because they are constructed discur-
sively, yet they are also necessarily about realities located at the level of
the real, and thus products of our commitment to objective knowledge,
thus of central importance our scientific understandings of causal rela-
tionships in the social world. For educators, education theorists, applied
linguists, and language practitioners in general, accepting the notion of
causal mechanism is thus of central importance to the type of work we
do.
Although the above discussion might resonate with some social scien-
tists, for others aligned with a postmodernist point of view, the very
mention of causal mechanisms can conjure the much-loathed image of
a social world determined by mechanistic forces, producing regular and
expectable social regularities without the hope of change and elaboration,
reducing human beings to structural/cultural “play dough”. Admittedly,
realists are equally weary of this hydraulic image. As Easton (2010: 122)
puts it,

the term mechanism has problematic connotations since it implies clear

structure and invariance in operation, something that critical realists
would reject. A better portmanteau term would be deep generative
210 J. Bouchard

processes and structures. […] they are ways in which structured entities
by means of their powers and liabilities act and cause particular events.
[…] They do not need to be linear additive as required by statistical
models or logico-rational as in box and arrow diagrams. Instead they can
be linguistic in nature and metaphorical.

Realists not only reject this hydraulic view often associated with the
notion of mechanism, they also hold that it goes against the very notion
of causal “law” itself. As Elster (1998: 48) clarifies, “the antonym of a
mechanism is a scientific law. A law asserts that given certain initial
conditions, an event of a given type (the cause) will always produce
an event of some other type (the effect).” In other words, while scien-
tific laws are deterministic, mechanisms are probabilistic, pointing in
the direction of tendencies and patterns. Porpora (2011) explains that
causal mechanisms have nothing to do with a linear, mechanistic view of
social processes; instead, they are very much aligned with a complexity
view offered by CDST, as well as an interpretative, hermeneutic under-
standing of the social sciences:

It is first of all an immediate mistake to assume the word mechanism

necessarily connotes something we would normally consider mechanistic;
something, that is, necessarily sub-human. […] When [realism] speaks of
causal mechanisms, then, it speaks of what makes things work. Generally,
that involves a reference to some kind of causal structure. In biology, for
example, we might speak of the structure of the DNA molecule, a very
special “double helix”. In physics, we might speak of the structure of
an atom. One major consequence of this conception of causality is the
realization that much of even natural science is qualitative.” (pp. 160–
161, emphasis mine)

Instead of social causes and effect relationships being hydraulic or

mechanical, realists prefer stochastic as a more appropriate label. In
Collier’s (2011: 8–9, emphases original) words, social causes are “features
of things which produce certain outcomes given certain inputs. […] So
rather than saying that there is a law by which whenever A happens,
B happens, we say that there is a mechanism by which a particular
structure or institution generates a particular tendency.” Here, tendency
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 211

must also be distinguished from regularity. Realism does not approach

causality only as involving relations among social events (specifically
patterned relations), but rather approaches it as a set of complex rela-
tionships between causal mechanisms and the causal potentials of social
phenomena. As Kaidesoja (2013: 107) explains,

the powers of a certain powerful particular does not cease to exist outside
the conditions where they are exercised as long as the nature of the partic-
ular does not change. Therefore, causal powers should be conceived of as
causal potencies of things, which determine what the thing will (or can)
do in the appropriate conditions.

As mentioned earlier, while causal relationships can be patterned, they

can also be local. Put differently, things happen in society because of the
existence of causal mechanisms which provide resources, relations and
conditioning forces on the one hand, and the capacity of people within
local contexts to make things happen on the other. Without agency,
mechanisms cannot effectuate causality on their own, thus cancelling the
critique that mechanism-based causal explanations are deterministic. As
Bhaskar (2008: 9) argues,

if science is to be possible the world must consist of enduring and

transfactually active mechanisms; society must consist of an ensemble of
powers irreducible to but present only in the intentional actions of men;
and men must be causal agents capable of acting self-consciously on the
world. They do so in an endeavour to express to themselves in thought
the diverse and deeper structures that account in their complex manifold
determinations for all the phenomena of our world.

This interest in causal mechanism is therefore not a denial of agency,

nor is it a denial of the centrality of empirical “facts” to the development
of sociological insight; rather, it is acknowledgement that people talk,
choose and act in constrained fashion, within structured contexts, and
that patterns in society are therefore possible and consequently need to
be accounted for in causal terms.
As we saw in Chapter 2, studying causality requires more than
measurement of empirical regularity, which is what the covering law
212 J. Bouchard

of causality offers. Hedström and Swedberg (1998: 11) provide a clear

example to illustrate this point:

A statistical association between “class” and income, or “class” and health,

tells us that individuals from certain “classes” have lower incomes or
worse health than others, but it says nothing about why this is the case.
To answer such questions, it is necessary to introduce and explicate the
generative mechanisms that might have produced the observed differ-
ences in average income or health between the occupational groups that
the researchers have assigned to different “classes.”

Statistical relationships represented in graphs, for example, sometimes

create patterns such as S shapes and so forth. In and of themselves, these
cannot be called social mechanisms or visual representations of mech-
anisms. However, these patterns and relationships can be generated by
underlying causal mechanisms, although to reach this level of interpreta-
tion—again, mechanism-based causal explanations are interpretations of
underlying phenomena (Schelling, 1998)—the use of theory is necessary.
Schelling lists three advantages of viewing statistical patterns in our data
from the angle of social mechanisms: (1) the possibility to explain not
only patterns but also exceptions to those patterns not as mere “noise”
but as potentially related to these and other mechanisms; (2) once mech-
anisms are identified and explained, the possibility to use them as a
template to explain other empirical phenomena; and (3) the possibility
for intervention if, for example, problematic phenomena (e.g., systemic
racism, sexism, etc.) can be related to specific mechanisms.
In short, explaining patterns as products of causal links requires a
causal theory which attempts to account for the relationship between
agency, underlying generative mechanisms and observable patterns, as
well as the irregularities which inevitably surface in sociological data.
After all, phenomena that rarely happen in society (e.g., 95% of the
population of a country agreeing on a single issue) also encompass
causal processes. Consequently, what matters to causal explanation is for
causality to be of relational necessity (Groff, 2008). This notion is at the
heart of the realist rejection of causality as mere statistical regularity, for
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 213

if causality in the social realm was otherwise, the latter would be deter-
ministically driven, and social sciences would essentially be a matter of
description, not explanation. Porpora (2011: 164–165) points out that,
for realism,

an event-regularity, even in the rigorous form of a regression equation,

cannot ever serve as an explanation. It is at most one, fallible piece of
evidence for an explanation. […] when critical realists use statistical tech-
niques […] the statistics are employed to indicate the operation of a
mechanism in a particular socio-historical situation. […] Statistics, as
mentioned, should function as a form of evidence for an explanation
rather than as the explanation itself.

The author then purports that causal explanations in the social

sciences, as with the natural sciences, are thus inherently qualitative
and that researchers belonging to all scientific strands must indeed
be confident in seeking to develop even bolder explanations of causal
mechanisms.
Generally speaking, when discussing causality (either from a
mechanism-based approach or otherwise), it is important to distin-
guish between different types of causal relationships. Firstly, we should
distinguish between causal and constitutive explanations of causality:

A causal explanation tells us how the antecedent events and their orga-
nization (timing and location) bring about the event to be explained.
In contrast, a constitutive explanation describes how the properties of the
components and their organization give rise to the system’s properties. […]
In the case of causation […] differences are in antecedent events; in the
case of constitution […] differences are in the properties of parts (or in
their organization). (Ylikoski, 2012: 34, emphases original)

For example, explaining what learner motivation is and how it affects

language learning are different kinds of scientific quests because they
focus on different explananda. With mechanism-based causal explana-
tions, we can also make two different types of claims about causality:
regarding the existence of a causal relationship and regarding the degree
to which causality has taken place. As Kincaid (2012: 49) puts it, “it is
214 J. Bouchard

one thing to know that C causes E, another to know how changes in the
various values of C result in different values of E.” Waldner (2012) iden-
tifies four types of causal relationships, and for each, I suggest examples
(or lack thereof ) related to language learning:

1. regularity causation, whereby two events are said to be causally linked

because one of them repeatedly follows the other (e.g., whenever we
see a motivated language learner, we also denote greater engagement
on his/her part in the learning task);
2. counterfactual causation, whereby if one event would not unfold, the
other would not happen (e.g., if language teachers do not clarify how
specific cultural norms influences language use, students might not
notice the connections between culture and language);
3. intervention causation, whereby two events are said to be causally
connected if the appropriate intervention(s) is/are made on one vari-
able, leading to a causal effect on the other variable, and possibly
a feedback effect onto the first variable (e.g., a teacher giving an
insightful and fun lesson, and students feeling motivated and engaged
as a result, which in turn leads the teacher to love his/her job); and
finally
4. mechanistic causation, whereby a causal mechanism is triggered by one
event, which then leads to the generation of another event (as pointed
out earlier, this hydraulic model of causality does not necessarily apply
to social phenomena including language-related phenomena).

We can also distinguish between necessary causes and sufficient causes,

although as already pointed out, mechanism-based causal explanations
place more emphasis on necessary causes. Kincaid (2012: 59) sheds light
on this important distinction:

One route to causal complexity arises from necessary causes. When causes
for an outcome are essential – the outcome does not happen without
them – we can call them necessary causes. Contrast necessary causes
with sufficient causes, where the latter have a causal effect on their own,
but other factors can bring about the effect as well. Necessary causes,
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 215

on the other hand, do not on their own produce the outcome in ques-
tion. Necessary causes are an obvious type of mechanism, in that they
are components of a complex cause that brings about an outcome. […]
Necessary causes need not produce consistent associations. Since they
work only in combination with other factors to produce an outcome,
their correlation with the outcome can be tenuous.

In short, while necessary causes (as inherently relational phenomena)

do not cause things to happen on their own, they are necessary for
that, without them, the causal relationship leading to the emergence
of the phenomenon under scrutiny cannot be fully explained. Within
the context of language learning, for example, learner motivation can be
understood as necessary for language learning to happen, and cannot be
replaced by another factor or learner characteristics to account for the
same outcome(s). At the same time, the complexity of social phenomena
implies that cause–effects relationships are almost never produced by a
singular variable causing a change in another variable. As such, motiva-
tion cannot account for successful language learning on its own: it can
only be part of a more complex causal landscape. Kincaid (2012) explains
similarly the indirect effects of education on growth:

It might very well be that education is a necessary cause of development.

Well-educated individuals living in a society that does not have the insti-
tutions and markets to put their skills to good use will find those skills
wasted; they will contribute little or nothing to growth. […] As a neces-
sary cause, education’s effect will be dependent on the presence of other
causal factors. To the extent that those factors are missing, correlational
methods will show low to nonexistent effects and miss its real importance.
(p. 60)

Economists usually account for this in terms of complementarities,

whereby the influence of one factor depends on the value and powers
of another with which it shares a relationship. Arguably, this view of
complex causality is found in both realism and CDST. Inspired by
developments in biology, and sharply critical of individualism in the
social sciences, Ylikoski (2012) identifies four general characteristics of
underlying causal mechanisms:
216 J. Bouchard

First, a mechanism is always a mechanism for something; it is identified

by the kind of effect or phenomenon it produces. Second, a mecha-
nism is an irreducibly causal notion. It refers to the entities of a causal
process that produces the effect of interest. Third, a mechanism has a
structure. When a mechanism-based explanation opens the black box, it
makes visible how the participating entities and their properties, activi-
ties, and relations produce the effect of interest. […] Finally, there is a
hierarchy of mechanisms. While a mechanism at one level presupposes or
takes for granted the existence of certain entities with characteristic prop-
erties and activities, it is expected that there are lower-level mechanisms
that will explain them. (pp. 22–23, emphases original)

Some elements from this definition are arguably questionable. In

particular, the idea of a hierarchy of causal mechanisms needs to be devel-
oped further so as to avoid reductive or conflationary causal accounts.
Also, the notion of a black box needing to be triggered by an external
force, conjuring the related idea of closed systems, may not be entirely
appropriate to analyses of social phenomena such as language education
and gender relations, for example. Nevertheless, Ylikoski’s description
of causal mechanisms is illuminating, particularly with regards to his
rejection of the ideas that (a) understanding mechanisms is the same
thing as understanding entire causal events, and (b) understanding causal
mechanisms leads to overarching theories of explanatory relevance to
all similarly caused social phenomena. As the author adds, “while there
is an assumption that everything is mechanistically explainable and
a presumption that ultimately all mechanistic accounts are mutually
compatible, there is no overarching effort to combine them into one
grand theory that would cover all the phenomena that the scientific field
studies” (p. 24).
In terms of types of causal mechanisms, possibilities abound. Williams
(2018: 28) explains that mechanisms “might be hugely complex or very
simple. The components of the mechanism must have particular dispo-
sitions (sometimes called liabilities or causal powers) that make the
outcomes possible.” Elster (1998) provides specific examples of mech-
anisms, one of which is cognitive dissonance (Festinger, 1957), which
“is stipulated to arise when a person holds two or more “cognitions”
that are inconsistent with one another. Here, cognitions include not
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 217

only ordinary factual beliefs but also consciously held values as well as
mental representations of the choices or behaviors of the subject” (p. 52).
According to Elster, dissonance can potentially lead to five outcomes
for an individual: (1) modifying the world to make the desired state
become reality (e.g., activism); (2) accepting that the world does not
match one’s view of it (e.g., fatalism); (3) becoming convinced (i.e.,
strengthening a belief ) that the desired state is in fact reality (e.g., ideol-
ogism); (4) changing the belief so that the desired state is no longer
desired (i.e., “moving on”); and (5) antagonizing the belief so as to wish
it may not come true (e.g., the “sour grapes” feeling). While each of these
possibilities might be characterized by interactionists as inherently agen-
tive, a fuller picture requires that they also be explained with regards to
cognitive dissonance acting as mechanism with causal potential when in
relation to agency. Elster also talks about the endowment effect and the
contrast effect as other possible underlying generative mechanisms thus:

A memory of a good experience is a good memory, the memory of a bad

one a bad memory. Hence a good past tends to improve the present, a
bad past to make it worse. On the other hand, there is a contrast effect:
A good experience in the past tends to devalue less good experiences in
the present, and a bad event in the past will similarly throw the present
into favorable relief. (Elster, 1998: 56)

Ideological processes and various mechanisms of belief formation

can similarly be considered possible examples of causal mechanisms.
Hedström and Swedberg (1998) provide two examples of commonly
identified causal mechanisms in sociology. The first is the self-fulfilling
prophecy, which postulates that defining a reality falsely (e.g., Trump’s
reiterations of the impeachment proceedings as a “Democratic hoax”,
despite ample damning evidences) can evoke specific kinds of behaviours
(e.g., public doubt in the House of Representatives, in politicians and in
“Washington”, partly leading the Republican majority in the Senate to
vote for his acquittal), which in turn can lead to the false conception
becoming a reality (e.g., Trump’s impeachment proceedings were indeed
a “Democratic hoax” aimed at undermining his presidency). The second
218 J. Bouchard

is the threshold theory of collective behaviour (Granovetter, 1978)—a

preference-formation mechanism—which they summarize thus:

An individual’s decision whether or not to participate in collective

behavior often depends in part on how many other actors already have
decided to participate […] actors differ in terms of the number of other
actors who already must participate before they decide to do the same
[i.e., individual "thresholds"] […] even slight differences in thresholds
can produce vastly different collective outcomes. (Hedström & Swedberg,
1998: 19)

The authors also discuss action-formation mechanisms as showing “how

a specific combination of individual desires, beliefs, and action oppor-
tunities generate a specific action” (Hedström & Swedberg, 1998: 23);
and transformational mechanisms as processes whereby “a number of indi-
viduals interact with one another, and the specific mechanism (which
differs depending on the nature of the interaction) shows how these indi-
vidual actions are transformed into some kind of collective outcome, be
it intended or unintended” (ibid.). While the list of causal mechanisms
goes on, they share this important characteristic: although they are inter-
pretations of causal relationships, causal mechanisms are nevertheless real
in that they can have real effects on real people in real contexts, and must
therefore be accounted for.
To summarize and highlight the most salient points made so far
regarding causal mechanisms, mechanism-based causal explanations do
not constitute a denial of agency’s crucial powers to affect things
in the world. Rather, they are aimed at revealing how people make
constrained choices in structured contexts. Furthermore, detecting and
understanding causal mechanisms require concepts, themselves depen-
dent on theoretical deliberation. Hedström and Swedberg (1998: 13)
point out that “mechanisms, in the natural as well as in the social
sciences, usually are unobserved analytical constructs […] the social
sciences routinely postulate the existence of unobserved explanatory
mechanisms. Assumptions of intentions, discounting, and preferences
have proven to be extremely useful analytical devices even though they
never have been observed.” Even if our concepts and interpretations of
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 219

social phenomena are deeply cultural, thus “imperfect embodiments” of

real objects and processes, we need them to explain, not merely describe,
social phenomena in their full ontological depth. Critiquing empiricists’
tendency to dismiss the importance of theory and causal explanations
and instead focus on either statistical regularities or individual narratives
as sufficient bases for explanation, Porpora (2008: 200) makes the same
point although more forcefully thus: “in the case of causality, concep-
tual considerations – and, thus, theory – matter even more decisively
than empirical considerations. This is a revelation that an empiricist soci-
ology must repress, which is perhaps another reason why the methods
texts so rush past causality itself to the indicators of causality.” What we
are looking for as AL scholars and social scientists are not merely traces
of causal links (the task of description) but rather why those particular
causal links exist and not others (the task of explanation).
In practical terms, revealing causal mechanisms involves “moving
beyond describing what can be measured in the social world to explain
the deeper causal powers that shape that which can be observed.
Causality is accepted as configurational, contingent and generative of
real social processes” (Emmel et al., 2018: 5). While mechanisms have
real effects on observable and measurable phenomena, they cannot be
described in the same way we describe objects and processes accessed
empirically. Consequently, and as Layder (2006: 52, emphasis mine)
explains, “it is important to include a rationalist element [in social theory
and social analysis] in order to be able to describe things which are not
easily experienced or observed. However, we must avoid the extreme
version of rationalism, which insulates concepts and theories from the
external world of empirical evidence.” Our explanations of causality
must therefore be conceptual: they must be developed through the use
of empirically-testable theories and concepts, making science in general
dependent on empirical evidence while also a profoundly qualitative and
interpretive human practice. Again, empirical and conceptual knowledge
must be combined to produce a fuller view of causality and of causal
mechanisms.
Similar to structure and culture, underlying causal mechanisms can
also be understood as intransitive social realities with antecedent proper-
ties. Elder-Vass (2010: 40) argues that
220 J. Bouchard

causality operates to determine individual events, but the causal factors

that determine these events are generic in the sense that whenever they
are present, they will have an influence that is in some way consistent.
Without such consistent regularities, it would be quite impossible for
us to disentangle the causal influences that affect our world, and quite
pointless for us to speculate about general causal laws or mechanisms.

Realism also stipulates that causality can unfold not only because of
the existence of mechanisms but also because of their absence. Collier
(2011) identifies negative facts, or the absence of objects or processes, as
also having real causal consequences. For example, the failure of some
governments in early 2020 to initially acknowledge the reality of the
Covid-19 virus outbreak—which could have led to the development
and implementation of rapid, targeted, and effective preventive strate-
gies for limiting its spread—has had devastating effects on millions of
people around the world. What began as a denial of objective reality—
the virus and its spread —subsequently penetrated the subjective realm
of human understanding and experience—is Covid-19 real and should
we worry about it? —which then led to the emergence of related objec-
tive and material consequences—morbid death tolls and massive job losses.
Similarly, although to a radically lesser extent, a teacher’s unwillingness to
discuss a particular issue in class can lead to a loss of confidence among
students in that teacher. In short, things can happen in the social world
not only because of the presence of particular causal mechanisms but also
because of their absence.
As pointed out above, mechanisms, as intransitive aspects of social
reality with antecedent properties, also have a generic and somewhat
consistent quality. Indeed, mechanisms such as our periodic denial of
objective realities and our marked tendency to prioritize self-interest have
always been consequential social “facts”, impacting individual, social
and natural life in very important ways. Mechanisms are therefore not
merely transient and ephemeral discursive realities, but rather “facts” of
social life, with real effects on real people in real contexts. This leads
to the closely related realist notion discussed earlier in the book that
the ideational features of social reality (e.g., beliefs, ideologies, norms,
etc., generally categorized as part of the Cultural System) are also real
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 221

because they have real causal effects (Collier, 2011). This view obviously
contrasts with the postmodernist—or perhaps perspectivist —characteri-
zation of beliefs, ideologies and values as discursively negotiated, fluid
and ephemeral entities. For realists, while the material and ideational
elements of society are ontologically different, they can both have causal
powers, and must therefore equally be considered real.
Interest in underlying causal mechanisms is obviously not limited
to realism, as most paradigms developed within the social and natural
sciences have been either explicitly or implicitly devoted to the discovery
of mechanisms. To this, Hedström and Swedberg (1998) add that a focus
on mechanisms is inherently interdisciplinary, and raises the potential for
the development of middle-range theories (Merton, 1968), which begin
with the observation of empirical data, followed by the development of
broader abstract conceptualizations or general statements, which in turn
are verified by the data. With their emphasis on ontological questions,
however, critical realists would stress that theory can do a lot more than
that. As argued earlier in this book, the development of theories and
statements about social mechanisms is a central task for social scien-
tists, for “the search for mechanisms means that we are not satisfied with
merely establishing systematic covariation between variables or events”
(Hedström & Swedberg, 1998: 7). It also means that, in our attempts to
reveal the full ontological depth of the social phenomena under scrutiny,
we are equally dissatisfied with localized and personalized interpretations
of these phenomena.
In this section, I have provided a general overview of the concept of
underlying causal mechanism and of mechanism-based causal explana-
tions, crucial elements in realist accounts of social stability and change.
In the remaining pages of this chapter, I extend the above discussion by
revisiting the structure–agency debate from a realist viewpoint.

Structure and Culture

As already discussed, much of social theory has been invested in eluci-
dating specifically how structure and agency are causally related in
the production of social life. We have also seen that despite various
222 J. Bouchard

approaches to the structure–agency debate and resulting emphases, most

social scientists and social theorists have considered both agency and
structure as important elements. The point was also developed that,
when either structure or agency is overemphasized, or when they are
both seen as “two sides of the same coin”, ontologically flattened socio-
logical perspectives ensue, complicating the study of causal relationships
and the scientific task of explanation. Given that a core objective in the
social sciences is explaining how people make structured choices in struc-
tured contexts, adopting a stratified viewpoint that considers the distinct
and emergent properties of structure and agency while uncovering their
complex interrelationship becomes necessary.
Realism presents the structure–agency relationship as dialectical.
Sealey and Carter (2004: 16) explain that

as particular individuals we confront a world that is not directly produced

or constructed by us, but is rather the complex, emergent outcome
of the interactions between structural contexts (structure) and ourselves
(agency). For the realist, therefore, there may be a divergence between
how things are and how people take them to be. This follows logically
from the temporal priority given to structures.

Social structures include broad phenomena such as social classes, the

socioeconomic order, education systems and social institutions. They
are understood from a realist angle as the enduring constraining and
enabling influence of the social order (Sealey & Carter, 2004), enduring
because structures possess the emergent property of anteriority—i.e.,
they have existed before us, and despite occasional changes, they will
continue to exist after we die. Structures’ constraining and enabling
potentials—another of their emergent properties—facilitate agentive
movements (e.g., evolution from educational to professional life) albeit
within certain limits (e.g., not everyone can get any job, become rich, or
live anywhere they wish).
I reiterate the notion of emergence here to emphasize that the task
of distinguishing agency from structure—and thereby avoiding confla-
tionary perspectives—involves looking specifically at emergence. From
this perspective, Manicas (2006: 73) distinguishes structure from agency
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 223

thus: “organizations have properties that cannot be ascribed to their

members. Bureaucracies, for example, are difficult to dislodge, operate
impersonally and are often painfully slow in getting to a conclusion.”
Similarly, and as cited earlier in this chapter, Archer (2011) points out
that while educational systems can be centralized, people cannot, and
while people can be emotional, structures cannot. This explains to a
large extent why society is not the aggregate of all individual subjec-
tivities within it, and by extension why (a) studying structure cannot
be achieved by looking exclusively at the empirical evidence of agen-
tive processes on the ground (either statistically or through interpretative
narratives), and (b) the study of agency requires different conceptual and
methodological strategies than those used to study structure. Accepting
the realist principles that social structures (a) are emergent outcomes of
social relations, (b) include a broad collection of material and ideational
phenomena such as organizations, normative institutions, social classes,
economic systems or gender roles, and (c) also occupy the intransitive
dimension, leads to the conclusion that the empirical study of structure
is very much a matter of revealing its effects on human agency, not struc-
ture itself. Conceptual work is therefore required to understand the links
between effects and their causes, links which are opaque and abstract
by their very nature. Studying structure this way, however, also implies
that structure has already been subjected to the effects of humans’ inter-
pretative and reflexive engagement, so we never quite have direct and
unmediated access to structure. Further complicating this study is that
structure refers to a very broad range of social phenomena with often
radically different ontological properties. As Elder-Vass (2010: 77) puts
it,

Someone who is theorising normative institutions may quite reasonably

come up with a different way of understanding social structure from
someone who is theorising the capitalist system. Both may develop radi-
cally different theories of structure and both may be right, even though
their theories appear incompatible, simply because they are theorising
different kinds of structure.
224 J. Bouchard

In short, the study of specific social structures requires the application

of structure-specific theories. Lopez and Scott (2000: 3–4) identify three
types of structure: institutional, relational and embodied :

Institutional structure [includes] those cultural or normative patterns that

define the expectations that agents hold about each other’s behaviour
and that organize their enduring relations with each other. On the other
hand, there is the idea of what we call relational structure. Here, social
structure is seen as comprising the social relations themselves, under-
stood as patterns of causal interconnection and interdependence among
agents and their actions, as well as the positions that they occupy. […]
Embodied structures are found in the habits and skills that are inscribed
in human bodies and minds and that allow them to produce, reproduce,
and transform institutional structures and relational structures.

Although the distinctions provided by Lopez and Scott are insightful,

they seem to overemphasize the ideational aspects of social structures, a
strategy that limits researchers’ ability to maintain important ontolog-
ical distinctions between culture and structure. On this point, Archer
(2011: 70) defines culture as “referring to all intelligibilia, that is to any
item which has the dispositional ability to be understood by someone –
whether or not anyone does so at any given time.” In Bouchard (2017:
79), I point out that “like structure, culture also possesses the proper-
ties of anteriority as well as affording and constraining influences. It can,
to some extent, also be studied in terms of underlying causes.” Given
that they share some emergent properties, it is possible to see ontological
parallels between culture and structure. However, Bouchard and Glasgow
(2019: 27) note that “while agents might rely on cultural knowledge to
interpret structural forces […] the latter are not inherently ideational.”
This understanding is drawn from Carter (2000), who distinguishes
between structure as primarily dependent on objective, material resources
on the one hand, and culture as dependent ideational resources on the
other.
Equating culture with structure is thus problematic because it helps
propagate the myth of cultural integration, or the view of culture as
an integrated system (Archer, 1996). Aligned with cultural determinism,
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 225

the myth of cultural integration can be denoted in the popular concep-

tualization of culture as a body of shared meanings which, according
to Archer (2011), essentially merges the community of cultural agents
with the meanings themselves. Rejecting this view of culture, the author
adds that the act of sharing constitutes only one among many specific
aims sought by a cultural group, and as such cannot be considered a
defining feature of culture. When culture is lumped within structure, or
simply identified as another structural reality, the problem of cultural
determinism surfaces, a problem identified by Porpora (1987: 64) in the
following terms: “To be told, for example, that some behavior is cultur-
ally intelligible, as a move in a game of chess, does not explain why the
player performed that culturally intelligible behavior rather than another
one.” Elder-Vass (2012) criticizes cultural determinism, specifically the
compartmentalization of cultures into distinct and essentialized sets of
cultural practices, by pointing out that “many of [the component prac-
tices of a particular culture] are actually shared with other cultures to
some extent. And even when some practices really are unique to the
culture concerned, there is something arbitrary about choosing those
practices rather than others to define a cultural group” (p. 171, emphasis
mine).
These realist observations about structure and culture help further
contrast realism from symbolic interactionism, for example, which offers,
in my view, an inconsistent definition of culture. Interactionists tend
to view cultures as fluid, ever-changing, and emerging through humans’
largely symbiotic interaction with the world. In and of itself, this view is
not problematic. However, interactionism’s relativistic position paradox-
ically depends on a deterministic understanding of cultural identities, as
revealed in Crotty’s (1998: 76) description of culture as “not to be called
into question; it is not to be criticised, east of all by someone of another
culture.” For Crotty’s view of culture as “not to be criticised” to hold
ground, a deterministic understanding of the agency-culture relationship
is necessary, locking people within the subservient role of reproducer of
rigid cultural norms and practices, and cancelling the distinct and emer-
gent properties of both agency and culture’. To avoid the determinist
trap when thinking about culture, while facilitating the use of concep-
tual tools adequate for an account of cultural change, realists first define
226 J. Bouchard

culture as the outcome of a complex interaction between humans and

their social and natural environments, with the two strata possessing
different kinds of powers to make things happen in the world. This
approach makes room for a necessary conceptualization of people as
different from their cultural identities and cultural communities, and
culture as also existing beyond situated interaction.
In line with the realist emphasis on the importance of drawing
ontological distinctions between phenomena, Archer (1996) concep-
tualizes culture as a stratified reality composed of two separate yet
closely linked layers: the Cultural System (CS) and the Socio-Cultural
Domain (SC). Simply stated, the CS includes processes and phenomena
including cultural knowledge, social norms, beliefs, traditions, language
(as resource for everyday communication), myths and cultural heritages.
It also includes cultural objects and artefacts. As part of their emergent
features is the property of anteriority, which means that CS phenomena
already likely existed when we were born, and will likely continue to
exist in some form or another after we die. Archer (2011: 70) refers
to the more conceptual aspects of the CS as similar to the contents of
“libraries”:

We use these concepts every day when we say that the ideas of X are
consistent with those of Y, or that theory or belief A contradicts theory or
belief B. In so doing, we grant that a cultural system has an objective exis-
tence and particular relations among its components (doctrines, theories,
beliefs and individual propositions). These relationships of contradic-
tion and complementarity are independent of anyone’s claim to know,
to believe, to assert or to assent to them, because this is knowledge
independent of a knowing subject – such as any unread book.

To further exemplify the CS, Archer (2011) explains that looking up a

word, a concept, a person or a place in an encyclopaedia, a dictionary or
online means that the relevant cultural knowledge is not “in our mind”
at that particular moment. When we look up a word, we are therefore
not a knowing subject: we are a subject actively seeking out the targeted
cultural knowledge, which is part of the CS. As such, CS elements
also occupy a life beyond situated and culturally imbued interaction.
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 227

They do not, however, occupy a “virtual” life devoid of causal poten-

tial, endlessly waiting for agentive input; instead, they are real because,
when interacting with agentive forces, they present real constraints and
enablements.
The SC, on the other hand, includes our everyday cultural choices
and actions, or how we adopt, reproduce, resist, or challenge elements
from the CS. This is largely the cultural life we experience and that we
are most directly aware of. Processes within the SC are characterized by
fluidity and unpredictability, not anteriority, although they are in large
part the outcomes of past and contemporary cultural deliberations and
actions. Archer (2011: 72–73) identifies the emergent properties of SC
phenomena thus:

The SC possesses causal powers of its own kind in relation to the CS: it
can resolve apparent contradictions and respond adaptively to real ones,
or it can explore and exploit the complementarities it confronts, thus
modifying the cultural system in the process. Moreover, it can set its own
cultural agenda, often in relation to its structurally based interests, by
creatively adding new items to the systemic register.

Willmott (2002) summarizes the CS–SC distinction similarly by

defining elements within the CS as cultural resources existing some-
what independently of human knowledge or awareness, and phenomena
within the SC as having to do with people, or culturally active agents,
ultimately generating and experiencing cultural life on the ground. The
CS acts as the cultural library which provides us with ideas and resources
to choose from while we live our lives within the SC. Archer (2011: 72)
explains that

at any moment, the cultural system (CS) is the product of historical socio-
cultural (SC) interaction, maintained in the present, but having emergent
properties and powers which pertain to that level. Like structure, some
of its most important causal powers are those of constraints and enable-
ments. […] However, again like structure, constraints require something
to constrain and enablements something to enable. Those “somethings”
are the ideational projects of people – the beliefs they seek to uphold, the
theories they wish to vindicate, the propositions they want to deem true.
228 J. Bouchard

In other words, the exercise of CS causal powers is dependent upon their

activation from the SC level.

In this way, the interaction between the CS and the SC not only gener-
ates the cultural realities we observe in the real world: it also accounts
for cultural stability and change over time. To describe this process,
Archer (2011: 73) extends the morphogenetic cycle involving structure
and agency summarized above to account for the relationship between
the CS and the SC, or between people and culture:

Cultural Conditioning → Socio-Cultural Interaction → Cultural Elab-

oration

For cultural conditioning to take place, the CS must necessarily pre-

date our cultural actions (the SC) which, as they post-date the CS,
can subsequently transform it, creating a feedback loop. As the author
summarizes, the act of having ideas essentially activates the CS’s emer-
gent causal powers which, as with structure, come in the form of
constraints and enablements. Yet, the reasons why some CS elements
are drawn from by agents and others not resides in SC’s emergent causal
potentials.
The links between the CS and the SC are also considered impor-
tant because, by being relational entities, the CS and SC must therefore
be distinct and emergent “layers” of culture related in a-synchronous
fashion. According to Archer (1996), the CS predates the SC, which
transforms it. Partly because this relationship is a-synchronous, elements
from the CS do not determine people’s views or actions: they only
provide certain conditions and possibilities within which people can then
choose to act in certain ways and not others. In turn, because people
have goals to achieve, they must make choices, which are in turn condi-
tioned by elements from the CS. Over time, our choices can potentially
change the CS by introducing new elements, which can in turn subse-
quently influence contemporary and future generations. This constitutes
the core of realism’s anti-determinist viewpoint. Accordingly, the links
between the CS and the SC are complex and often lead to unexpected
outcomes because the CS and the SC unfold or move through time at
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 229

different paces. For example, elements within the CS—being antecedent

realities—have developed over long periods of time, often over genera-
tions and even centuries. While a language, for example, can change, it
can only do so over very long stretches of time. In contrast, our decisions
and actions within the SC are daily, rapid, performed at the moment and
sometimes unpredictable. Because of their distinct properties, the CS and
SC can also be understood as having different causal powers.
The links between the CS and the SC are also understood from
a realist perspective as causal , since causality is necessarily implied in
discussions of phenomena such as cultural stability and cultural change.
The a-synchronous relationship between the CS and the SC as distinct
and emergent layers of culture is, again, necessary here, since it creates
the context within which friction or occasional gaps and contradictions
between the CS and the SC can emerge. These points of friction—
inherent to the relationships themselves—are of considerable impor-
tance to explanations of phenomena such as cultural morphostasis and
morphogenesis. The realist view of culture presented here also presents
agency as a distinct social stratum with considerable causal potential,
since our everyday cultural decisions and actions (the SC) are understood
as constituting the principal force behind cultural stability or elabora-
tion. Again, we take something from the CS (or the “library”) when its
information is pertinent to us in specific situations. In turn, our choices
and actions also transform the CS (although this might take a lot of
time). If, for example, some information from the CS becomes perti-
nent to a larger portion of a cultural community over time, its salience
as a cultural reality is magnified. On the other hand, less relevant infor-
mation is gradually pushed deeper in the background, while new ideas
tend to be introduced. In this way, the realist view of culture helps us in
two important ways: (1) by explaining why some traditions, beliefs and
rituals fade through history while others remain; and (2) by providing us
with a basis upon which we can understand cultural stability and change,
and develop strategies for safeguarding cultural traditions and heritages,
to name one possible practical application.
The realist view of culture summarized thus far stands in rather
sharp contrast with interactionist views of culture, notably that of Street
(1993), who reduces culture to action (or to a “verb”). By reducing
230 J. Bouchard

culture to cultural acts, Street, unfortunately, conflates CS within SC,

thus denying their emergent properties and powers. Instead, realism
provides a robust ontology because it is stratified and anti-deterministic.
It is also robust because, while agency occupies an important place,
its context remains structured and cultured in important ways, which
means that agentive choices and movements are also structured and
cultured. While their ontological differences make it possible for them
to be causally related to each other, structure, culture and agency remain
fundamentally relational phenomena, and must therefore be understood
in large part in terms of their interactions with other phenomena.

Agency
In addition to its consideration for underlying causal mechanisms
as powerful particulars, realism is presented in this volume as also
providing a robust, stratified view of human agency as causally effica-
cious, equipped with distinct and emergent properties including generic
powers to communicate and act (Elder-Vass, 2010), and operating within
a contingent social realm—i.e., intricately linked with, yet irreducible
to, cultural and structural forces. Other important distinct and emer-
gent properties of agency include reflexivity, intentionality and creativity,
properties that cannot be associated with structure or culture.
The realist view of human agency offers a viable alternative to homo
economicus (or Modernity’s Being, an agent with a core essence, constantly
striving towards achieving free will based on rational calculations) and
homo sociologicus (or the Social Being of constructivism and much of
postmodernism, a replicator of social norms and rules who inhabits
a fluid world of constantly negotiated social constructions, trapped
within a discursive realm). Archer (2011) describes the first alternative as
dependent on instrumental rationality, thereby remaining an essentially
anthropocentric perspective, whereby only people have causal potential,
not society. She describes the second alternative as providing a weak-
ened view of agency overly dependent on discourse. She summarizes the
conceptual problems at the heart of both alternatives thus:
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 231

The central deficiency of these two models [Modernity’s man and

Society’s Being] is their basic denial that the nature of reality as a whole
makes any difference to the people we become […] Modernity’s Man is
pre-formed, and his formation, that is, the emergence of his properties
and powers, is not dependent on his experiences of the world. [With]
Society’s Being […] the whole of the world comes to people sieved through
one part of it, “society’s conversation”. […] What is lost, in both versions,
is the crucial notion of experience of reality.” (p. 81, emphasis mine)

In other words, missing in these two problematic views of agency

is consideration for structure, culture and agency, three core strata
equipped with distinct and emergent properties of their own, although
involved in complex and ongoing interactions unfolding at the levels
of the empirical, the actual and the real. Instead of Modernity’s Being
and Society’s Being, what is needed in sociological inquiry is a view of
human agency as both “regulator” and “regulated” which encompasses
the trialectical relationship between structure, culture and agency in
conceptually and methodologically productive ways. Stated differently,
we need a view of people which considers their distinct and emergent
properties and powers as people, yet which situates them within a cultur-
ally and structurally contingent social world. As we saw in the previous
chapter, structuration theory seems to provide interesting possibilities
in this regard, although it does so by fusing both structure and agency
together, leaving the crucial issue of causality somewhat unaddressed.
Archer’s notion of double morphogenesis (summarized above) is
also useful here. As the author explains, “structure is the conditioning
medium and elaborated outcome of interaction: agency is shaped by
and reshapes structure whilst reshaping itself in the process.” (Archer,
2011: 86). In this model, the causal relationship between structure and
agency can potentially be operationalized theoretically and methodologi-
cally because these two strata are not fused together at the ontological
level. The ways in which the world unfolds over time is not entirely
dependent on our discursive input into it, nor our understandings of it,
and the way the world is has a necessary regulatory effect on our actions
and discourses. At the same time, we are not automatons, entirely deter-
mined by social forces: our existence is consequential to the ongoing
232 J. Bouchard

production of social life. Such claims about agency and structure are
possible within a realist ontology largely because they are grounded in
the realizations that (1) we are inherently relational beings, (2) structure
and culture are emergent outcomes of these relationships, and (3) struc-
ture, culture and agency—as relational phenomena—must therefore be
ontologically different things.
Social realism offers perhaps the most robust conceptualization of
human agency, notably through the work on human reflexivity by
Margaret Archer. Because we reflexively deliberate on a number of issues
affecting our lives, and that these deliberations necessarily involve consid-
eration for structural and cultural constraints and enablements, we can
reach decisions which can then affect our behaviours, decisions which
can then affect the course of social life, a process which over time can
help solidify or reshape structure and culture. Archer’s view of human
reflexivity begins with the notion that

fundamentally, personal identity is a matter of what we care about in

the world. Constituted as we are, and the world being the way it is,
humans ineluctably interact with the three different orders of natural
reality: nature itself, practice and the social order. Humans necessarily
have to sustain relationships with the natural world, work relationships,
and social relationships, if they are to survive and thrive. (Archer, 2011:
88)

In sum, precisely because we have projects we want to achieve, our

interaction with the constraining and enabling influences of structure
and culture (and the natural world, let’s not forget) become necessarily
involved in what we do, influences which are channelled through the
three orders of natural reality. At the same time, these three orders—
nature, practice and the social order—are not necessarily neatly aligned
with each other. As with the a-synchronous relationship between struc-
ture and agency and between the CS and the SC, contradictions, points
of friction or “mismatches” between the three orders contribute to the
complexity and unpredictability empirically observable in the social
world. Faced with this complexity, humans try their best to achieve
modus vivendi, or a “liveable degree of solidarity for the self in its
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 233

commitments” (Archer, 2004: 10), or again as “some form of agreement

between diverging forces, or an agreement between structure, culture,
and agency to coexist through an accommodation of differences, made
possible because of human agents’ ability to be reflexive” (Bouchard,
2017: 107). Not only do people adopt different approaches to reaching
modus vivendi, depending on people themselves and the situation where
the structure–agency relationship unfolds, people can prioritize one or
two of the three orders of natural reality (e.g., people “living for their
art”, people sacrificing their health and safety to protect others), although
they can never neglect any one of these three orders (Archer, 2011). This
means, of course, that human agents can never be reduced to biolog-
ical entities or purely social beings: they are inescapably connected to the
three orders of natural reality—nature, practice and the social order—for
their survival.
For social realists, human reflexivity—characterized by Archer (2011)
as both cognitive and affective—is the main factor determining which
balance, or modus vivendi, is ultimately achieved. Archer (2004) suggests
four approaches to reflexivity: conversational reflexivity, autonomous
reflexivity, meta-reflexivity, and fractured reflexivity, summarized by
Bouchard and Glasgow (2019: 51–52) thus:

Communicative reflexivity is adopted by individuals who doubt their own

ability to reach modus vivendi by themselves. It is a type of reflexive
engagement that aims towards contextual continuity or the reproduction
and extension of existing social rules and structures. […] Autonomous
reflexivity, on the other hand, involves an independent internal conver-
sation in which work becomes a way for people to gain balance in their
lives and reach modus vivendi. Personal rights and responsibilities are
very important areas of concern in autonomous reflexivity. […] Meta-
reflexivity is the ability to be reflexive about reflexivity, or the ability to
realize that we have an internal conversation and that it is important
to our well-being as social agents. Meta-reflexive people are critical of
themselves and of society and think of the individual/society relationship
often in idealistic terms. This explains why they are often uncomfortable
when facing limits or rules. […] Finally, fractured reflexivity is a passive
approach to the internal conversation. Fractured reflexive people do not
have much control over their lives because their internal conversation
234 J. Bouchard

has been somewhat interrupted and no longer helps them make reflexive
choices effectively.

Although in Archer (2007) the author notes that none of these four
types dominate in any society, in Archer (2012) and subsequent publica-
tions she presents meta-reflexivity as more dominant in late modernity.
Despite their differences, however, these four approaches to the internal
conversation reveal that humans (a) are ontologically different from the
context and realities which surround them and are thus not reducible
to them, yet also (b) rely on these to function successfully and achieve
their goals. As such, when we talk about people deploying their agentive
potentials, we are not talking about human beings acting in the world
free of constraints, free to achieve their full potentials as they see it. As
we saw previously, the “free will” view of agency is problematic because
it only offers a socially decontextualized agency, a position which then
leads to a problematic qualification of agency in terms of degrees of
freedom to do as one wishes—i.e., the freer a person is, the more agency
(s)he is said to possess. Elder-Vass (2012: 193) offers a realist critique of
this view thus: “Having the agentic capacity to think, choose, and act is
entirely distinct from having the authorised capacity to make decisions
with significant social implications. We may be agents and yet prevented
from exercising social power.” In many discussions of agency within the
social sciences, however, when people are said to lack the ability to make
their own decisions and act according to their own volition, they are
often said to “lack agency”. Such claim reveals a modernist Western
morality based on the conceptually problematic idea that people make
decisions on their own, somehow outside structure or culture. As Erikson
(2001: 177) points out, “it is a fallacy to conflate ‘agency’ with freedom
(and hence with progressive, transformative practice). Rather, the point
is that because local circumstances are contingent and that persons are
not automata, local social action inherently involves agency, whatever
the tendencies or consequences of those actions might be.”
Although the social realist emphasis on reflexivity might be interpreted
by some as another version of phenomenology, particularly the latter’s
emphasis on how people make sense of their worlds, it is important to
stress that by defining reflexivity as an emergent property of agency and
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 235

by placing it in relation with structural/cultural constraints/enablements,

social realism avoids the conflationary tendency to reduce society to a
mere collection of subjective realities, or to overemphasize the impor-
tance of humans’ interpretative and rational potentials. Instead, social
realism considers the complexity of human reflexivity, of human inter-
pretations and discourses, in relation with structural and cultural forces
as stratified phenomena themselves, all within a stratified social realm.
Extending this view further, agency is conceptualized from a social
realist viewpoint as more than what pertains to individual selves,
because some of the properties of individual human agents—e.g., having
projects, interacting with structural and cultural constraints and enable-
ments, etc.—depend to a large extent on what goes on at the collective
level. This implies that agency, or at least aspects of agency, also need to
be extended to collective social units such as groups and communities.
At the same time, it is conceptually problematic to reduce people to their
social relations, as in relationism. Highlighting the importance of distin-
guishing individuals and groups ontologically, Bouchard and Glasgow
(2019: 58–59, emphasis mine) point out that

perhaps the main difference between individual and collective agency

(besides the obvious fact that collective agency involves more than one
human being) is that the latter needs to articulate its goals to meet them.
The articulation of such goals requires both the organization of social life
and the emergence of roles within [collectives].

In terms of causal explanations, these conceptual nuances matter a

great deal. For one, individual agents who are part of groups can be
said to cause things to happen in society largely as a result of the group
acting through its members. In collectives, the causal potentials of indi-
vidual agents must therefore also be explained in relation to their roles
within those collectives. Elder-Vass (2012: 222) notes another impor-
tant difference between individual and collective agency with regards to
causality:

Communities are not the kinds of thing that have the causal power to
know. In order to know, one must have the capability of holding a belief,
236 J. Bouchard

and communities do not have this capability. In order to attribute a causal

power to a social collective, one must have an ontology that explains how
collectives can have such power and a specific explanation, consistent with
that ontology, of how a collective of the type concerned can have the
power concerned.

Unlike groups, it is people who have a brain to think with. At the same
time, when people think, their beliefs, ideologies and worldviews remain
deeply social phenomena: “Knowledge thus depends on social groups
for its validation but it is not held by them. We must bring social groups
into the ontology of knowledge not by claiming primacy for them but
by identifying their specific causal role” (Elder-Vass, 2012: 223). This
stratified view of agency, in other words, leads to the realization that,
while groups and collectives cannot hold beliefs, they can have causal
potential because they can act through their members.
While conceptualizing collective agency requires an initial under-
standing of individual agency, the same requirement exists with regard
to the differences between agents and actors. Archer (2004) distinguishes
four distinct and emergent layers of agency—the self , the person, the
agent and the actor —a conceptual distinction that helps us understand
agency as a phenomenon ranging from the inner self to the social being.
On this basis, the author argues that “any attempt to conceptualise the
Social Actor needs to be completed by reference to their properties as
Agents, if we are finally to arrive at an adequate conception of social
identity and how it is attained” (p. 283). Bouchard and Glasgow (2019:
54, emphasis mine) draw insight from this principle to suggest two
important elements to consider when developing a view of collective
agency:

Firstly, understanding how agency operates in specific contexts and

domains requires an initial conceptualization of individual agency and
a secondary conceptualization of individual agents penetrating social
contexts and reorganizing themselves into members of [collectives].
Secondly, our socially oriented needs as human agents can also be under-
stood as triggers for the deployment of our reflexive powers in social
contexts. Stated differently, while individual agency and collective agency
possess distinct and emergent properties, they are also closely related to
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 237

each other in the production, reproduction and transformation of social

life.

In other words, the double morphogenesis also happens between

individual and collective agency: the individual agent helps shape the
collectivity, which also has potential causal effects upon individual
members.
With the above general realist principles regarding human agency, the
next section looks at how a possible conceptual amalgamation between
human reflexivity and the more patterned or routinized features of
people’s discourses and actions could potentially contribute to a greater
understanding of social stability and change.

Habitual and Transformative Actions: Can

Habitus and Reflexivity Be Combined?
As presented thus far, realism—particularly Archer’s morphogenetic
model which allows for a conceptual detachment between struc-
ture, culture and agency and provides a strong version of agency—
provides solutions to some of the conflationary tendencies in Bourdieu’s
theory of practice and Giddens’ structuration theory (see discussions in
Chapter 3). Elder-Vass (2010: 88) sees less of a victory for reflexivity
and a loss for habitus than a possible combination between the two
perspectives:

Pierre Bourdieu and Margaret Archer have advanced what seem at first
sight to be incompatible theories of human agency. While Archer stresses
our reflexive deliberations and the consequent choices of identity and
projects that individuals make, Bourdieu stresses the possibility of acting
without such deliberations, and his concept of habitus gives a central role
to social conditioning in determining our behaviour.

Despite these important differences, I will argue in this section that

because both perspectives reveal valuable insight into different aspects
of the agency–structure relationship, the possibility of conceptually
238 J. Bouchard

combining them is worth further consideration. It is worth also noting at

the onset of this section that parallels to the concept of habitus have also
been considered by CDST adherents with consideration for the stratified
nature of social reality, notably by Juarrero (1999: 255) who rightfully
points out that

contextual dependencies established through persistent interactions with

that environment limit our need to constantly interpret the world. Under
stable conditions, we simply order ourselves to "drive home" and let the
world be its own model. No need to analyze and evaluate every stim-
ulus; the stable context, as embodied in our external structure’s contextual
constraints, will automatically reparse the environment for us. Higher-
level monitoring can continue in place while the constraints of the
internalized environment fine-tune the details.

The works of Bourdieu and Archer, however, do not provide equally

stratified viewpoints. Therefore, drawing conceptual parallels between
reflexivity and habitus necessitates a certain conceptual back and forth
between two contrasting models, and requires negotiating and resolving
core conceptual discrepancies. Although Archer herself does not see such
combination as possible, Elder-Vass (2010) asserts that a sociology of
the human agent which combines both reflexivity and habitus is both
possible and desirable. In the context of ideology critique, Bouchard
(2020) argues similarly that, instead of the outdated Marxist notion of
ideology as false-consciousness, critics should consider habitus, which
explains the more routinized and habitual features of human discourses
and actions, and a model of human reflexivity to account for the
distinct and emergent properties of agency within the context of ideology
research. Accordingly, while Archer’s account of reflexivity reveals agency
as an important causal force, it is also crucial to recognize that people
cannot act by drawing exclusively from their own resources and powers
(a point which Archer also makes). To explain why people cannot fully
extricate themselves from structural and cultural constraints simply by
engaging in alternative discourses and actions, Bouchard argues that crit-
ical social scientists must also consider habitus as possible underlying
generative mechanism. Archer recognizes and integrates this reality well
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 239

in her work, although as will be explained later she remains a rather

strong critic of habitus largely because it is grounded in a weak version
of agency.
Elder-Vass (2010: 111) begins this difficult task with the claim that
reflexivity’s role in determining what actions will be taken by people
“varies by individual, by social class and by historical context.” To this
claim, I would add that reflexivity also varies depending on the Cultural
System of relevance to particular agents and particular situations or
cultural contexts, as well as the habitus related to a particular field of
practice. As with structural forces and underlying generative mecha-
nisms, habitus acts as a powerful “magnet” for agency and conditions
much of what we say and do. As such, perhaps its explanatory poten-
tial is greater than what Archer is willing to recognize. Elder-Vass (2010:
112) follows with an argument which, in my view, captures the complex
interaction between habitus and human reflexivity rather well:

To say that our social background and experiences influence our disposi-
tions is not to cede all causal power to the social level at the expense of
the individual. Our dispositions may sometimes be heavily and uncon-
sciously affected by social factors, but none of us is ever completely at
the mercy of our habitus. Nor is our habitus the unmediated product
of social structures, but rather the result of a lifetime of critical reflec-
tion upon our experiences, including our experiences of those structures.
Reflexivity thus becomes a critical attitude towards the dispositions we
have acquired from our past, as well as towards the contemporary social
situation that we face.

In short, habitus is presented by Elder-Vass as one of the emergent

products of reflexive engagement by individuals and collectives over time.
In doing so, the author does not characterize reflexivity and habitus
in Giddensian-like fashion (or as “two sides of the same coin”). In
attempting to bridge habitus and reflexivity thus, Elder-Vass is mindful
of Archer’s (2010: 128) point that structure, culture and agency cannot
essentially be “mutually constitutive” “because reflexive deliberations
depend upon a clear object-subject distinction.” Looking at solutions
to this theoretical conflict, and maintaining his commitment to a strat-
ified realist ontology, Elder-Vass (2010: 107) states that “some actions
240 J. Bouchard

are reflexively determined and others are determined by the habitus

[…] both Archer’s and Bourdieu’s theories are right, but about different
actions.” In this way, habitus and reflexivity could potentially be compat-
ible theories within a stratified understanding of the structure–agency
relationship.
This potential conceptual compatibility could be seen as offering
greater explanatory possibilities because empirical questions could then
focus on what contextual conditions, human motivations and under-
lying mechanisms lead people to act in particular ways and not others,
thus opening possibilities for accounts of a broader range of human
behaviours. Elder-Vass goes even further to suggest that both reflexivity
and habitus cause most agentive phenomena:

When individuals act, that action is the direct and immediate product of
non-conscious brain processes and that conscious intentionality is itself a
naturally caused phenomenon that acts as an input into this process, but
only as one of many such inputs. This means that human individuals do
sometimes make choices that affect their actions but it does not mean
that they have free will in the controversial philosophical sense of making
uncaused choices. We are choosing beings, but choosing is itself a natural
process and one that is governed causally like any other. If this is the case,
the sense we have of free will arises from the fact that we are the being
doing the choosing, not because that choosing is uncaused. (Elder-Vass,
2010: 198, emphasis original)

For Archer (2010), however, habitus and reflexivity are simply incom-
patible. She identifies four reasons why habitus fits uncomfortably within
a realist ontology: (1) as a complex, dynamic and open system, social life
and the people who live it always operate within, or in relation to, contin-
gent realities; (2) humans, as stratified biological and social entities,
possess creative reflexive powers which are not part of habitus; (3) the
contingencies of the social world are multiple and lead to unpredictable
outcomes, often pushing people to resort to their creative reflexive poten-
tial; and (4) a realist ontology is rooted in a conceptualization of agency,
structure and culture as distinct and emergent strata of the social realm,
with different powers and properties, thus leaving little room for habitus
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 241

which, according to most realist thinkers, reduces agency more or less to

an epiphenomenon, or product, of habitus as structuring structure.
According to Archer, because the notion of habitus fails to consider
reflexivity as a mediatory mechanism between structure, culture and
agency, and therefore as an important causal mechanism in the produc-
tion of social life (Kaidesoja, 2013), it therefore cannot be juxtaposed
or combined with reflexivity. Although not rejecting habitus outright,
Sealey and Carter (2004: 136) prioritize reflexivity over habitus thus:
“the process of ‘socialization’ is not one of consensus among people who
arrange themselves into simply identifiable groups. […] The presence of
consensus at the level of observable behaviour does not permit a direct
reading of people’s commitment to the culture at the level of beliefs.”
The authors’ viewpoint thus ensures that important ontological distinc-
tions between people and ideas, and between habitus and reflexivity, are
maintained.
Instead of habitus+ reflexivity, Archer (2010) suggests researchers to
remain focused on providing balanced accounts of the distinct and emer-
gent powers of agency, structure and culture. For her, habitus is a weak
model because it relies too much on what she calls “group member-
ship and action patterns” which fail to explain what people actually do.
Reflexivity and habitus are thus seen by the author as incompatible in
the sense that one explains causality while the other offers merely a cover
term for routinized acts without actually explaining how it might cause
things to happen:

The compromise concept of a ‘reflexive habitus’ elides two concepts

which Bourdieu consistently distinguished: the semi-unconscious dispo-
sitions constituting habitus, and reflexivity as self-awareness of them.
Moreover, what work does calling this a ‘habitus’ do? Literally, it states
that people now have a disposition to be reflexive about their circum-
stances and perhaps to be prepared for change rather than for stability.
If so, ‘preparedness’ must be used transitively; one must be in a state
of preparation for something determinate, otherwise this hybrid habitus
cannot supply dispositional guidelines for action.” (Archer, 2010: 126)

In my view, Archer’s rejection of habitus, although persuasive in her

account of human reflexivity, fails to consider the possibility that habitus
242 J. Bouchard

can indeed and quite reasonably be viewed as an underlying causal mech-

anism in and of itself. Underlying generative mechanisms, as suggested
earlier in this chapter, do not directly cause people’s actions, nor does
explaining them as social phenomena distinct from agency requires a
strong account of agency. The causal potential of underlying genera-
tive mechanisms is “triggered” when interacting with humans’ reflexive
potentials and their very real capacity to act and bring about change in
the world. In this sense, habitus “kicks in” when people have things
to do, and deliberate on some level about what needs to happen for
particular goals to be fulfilled. While habitus, by itself, cannot provide
a complete causal account of human action, as a potentially powerful
causal mechanism, and as providing important insight into the social
and cultural forces interacting with agency, it is in my view somewhat
mistaken to dismiss it merely as a problematic theoretical concept in
the explanation of social processes. Habitus should instead be concep-
tually positioned in relation to agency, all the while keeping in mind
their distinct and emergent properties and powers. Sayer (2010), another
realist thinker who sees value in looking at reflexivity in combination
with habitus, adopts a slightly different angle to argue that

we hold one another responsible for so many of our actions, that is,
capable of reflecting on what we should do. It is also indisputable that we
do much ‘on automatic’; we have many embodied inclinations, aversions,
and skills. We could hardly be skilled actors if we needed to reflect and
deliberate on everything before acting. (p. 108)

This basis allows the author to envisage the possibility of a combi-

nation between habitus and reflexivity, although not without some
important conceptual elaboration of habitus in particular. The impact
of habitus on agency, to be more specific, should not be understood as
taking place only at the subconscious level. As he puts it, “the processes
by which we develop a habitus range from a kind of osmosis or uncon-
scious adaptation through to a more conscious process of learning how
to do things so that we can come to do them without thinking” (Sayer,
2010: 110). Stated simply, there are not only subconscious and conscious
actions happening separately: both processes can happen in conjunction
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 243

and influence each other in important ways. For example, I can will-
ingly choose to join classes at a language school with the explicit goal
of improving my communicative competence in a language, while not
reflexively pondering on the validity of every one of my actions in the
classroom. So that the mind can operate smoothly without having to
consciously consider every action we make, many of our everyday actions
must therefore unfold with regards to field-specific habitus. This means
that habitus must also be accounted for as an underlying generative
mechanism and as consequential to an explanation of human action, in
the development of richer sociological insight.
Again, because they are not “two sides of the same coin”, it is impor-
tant to consider the complex interaction between reflexivity and habitus
in temporal terms—i.e., explaining how people “acquire” habitus over
time, and how habitus influences agentive movements from then on.
This position clearly underscores the primacy of reflexivity over habitus
in accounting for agentive movements, and makes a great deal of sense
if we consider that, while children do have the unique potential to be
socialized (as opposed to plants which do not), this potential is depen-
dent on the presence and use of their reflexive powers. Stated differently,
because one cannot be socialized—and thus “acquire” habitus—without
reflexivity, the latter must therefore be more consequential to accounts of
agentive processes than the former. We must always remind ourselves that
people do not act in particular ways because culture or society dictates
them to do so; instead, decisions and actions are arrived at through the
use of humans’ sense-making ability—one of agency’s distinct and emer-
gent powers—and it is through this process that cultural constraints and
enablements can have their effects. Caetano (2015: 67), however, puts
both at the same level by arguing that “structural conditioning is not
always external; society also exists internally in subjects’ minds, consol-
idated in systems of dispositions that, like reflexivity, have the potential
to guide action.” In my view, this is mistaken because, again, for habitus
to have any influence on agentive movements, it must be processed by
reflexivity-endowed human agents, and must therefore be considered as
distinct from agency. Instead, the combination between reflexivity and
habitus—with the former having primacy over the latter—is mindful of
realist principles, while not succumbing to an interactionist viewpoint
244 J. Bouchard

or promoting simply another version of homo sociologicus. It success-

fully integrates the idea that reflexivity is crucial in mediating “the
effects of the social field and participation in social life on individuals”
(Sayer, 2010: 112), while making it possible for habitus to act as causal
mechanism in certain situations, for certain purposes, at specific times.
The current discussion reveals some of the problems in Archer’s theory
of reflexivity. Sayer (2010), for example, notes that people’s reflexive
powers do not actually mediate all socializing influences: “We are not
omniscient, omnipotent beings; some influences get beneath our radar,
especially in early life, in our ‘formative years’, shaping our dispositions
and responses without our even noticing them” (p. 113). Further on, the
author identifies similar possibilities in later life thus:

Embodied habits of thought and action can remain important even where
we change our minds through deliberating on some issue. Thus if people
come to see that something they have believed is wrong, through encoun-
tering a convincing argument and decide that they should henceforth act
differently, this in itself is unlikely to be sufficient to change their ways of
thinking and acting completely. For example, even if a white racist comes
to renounce her racism on the basis of argument, she may still find herself
unintentionally making racist assumptions in everyday life. (p. 117)

Caetano (2015) echoes Sayer’s criticism of Archer’s theory of reflex-

ivity to some extent, arguing that Archer’s notion “minimizes crucial
social factors and the dimensions necessary for a more complex and
multi-dimensional study of the concept, such as social origins, family
socialization, processes of internalization of exteriority, the role of other
structure–agency mediation mechanisms and the persistence of social
reproduction” (p. 60). While individuals’ reflexive deliberations are
presented by Archer as the “glue” between structure, culture and agency,
Caetano posits that the influences of generative structural and cultural
forces are not fully considered. In arguing thus, Caetano seems to suggest
that Archer’s model is aligned with interactionism to some degree,
suggesting that this problem is due to Archer conceptualizing the links
between agency, structure and culture principally at the level of theory.
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 245

Although I do not fully agree with Caetano’s critique of Archer, this

lack of conceptual flexibility between reflexivity and habitus also strikes
me as somewhat odd in Archer’s work. If we consider that “reflexivity,
exercised by internal dialogues, not only mediates the impact that struc-
tures have on agents, it also conditions individual responses to particular
social situations” (Caetano, 2015: 62), Archer’s morphogenetic model
can indeed be seen as prioritizing agentive discourses and actions in the
production, reproduction and transformation of social life. This percep-
tion can be somewhat justified in reading Archer’s (2004: 18) own words
regarding the importance of agency in her work: “I wish to reclaim
human beings as the ultimate fons et origio of (emergent) social life
or socio-cultural structures, rather than subjugating humanity, as if it
were the epiphenomenon of social forces.” This epistemological bias in
Archer’s work is noted by Caetano in her argument that Archer’s analysis
“is focused on individuals’ capacity to evaluate their social circumstances,
leaving no room for a problematization that is articulated with the hier-
archical dimension of social life” (p. 64). Although not in full agreement
with Caetano on this point, I do agree with the critique that her work
needs to provide greater insight into people’s habitual actions.
At the same time, Caetano’s claims that Archer fails to consider
social origins, socialization and differentiated locations in her work on
reflexivity, and her charge that Archer leaves “no room for a prob-
lematization that is articulated with the hierarchical dimension of social
life” (Caetano, 2015: 64), are not entirely convincing. Even a surface
reading of Archer’s work reveals that she is mindful of social forces
when developing her theory of reflexivity. Although she seems to priori-
tize agency, Archer consistently makes the claim that the morphogenetic
model provides a framework that explains the links between structure
and agency, and never (in my view at least) highlights one at the expense
of the other. The author makes this clear by persistently referring to
the need in social research for analytical dualism, or analytical balance
between the “parts” and the “people”. In addition, when one engages
in a closer reading of Archer’s work, it becomes clear that Caetano
overlooks important elements. For example, while Caetano is right in
pointing out that, in Archer’s model, “the causal efficacy of structures is
246 J. Bouchard

not directly felt upon subjectivity itself, but on the result of that subjec-
tivity: individual projects, from which potential courses of action are
defined” (p. 66), she is mistaken in claiming that “social structures are
only present in internal conversations when individuals evaluate them
in articulation with their main concerns” (ibid.). Indeed, when Archer
(2004: 21) argues that “we cannot discover the nature of social structure
by administering questionnaires”, for example, she is also arguing that
the effects of structure upon agency (a) are not only real, but that (b)
they cannot be measured simply by studying how human agents inter-
pret them through analysis of their reflexive activities and engagements,
as revealed through the analysis of survey data. Clearly, Archer’s views
diverge from interpretivist principles.
Despite these problems in her critique of Archer, Caetano neverthe-
less manages to present the morphogenetic model as a dialogue with
Bourdieu’s theory of habitus, and this in my view deserves further atten-
tion. Put differently, Caetano’s critique can be interpreted as suggesting
that the theories of Bourdieu and Archer are the products of diverging
epistemological emphases, the former on socialization and the latter on
reflexivity, but that they can be linked together at the ontological level.
In this section, I have tried to argue that these links are possible as
long as habitus and reflexivity are understood as distinct and emergent,
with habitus as a potential causal mechanism, and with reflexivity as
an emergent property of human agency as powerful particular. While
habitus does not have any particular agentive capacity to guide action,
agentive reflexivity can, in a very practical sense, rely on systems of dispo-
sitions that allow people to make decisions in context without ongoing
conscious deliberations over options and strategies. As Caetano (2015:
67) puts it,

the inner life of subjects is not only composed of conscious dynamics.

Individuals are not in a constant state of alert. Combining Archer’s theory
with the dispositionalist approach allows a conceptualization of individual
interiority as consisting not only of conscious mechanisms, but also of
social processes that take place without individuals being aware of them.
 4 Social Realism and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 247

In sum, the reflexivity+ habitus combination does have explana-

tory potential within a realist perspective. Similar to Elder-Vass (2010)
although perhaps more aligned with Archer’s views, Sayer (2010: 121)
combines reflexivity and habitus in the following way: “the semi-
conscious responses that arise from the dispositions of our habitus merge
into the conscious monitorings of our internal conversations. Our rela-
tion to the world is not merely one of practical engagement, or indeed
contemplation, but of concern.”
At the same time, this combination cannot come without some degree
of conceptual reformulation of habitus. This is because, in and of itself,
habitus reveals little about agency. As Layder (1997: 53–54) points out,
“habitus only provides a general, loose series of predispositions, and these
are not determining of what people do in specific social contexts. This
is in part due to the emergent quality of social action.” Nevertheless, its
potential to have a marked influence on agency cannot be dismissed, as
Archer seems to do at times. If we accept the definition of habitus as a set
of “durable motivations in people’s minds, as “acting as a system of cogni-
tive and motivating structures” (Bourdieu, 1990: 53), as constituted at
the level of practice, and as practically oriented dispositions, we can also
accept the possibility that habitus is also closely related to (yet of course
distinct from) human beings’ sense-making capacities, and indeed close
to the reality faced by people daily. Again, while people make decisions
largely based on their sense-making capacity, habitus remains an impor-
tant influence upon the development of this capacity within human
beings. These are, of course, conceptual deliberations which can only
be strengthened through empirical research; yet, they offer avenues for a
renewed understanding of the structure–agency relationship, in light of
the important contributions made by Bourdieu and Archer.
To sum up, a social realist approach (and to a large extent a CDST
approach as well) to the social sciences seeks to understand human beings
not as hopelessly fluid entities constructed through discourse, but as
having very real capacities to act in the real world and affect other things.
As such, they must be conceptualized as “real,” which requires theoret-
ical exploration and elucidation of their distinct and emergent properties,
including their ability to cause other things to happen in society. Equally,
structure and culture affect people in consequential ways, which is why
248 J. Bouchard

their distinct and emergent properties must also be clarified. Hopefully,

the work in Chapter 3 and in this chapter has done more than reassert
agency’s role in the production of social realities, that it has provided
readers with a clearer understanding of the importance of the struc-
ture–agency debate to social research, including AL research, and that
contra Ashwin (2012), it has made the important point that talks about
structure and agency are not mere epistemological exercises centering
on different sets of social processes, but rather deliberations about onto-
logically different yet equally consequential phenomena and processes.
I also hope that this chapter on realism has offered ways to resolve
some of the tensions between the various ontologies summarized in the
previous chapter while providing the grounds for a realist approach to
AL scholarship, the subject of the next chapter.

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 5
Social Realism and Applied Linguistics

Chapter 3 identified important conceptual developments in the struc-

ture–agency debate within social theory, and has shown that in most
cases, both structure and agency have long been seen by social theo-
rists and scientists as consequential to the production of social life. Most
social theorists to date have largely rejected the notion that structure
and agency work contra each other; instead, most have been invested in
figuring out precisely how structure and agency are causally related, and
it is from this basis that preference for one over the other have emerged;
only in radical versions did one “win outright.” This general avoidance
of dichotomous thinking in social theory is justified, for as López (2001:
88, emphasis mine) explains, “one of the fundamental problems with
the opposition of agency to structure, is that it sets up a connotative
resonance between agency and freedom, and structure and determinism
[which] seems to allow for explanatory inadequacy to be reproduced.”
Phrased differently, the reduction of agency to freedom and/or struc-
ture to determinism is possible only within flattened (i.e., non-stratified)
social ontologies, whereby the distinct and emergent properties of agency
and structure are not fully considered, leading to complications at the
level of theory design, methodology and data analysis. In light of this,
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 253
Switzerland AG 2021
J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_5
254 J. Bouchard

one of the underlying arguments in this book is that understanding the

complex evolution of the structure–agency debate—including coming
to term with realism as a more robust social ontology—is consequen-
tial to AL research because it provides richer conceptual grounds upon
which to (a) resolve debates regarding language as a socially emergent
phenomenon, (b) come to term with the centrality of complexity, emer-
gence and causality in AL research, and more broadly speaking (c)
understand the role of language in the ongoing production of social life.
This chapter builds upon the previous one to summarize a realist
approach to AL research, drawn mainly from Sealey and Carter (2004),
a volume which in my view is perhaps most effective in drawing from
social theory to overcome enduring problems posed by both succes-
sionist and interpretivist approaches to AL research. As the authors
phrase it four years prior to the publication of their book, sociolinguistics
research can instead “draw on social theory for analysis of the relation-
ship between speaker and system, the role of language in the creation,
maintenance and change of social institutions, and the role of human
agency in sociolinguistic phenomena” (Carter & Sealey, 2000: 3). The
need for a renewed AL has been underlined for decades, at least since
Hymes’ works and of course Firth’s call for a new kind of linguistics
concerned with the realm of real-world language experience. Unfortu-
nately, the term “realism” has also been misunderstood as another version
of modernism, a confusion apparent in Silva and Leki’s (2004: 7) prob-
lematic dichotomization between “realist AL” and “composition AL”:
“applied linguistics’ ontology has been primarily realist. That is, phys-
ical reality exists and is driven by unchanging natural laws. Composition
studies’ ontology is predominantly relativist – realities exist only in the
form of mental constructions that are socially based, local, and specific.”
The confusion here comes from (a) Silva and Leki’s marked interpre-
tivist argumentation, and (b) lack of acknowledgement by the authors of
realism’s satisfied ontology and its resulting antagonism towards any form
of determinism, including the notion of “unchanging natural laws.”
Calls for re-conceptualizing AL scholarship along realist lines have
also been construed as calls for (a) localized views of language-related
processes—i.e., what people do with language in context, and (b) “prac-
tical” linguistics—e.g., something that language teachers can use in the
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 255

classroom “next Monday.” Despite recognition by a growing number

of AL scholars of the need to transcend successionist and interpre-
tivist approaches in AL, unresolved conceptual and methodological issues
persist, notably the notion of “authentic” or “real” language, which
has most often been reduced to empirical evidence of language, thus
reduced to language practice, and by extension, reduced further to spoken
language. This type of empiricism is considerably limiting because it
further exacerbates the counterproductive divisions between theoretical
and pedagogical AL scholarships. Perhaps more importantly, it moves
attention away from our collective understanding of the challenges
currently facing AL scholarship, including the view of AL problems and
issues as systems.
As stated in the Introduction, my goal in this book is mainly to look at
how complexity, emergence and causality have so far been conceptualized
in AL, and I have chosen to approach this task by looking at CDST-
oriented AL research from the stratified social ontology provided by
realism. My purpose in doing so is to encourage greater interest among
AL scholars in the development of a CDST-informed realist AL. Since
realism is less explicit with regards to social complexity and its implica-
tions for social research including AL, I leave this topic for subsequent
chapters on CDST, and instead concentrate in this chapter on four main
issues pertinent to AL research: emergence, causality, knowledge and
language, as developed within realism. Despite the facts that (a) prin-
ciples and concepts associated or in parallel with realist social ontology
have so far been sporadically used by AL scholars, (b) realist AL success-
fully integrates a broad range of existing AL theories and theories about
language within a robust social ontology and (c) realism seems to have
attracted more attention within the field of linguistics, it is worth noting
that realism simply has yet to occupy an important place within AL
scholarship. Authors including Belz (2002), Block (2006, 2007, 2015),
Bouchard (2017, 2018, 2020), Bouchard and Glasgow (2019), Corson
(1997), Jones (2003), and Jordan-Baker (2013) have approached their
analysis by adopting different elements from different strands of realism;
however, few have explicitly outlined a realist approach to AL as compre-
hensively as Carter and Sealey (2000), Sealey (2010a, 2010b, 2012,
2018), and Sealey and Carter (2004). Although not exclusively a “realist”
256 J. Bouchard

reference, the resource book by Sealey (2010b) can also be categorized

within the realist strand of AL research. This resource book is specifically
aimed at helping beginner AL scholars (particularly sociolinguists inter-
ested in exploring and using various approaches to discourse analysis),
while situating AL scholarship within the social sciences, and managing
to explain the complex and multiple links between concepts/theories and
the practical aspects of AL research. It unpacks the ontological basis upon
which to distinguish between different types of linguistic evidence, and
reiterate from a variety of angles the need for triangulation in realist AL
research. Given that the current volume is much less specific on issues
related to realist AL methodology, I encourage readers to consult this
valuable resource.
Sealey and Carter’s (2004) book Applied Linguistics as Social Science
opens with a discussion of the links between social theory and core AL
concerns, and follows with a summary of a realist view of language.
The authors explain how claims about language by AL scholars are
grounded in specific theoretical and methodological traditions, and trace
numerous conceptual problems in AL scholarship back to specific theo-
retical descriptions. They subsequently develop a realist take on intercul-
tural communication and empirically grounded AL studies, closing their
volume by suggesting methodological possibilities for as social realist
approach to AL research. Applied Linguistics as Social Science is—as is
the current volume—grounded in a critique of existing AL scholarship
as being largely driven by successionist and interpretivist traditions. The
authors argue that

research in the most ‘well-populated’ region of applied linguistics – the

teaching and learning of additional languages – has been dominated
by an approach which draws on traditional concepts such as falsi-
fiable hypotheses, the identification of dependent, independent and
confounding variables, and the measurement and quantification of salient
phenomena. We also noted developments in theoretical and method-
ological debates in applied linguistics which challenge this tradition,
and advocate alternatives, including relativist perspectives, qualitative and
ethnographic methods and social constructionist assumptions. These two
broad alternatives are often presented in open opposition to each other
[…] but there is a third category of researchers who are not wholly
convinced by either. We would locate ourselves amongst them. (p. 183)
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 257

The authors qualify the successionist and interpretivist traditions as

empiricist, thus as products of conflationary thinking, and convincingly
present the requirements for and the benefits of a realist approach to
AL. Specifically, realism is said to allow AL scholars to do their work
“with reference to the properties and powers of language and of language
users […] A central feature of this approach is to argue that the social
world consists of different kinds of things: namely human beings and
the products of their interactions, which are social relations and cultural
creations” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 1). Prefacing the Sealey and Carter
volume, Layder (2004) identifies realism’s notable advantage over other
paradigms in social theory, notably its emphasis on the links between
theory and empirical data, its acknowledgement of the discursive nature
of scientific theories, and the fundamental orientation of theories towards
objective knowledge. In short, realism can be said to offer a “third way”
by combining insight from successionist and interpretivist approaches
and by integrating them within a more robust social ontology.
As with most realist social studies or books, realism is introduced
by Sealey and Carter through a critique of conflationary thinking in
general—e.g., rendering human agency as an epiphenomenon of cultural
or structural processes (downward conflations), reducing social struc-
tures to discourse or human interaction (upward conflations), reducing
complex systems to their interaction with other complex systems (central
conflations), etc.—although it is particularly concerned with the prob-
lems posed by postmodernism, as is the current volume. At their core, all
variations of realism (see previous chapter for a short list) are concerned
with the contingent relationship between agency, structure and culture
in the ongoing production of social life. Clearly, realism is not the only
ontological perspective to be concerned with this relationship, although
it does differ in terms of its account of causality, specifically how it posi-
tions emergence as a necessary condition for explaining the causal powers
of agency, structure and culture, including an account of agency and
underlying generative mechanisms as powerful particulars.
To provide some context to the current discussion, an example of
conflationary thinking in recent AL research can be noted in some of the
core assumptions guiding extensive reading research (e.g., Renandya, &
Jacobs, 2002). One such assumption is that extensive reading, in addition
258 J. Bouchard

to fostering reading fluency, facilitates a richer linguistic environment

by emphasizing learners’ ability to guide their own learning process
largely through self-selection of learning materials, or reading materials
within their “comfort zone.” Although a reasonable proposition at first
glance, and while learner agency seems to be important in this account,
much of extensive reading research remains grounded in the problem-
atic assumption that the type of book chosen itself causes language
development to take place, thus overlooking the crucial contribution of
reflexivity and learners’ sense-making capacities. Although the point is
not to discredit extensive reading as a valuable approach (indeed, exten-
sive reading research has so far raised a number of important issues
in language learning, notably regarding learner autonomy, motivation,
comprehensible input, language competence and vocabulary learning),
at the heart of one of its underlying assumptions—the superior value
of specific reading materials over other materials—is that the reading
material itself possesses causal power (i.e., that a specific type of reading
materials has the potential to cause or trigger a particular learning
process rather than another). In contrast, a realist (particularly social
realist), non-conflationary approach to these issues would argue that,
while the reading material selected is a cultural resource with specific
constraining and enabling potentials, the reflexively endowed learner
engaged in extensive reading tasks remains the principal focus of analyt-
ical concern since (s)he has causal efficacy, not the reading material
in and of itself. After all, some language learners could certainly see
more value in selecting full-length, non-edited novels over extensive
readers to their overall language development. As an English language
learner myself, for example, reading the full-length English translation of
Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground and Neil Postman’s Technopoly
at the age of eighteen were far more enriching and consequential expe-
riences (although admittedly painful and nerve-racking at times) than
any simplified reading materials deemed to fall within my comfort zone
at that age. From this understanding of causal links, the question for
researchers then centres on the relationship between the learner (as
reflexive agent and powerful particular) and the reading material (as
cultural resource with constraining and enabling potentials), in light of
the language learner’s interests and goals. This relationship is understood
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 259

within this perspective as necessarily unfolding over time and within a

contingent social realm. Descriptions of the reading materials can be of
use in the task of explaining how this process unfolds, although only in
terms of explaining these materials as resources found within the CS, not
the SC. To account for the latter, reflexivity would need to be explained.
In much of extensive reading research, however, the focus remains largely
on the correlation between learners’ existing vocabulary knowledge and
the vocabulary range afforded by the materials, a focus which arguably
conflates human agency within the CS and bypasses reflexivity as an
important causal force in language development.
The importance of realism’s anti-determinist, anti-conflationary view-
point to AL scholarship becomes even more apparent, for example, when
important analytical categories such as motivation, task or learner need
to be conceptually developed prior to data collection and analysis. In
Chapter 2, it was argued that motivation is generally understood in
AL scholarship as an affective condition, or disposition, of individual
learners towards learning, including their capacity to persist in their
learning endeavours (Gardner, 1985). Sealey and Carter (2004: 205–
206) were also quoted as offering a definition of motivation rooted in
consideration for structural enablements and constraints upon learners’
intentions (i.e., motivation as a relational phenomenon), and so it is
worth repeating it here:

While learners’ assessment of the probability of being able to make

use of the L2 may also be involved in motivation, that probability
is associated with more macro structural factors such as the global
economy, and the likelihood that facility in this particular L2 will lead to
secure employment. ’Motivation’, then, is conceptualized not as an indi-
vidual characteristic, nor as a quantifiable variable possessed in different
measures by different learners, but as emergent from relations between
human intentionality and the social world.

As such, motivation is conceptualized from a realist perspective as

both part of learners’ reflexive engagement with the constraining and
enabling forces of structure and culture, and as a fundamentally rela-
tional phenomenon emerging from learners’ engagement with structural
260 J. Bouchard

and cultural forces, throughout the language learning process. Variations

in motivational states thus cannot be explained with reference to causal
forces internal to the learner alone, but also and rather importantly with
reference to the complex interaction between the learner and his/her
structured situatedness.
Since this chapter aims to reveal some of the important links between
social realist ontology and AL research, I begin by highlighting core prin-
ciples grounding social realist research left unaddressed in the previous
chapter, and in the process hopefully clarifying some of the “nuts and
bolts” of a realist approach to AL research.

Realism and Social Research

Within the current intellectual zeitgeist—often characterized as part
of the broader linguistic turn in philosophy, or as “anti-realist”—it is
possible for the term “realism” to conjure associations with the natural
rather than the social sciences. However, as Haig and Evers (2016) point
out, contemporary realism—largely developed out of Bhaskar’s crit-
ical naturalism, a critique of both positivism and postmodernism—has
generally been the purview of the social sciences. Although certainly not
a unified vision, a realist research agenda in the social sciences involves
“commitments to a stratified ontology, [an emphasis on causation], a
distinctive rationale for experiments and qualitative research methods,
and a transformational model of the nature of society” (Haig & Evers,
2016: 15, emphases mine).
With this in mind, realist AL research advocates the emergence of
methodological strategies out of theoretical deliberations in order to
elucidate causal relationships—i.e., explaining social phenomena in both
how they are constituted and how they affect other phenomena. In this
sense, realist AL contradicts to a large extent Grounded Theory (Glaser &
Strauss, 1967) in that it views the apprehension of empirical reality
as a profoundly conceptual task. Put differently, we cannot understand
reality without theories, concepts or even words, which are themselves
theory-laden. More importantly, “it is only through [a-priori theoretical
deliberation] that one can circumvent the limitations of [the empiricist
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 261

view of knowledge] vis-à-vis the problem of the social interaction/social

structure relation” (Layder, 1981: 37, emphases mine). Sealey and Carter
(2004: 125) talk about theories as “descriptions” of reality thus:

As propositions about reality, these descriptions can be assessed in terms

of their truth or falsity, their consistency, their evidence and so forth.
The importance of a realist ontology is critical here. It provides us with
a firm view of the reality to which our theoretical descriptions refer;
our descriptions are descriptions of something. […] one cannot theo-
rize about anything, least of all language, without implicit commitment
to a view of the world. How things seem to us, in other words, depends
both on the world and on our descriptions of it.

In other words, our research endeavours would be impossible from

a tabula rasa state of mind; instead, they depend to a large extent on
our pre-existing understandings of how the world is and works. Again,
however, theories and concepts are not mere discursive constructions:
they are emergent products of our commitment to objective knowledge
as scientists, and as such they must be subjected to the correspondence
theory of truth—the notion that the truth or falsity of a statement about
the world is judged on the basis of how it describes/explains that world.
Furthermore, methodology must be able to clarify specifically what
methods are available, their benefits and drawbacks, and of course which
ones are ultimately chosen and for what reasons. Also of importance
to this process, methodological strategies must be justified as both reli-
able with regards to their capacity to measure and reveal insight into
AL phenomena, and coherent in relation to theories, conceptualiza-
tions and beliefs about those phenomena. Depending on the research
project, and the components and resources involved in it, both induc-
tive and hypothetico-deductive approaches are deemed valuable to realist
social research: the former being best suited to evaluating the value of
competing theories, and the former of potential value to revealing the
links between hypotheses and empirical data.
Being a realist about methodology does not involve rejecting one
approach and prioritizing another outright. At the same time, more
importance is placed on qualitative analysis, not as a rejection of quan-
titative research strategies, but rather as a necessary outcome of realism’s
262 J. Bouchard

concern for the development of causal explanations. As Porpora (1987:

8) puts it,

human agents struggle to achieve their socially structured interests in the

context of social structured resources, powers, constraints, and opportu-
nities. In the process they alter the social structural relationships that bind
them. Such process can only be studied historically because of both the
uniqueness of the structural conjunctures and the intrinsic non-lawfulness
of human behavior. […] narrative accounts of such processes combine
elements of both agency and structure in ways that resolve the theoretical
opposition between them.

The idea that explanations of causality require historical, or time-

sensitive, perspectives was developed earlier in this book. Unlike statis-
tical analysis, which merely provides traces of social facts, historical
narratives have explanatory potential in that they allow researchers to
explain how phenomena emerge over time out of the complex rela-
tionship between people and specific combinations of underlying causal
mechanisms, or as an outcome of the agency–structure–culture interac-
tion. Historical narratives also allow for a productive interaction between
theory and the analysis of empirical data. Porpora (1987: 8) explains
that “a historical narrative can be explanatory by describing the oper-
ation of various generating mechanisms in a specific context and by
showing how the shape of events in that context conforms to some
general theory.” Historical narratives also afford researchers the neces-
sary tools with which to gauge society as radically open and stratified.
This is a specific understanding of historical narratives, whereby a unique
phenomenon under scrutiny is explained as the outcome of a specific
series of events unfolding through time, each with distinct and emergent
powers and properties of their own, as well as the effects of mecha-
nisms (which might not necessarily be unique to the situation). Given
that realism values historical narratives and analyses, it goes without
saying that the pre-test/post-test approach—which occupies a prominent
place in successionist AL research—is also seen from a realist angle as
inadequate to the task of explaining causal relationships.
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 263

Porpora (1987) also notes that historical narratives are well-suited to

the analysis of agency in contingent social contexts: “because the explana-
tory form of narrative is discursive rather than syllogistic, it needs not
portray the actions of individuals as deterministic outcomes of social
structural arrangements. Instead a narrative can trace the unique agen-
tial responses of individuals to those arrangements” (pp.102–103). As
we saw earlier with regards to humans’ reflexive engagement with struc-
tural and cultural constraints and enablements, a historical narrative is
appropriate to the task of clarifying the complex and stratified process of
mediation between structural and agentive forces, specifically reflexivity
as a powerful particular and as a three-step process involving (a) struc-
ture/culture shaping contextual realities, (b) human beings deliberating
upon structural and cultural constraints and enablements, because of
their concerns and goals and (c) agentive commitment and contribution
to social morphostasis and/or morphogenesis. With historical narratives,
every step along this process of mediation can be clarified empirically and
conceptually, from descriptive and explanatory angles. Elder-Vass (2010)
eloquently summarizes the realist approach to social research in terms of
a specific series of analytical steps, as a complex process of identifying

a number of structural elements that we would expect to find in any object

of scientific enquiry: entities, made up of parts (which are themselves enti-
ties), organised by particular relations between the parts and possessing
emergent properties in virtue of these relations. In order to explain these
entities, relations and properties, we need to identify the mechanisms by
which the parts and relations produce the properties, the morphogenetic
causes that bring this set of parts into this set of relations in the first place
and the morphostatic causes that keep them so. And once we are equipped
with these elements, we can go on to explain events, and sometimes event
regularities or partial regularities, by showing how the emergent proper-
ties or causal powers of the entities concerned interact to codetermine
these events. (p. 68, emphases original)

If we apply this approach to a study looking at extensive reading (to

extend the above example), analytical categories might be organized in
the following way (Table 5.1).
264 J. Bouchard

Table 5.1 A realist approach to studying extensive reading

Examples of elements in a
study Distinct and emergent
Entities and parts on extensive reading properties
Structural/cultural • Ministry of education • Provide contents and
elements policies on foreign direction for language
language education pedagogy
• Literary works • Limit range of
• Curricular structures, pedagogical
including language possibilities
learning assessment
• Formatting and
accessibility of reading
materials
Agency • Students • Capacity to learn,
• Teachers/library workers make sense of stories,
guess unknown
words, remember
information,
reformulate, share
ideas and opinions
with others
• Establish assessment
criteria and evaluate
students’
performances, suggest
interesting books,
share personal
experiences, provide
feedback and advice
Morphogenetic • Importance placed on literary appreciation and
mechanisms literacy at a particular school or language
department
• Enduring and powerful influence of teachers,
library staff and seniors
• Students’ desire to learn a foreign language and
improve reading fluency
• Actual language learning and reading fluency
development
• Teachers’ desire to enrich the language learning
experience
(continued)
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 265

Table 5.1 (continued)

Examples of elements in a
study Distinct and emergent
Entities and parts on extensive reading properties
Morphostatic • Students’ apathy towards the language learning
mechanisms experience
• Disengaged and/or ill-trained language teachers
• Lack of resources at the school or language
department

Of course, the above table merely provides a speculative arrangement

and only a limited number of possible analytical categories. In turn,
accounting for the relations between entities and the resulting events
and regularities would involve a thorough study of empirical data (e.g.,
actual graded readers, students’ performances on online graded reader
tests; engagement in reading circle activities, short summary essays, etc.),
in light of the theory-informed organization of concepts and analytical
categories in the above table. An obvious outcome of such an approach
to the study of extensive reading is rejection of the assumption that
the reading material itself has the capacity to cause particular learning
processes to take place, or that a particular range of lexical units is respon-
sible for causing development. Consequently, understanding the role of
graded readers in the development of reading fluency necessarily involves
accounts of reflexivity and other mechanisms involved. Also of capital
importance here is the idea that any arrangement involves ongoing and
nuanced analysis of the relationship between conceptual and empirical
elements.
To sum up, a realist approach to AL research aims to provide concep-
tually and empirically grounded explanatory insight. As such, it depends
on sound and robust theories of how society works, or how its various
components (including institutions, people, language, communication,
pedagogy) operate in relation to underlying generative mechanisms
in the production of both empirically observable and conceptually
decipherable social phenomena. This general principle applies also to
critical AL research, for as Layder (2006: 54) points out, “the capac-
ities of human beings to ‘act back’, to resist and transform the social
circumstances in which they find themselves, are important features
266 J. Bouchard

of any theory which links macro and micro phenomena.” As with

the complexity approach discussed in the following chapters, realism
remains an inherently relational perspective towards the world. It is
deeply relational, however, not by succumbing to relationism, but rather
by studying the complex relationship between conceptually distinct and
emergent phenomena within a contingent social realm.
Realism is also concerned principally with situated, contingent, local
processes and the generation of middle-range theories, or what works for
whom in what circumstances (Emmel et al., 2018). Again, however, crit-
ical realism places a much greater emphasis on the potential for theory
to reveal insight into the stratified nature of social phenomena including
underlying causal mechanisms. Following Popper (1972), the poten-
tial for social change is not inherent to social objects or phenomena,
but rather inherent to the situation. Stated differently, critical poten-
tials are not exclusive to people: they are also emergent outcomes of
the relationship between people and the contingent social world in
which they operate. As such, a fundamental task in critical realist
AL research involves clarifying how situated agents (language learners,
teachers, language programme designers, policymakers, etc.) are differ-
ently resourced and differently constrained and enabled in their choices,
as a result of various structural and cultural factors including their
position along the socio-economic ladder (Pawson & Tilley, 1997).
In the next section, I revisit the realist view of emergence—a notion
which grounds realism’s anti-conflationary, anti-deterministic stance—in
relation to AL research.

Emergence in Realist AL
Realist AL can be described broadly as a type of study principally
concerned with language and language-related phenomena, themselves
seen as emergent outcomes of the antecedent, complex and enduring
interaction between agency, culture and structure as “layers” of the social
realm with distinct properties and powers of their own. Sealey and Carter
(2004) identify three broad areas of interest for AL research: language,
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 267

people’s discourses and practices, and structured social contexts within

which language-related practices take place.
Realism offers a unique approach to—and places a marked emphasis
on—emergence as a relational process and as a prerequisite for causality.
According to Elder-Vass (2010: 5), “the value of the concept of emer-
gence lies in its potential to explain how an entity can have a causal
impact on the world in its own right: a causal impact that is not just
the sum of the impacts its parts would have if they were not organ-
ised into this kind of whole.” Stated differently and with regards to
human agency as powerful particular, a realist viewpoint holds that a
person can potentially condition context and subsequent social interac-
tion because (s)he has emergent properties and powers—e.g., the ability
to speak, remember, learn, reconfigure his/her thought process, act.—
which are not reducible to his/her component parts (e.g., brain, mouth,
eyes, neurological system, etc.) nor to his/her context (e.g., classroom,
teacher instruction, textbook, school, etc.).
In the previous chapter I offered a few examples of emergent processes
including one which pertained to language learning, pointing out that
mental properties emerge from chemical and biological processes in the
brain, gaining distinct properties and powers over time which cannot be
explained by these constituting elements (ideas, beliefs, emotions, etc.). I
also mentioned that emergent mental properties can reciprocally impact
the physical elements in the brain. In parallel, Carter and Sealey (2000:
8, emphases original) provide the example of a written text to explain
emergence as it relates specifically to language and related phenomena:

A linguistic artefact in the form of a written text is emergent from the

engagement of authorial consciousness with language, but as a text it is
irreducible to either of these elements and possesses properties and powers
which are partially autonomous of them and capable of exerting influence
in their own right (the startling career of The Satanic Verses and its dire
consequences for its author provide a compelling example).

Acknowledging some of the parallels between realism and CDST, and

describing language as (1) emergent in the human species, (2) emergent
268 J. Bouchard

in individual human beings and (3) a cultural emergent property, Sealey

and Carter (2004: 77) further state that

the concepts of emergence and complexity are crucial to explaining

social action, including social actors’ use of language […] explanations of
socially situated language use entail a recognition of natural phenomena,
such as the biological endowment of human beings with particular
kinds of vocal, aural and visual apparatus and particular kinds of brains,
and that speakers’ language use is partly a product of various kinds of
interaction between nature and culture.

Below, I revisit this stratified, emergentist view of language within

realism. Suffice to say at this point that emergence is a crucial concep-
tual reality to consider in the development of a stratified approach to
AL research, notably because it helps researchers clarify important issues
regarding “real” language, authenticity, and more importantly causality,
an issue which I revisit in relation to AL research in the following section.

Causality in Realist AL
The issue of causality is certainly not germane to realism or AL, nor is
realism the only paradigm which addresses this issue explicitly, for essen-
tially all social sciences are necessarily involved in the search for causality
(Kincaid, 2012). As Sealey and Carter (2004: 86) point out with regards
to the learning-teaching relationship within AL, “the problem of how
learners can best be helped to make progress in the language they are
learning entails an interest in how pedagogy and outcomes are related.”
This relationship is, at its core, causal. This makes the rejection of the
very idea of causality by many AL scholars within the postmodernist
strand more or less an abdication of one of social scientists’ core responsi-
bilities: to explain why things are this way and not another. Instead, the
previous chapter has shown that models of causality applicable to the
study of social phenomena are not only available in the literature (for a
discussion of the various approaches to causality and causal modelling
in the social sciences, see Russo (2009)), they are necessary to explain
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 269

the kinds of causal interactions between structure and agency, and the
influence of underlying causal mechanisms on the production of social
life. Since AL scholars cannot sidestep this core responsibility, they there-
fore need an approach, or a combination of approaches, which allow
them to “think about the social world as a complexly stratified open
system where explanation takes the form of modelling causal mecha-
nisms and testing models empirically” (López & Potter, 2001: 19). In
order to develop and apply such an approach to AL problems, we first
need to dispense with (a) the interpretivist rejection of causality as the
product of modernist or dichotomous thinking, and (b) the determin-
istic/hydraulic model of causality which characterizes successionist views.
Instead, we must look at how causality generally unfolds in specific AL
contexts, as a result of the structure–agency interaction, influenced by
underlying causal mechanisms, over time and for specific purposes.
As with CDST, realism generally sees causality in complexity terms—
i.e., as complex causality—which presents the very process of causality
not as direct singular force of one object upon another, but rather in
terms of tendencies and/or mechanisms (Maxwell, 2012). As Elder-Vass
(2012: 16, emphasis original) explains,

because what happens on any given occasion is never completely deter-

mined by a single causal power, causal powers do not produce exception-
less empirical regularities. Instead, they operate as tendencies. Any given
causal power has a tendency to produce a certain sort of outcome but
these tendencies may be frustrated when causal powers with conflicting
tendencies interact with them.

Within realism, language learning (one of the core concerns in AL

research) can be conceptualized as a process emerging out of a complex
combination of variables, elements and underlying causal mechanisms
situated at different levels—structural, cultural and/or agentive—inter-
acting in complex ways in specific contexts and moments. This stratified,
emergentist view of variables, elements and underlying causal mecha-
nisms, along with models for complex and contingent causality, can
also (and perhaps even more explicitly) be applied to the study of
270 J. Bouchard

language policy and planning. Monaghan and Boaz (2018: 183) iden-
tify a core ontological assumption guiding realist AL research: “Realist
advice eschews proclamations that declare programmes to work, precisely
because programmes themselves have no causal powers. Instead they
offer recipients a range of resources on which to act or not.” In similar
vein, Cartwright (2012: 299) argues that showing that a programme or
policy worked within a specific population “is a long way from estab-
lishing that it will work in a particular target, let alone that it works in
general.” The main reason, as we saw previously, is that neither structure
nor agency act in deterministic fashion, largely because of the reality of
human reflexivity which acts as a sort of “buffer zone” between agency
and structure.
In my view, the statement by Monaghan and Boaz (2018) in the
previous paragraph is also pertinent to the study of language teaching
approaches, materials or even variables such as learner characteristics
(e.g., first language, motivation, anxiety, beliefs about language learning):
while potentially causally relevant, these factors commonly studied in AL
research do not directly cause (or impede) learning. Likewise, a language
teaching method, set of methods or methodological perspective (e.g.,
grammar translation, communicative language teaching) can be deemed
as causally meaningful to a specific learning outcome, although they
cannot independently explain why a language learner succeeds or fails at
his/her task. As Westhorp (2018) points out, and as suggested in Table
5.1, teaching approaches provide a range of resources for learners to act in
certain ways and not others. In other words, teaching “works” for some
people—i.e., can trigger learning—in certain circumstances, at certain
times, and for specific purposes. Stated differently, these phenomena
can be causally efficacious when they are combined with other forces
at particular points in time, in specific contexts, for specific purposes. In
this sense, what is needed in AL is a perspective which allows researchers
to account for complex and contingent causality. In this sense, the task of
realist AL scholars is to explain the different conditions, mechanisms and
causal links at play, a task which as we saw in previous chapters becomes
possible largely with the use of theory informed by empirical evidence.
From this conceptual basis, we can deduce that realist AL—as with
CDST-informed AL for that matter—is principally focused on the
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 271

“case,” specifically the complex succession of causal events potentially

binding teaching to learning in contexts, for example, so as to hope-
fully produce conceptual insight of relevance to other cases. Knowledge
of the local is necessary also in large part because it can potentially
lead to knowledge and insight about both individual and larger groups
of learners. AL scholars are, by the very nature of their work, deeply
invested in both descriptive and explanatory tasks not because they want
to help one or two people learn languages more effectively, but precisely
because they want to understand how language-related phenomena such
as language learning and teaching can be improved overall, for the
empowerment of learners everywhere and the betterment of the human
condition. Stated differently, AL research outcomes should, in principle,
be generalizable in some form or another. If they are not, their use to
language practitioners becomes considerably limited. At the same time,
causal models are not necessarily applicable uniformly to all learning and
teaching situations, which means that the types of causal claims made
with regards to a specific case must be reformulated and adjusted to
other cases, in light of new empirical evidence. Again, underlying causal
mechanisms can be understood in broad conceptual terms, but they are
also specific to the case, which means that their potential causal effects
cannot be fully predicted. As Cartwright (2012) argues, while cases can
indeed share causal structures, asserting these similarities requires strong
evidence of a varied kind. Sealey and Carter (2004: 88–89) make a
similar argument thus: “Research of this type will not discover ‘universal
laws’, because the actualization of the properties and powers of the
objects in the world is context-dependent, but it will aim to generalize
beyond the individual case of the single ethnographic study, by drawing
on particular conceptualizations of propensity and probability.” As such,
the notion of generalizability within realist AL is very much a conceptual
issue of relevance to the case.
As established previously, a stratified realist view necessarily considers
the relationship between structure, culture and human agency as conse-
quential to causal explanation. Sealey and Carter (2004: 87) explain that
a realist approach to causality is rooted in
272 J. Bouchard

a belief that the world consists of phenomena – including human beings

and social structures – which have distinctive properties and powers.
These objects exist independently of our understandings of them […]
It is the combination of the powers and properties of human beings and
social structures which generates the experienced empirical world.

The realist approach therefore goes beyond both interpretivist and

successionist views of causality by focusing on causal mechanisms to
produce causal explanations. It is based on understanding that regu-
larity in the data can be explained with reference to specific mechanisms.
Elder-Vass (2012: 17, emphasis original) explains causal mechanisms as
inherently relational conceptual entities which

depend on the composition and structure of the entities concerned. To

be more precise, they depend upon (i) the set of parts; (ii) the powers of
those parts; and (iii) the set of relations between these parts that are char-
acteristic (and definitive) of entities of this type. When they depend not
just on the parts of the entity possessing them, but also on the relations
between those parts that only obtain when they make up a whole of this
type, these powers are emergent properties of the things possessing them.

In this way, Elder-Vass (2012) further distinguishes between realism

and more radical constructionist approaches by assigning central impor-
tance to the causal powers of culture and concepts—specifically the
causal mechanisms at play—when determining whether these actually
matter to the study of specific social phenomena:

Constructionist arguments generally assign key roles in the process of

construction to one or more of: culture, language, discourse, and knowl-
edge. For a realist, if these are significant then it is because they have a
causal effect, and the attribution of causal significance to these norma-
tively based phenomena demands an investigation into their ontological
structures. To be more precise, we must identify the mechanisms by virtue
of which they can be causally effective (p.8, emphasis original).
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 273

Applying this view to research in sociolinguistics, for example, is

Meyerhoff (2001) who lists four possible underlying mechanisms—
as they relate to language users as social agents—for the emergence
of language variation: “To date, the motivations for interlocutors that
have been proposed in sociolinguistics might be summarised in four
ways: Accrue social capital; Avoid or minimize risk; Maximize fit with
others; Maintain individual distinctiveness.” The realist understanding
of causality outlined thus far and in the previous chapter also includes
consideration for variables as bearing relevance to causal accounts.
Looking at the interaction between variables and second language
learning, for example, Lightbown and Spada (2001: 42) list some
variables of consequence: intelligence, aptitude, personality and moti-
vational characteristics, learner preferences and age. However, because
realism rejects the successionist model, these variables are not under-
stood as independently affecting learning; although they possess distinct
and emergent properties of their own, they remain profoundly contex-
tualized social phenomena. To understand how variables interact in
complex ways to influence the phenomena under scrutiny, we need
causal models. Elder-Vass (2012: 18–19) also recommends combining
retroduction—first identifying the causal powers followed by explaining
the mechanisms behind them—and retrodiction—first identifying the
event, then explaining the powers which led to this event and their
interaction. Reinforced through conceptual linkages between theory,
underlying mechanisms and empirical data, the author argues that a
retroduction/retrodiction combination allows researchers to avoid confla-
tionary thinking characteristic of both successionist and interpretivist
accounts of causality.

Truth, Knowledge and Education in Realist AL

Although multiple often diverging theories of education can be found
in the literature, most agree with the principle that education should
empower both individual and groups of learners to face a complex
world. This process of empowerment necessarily involves presenting a
274 J. Bouchard

clear, rational, consistent and objective view of social reality, its chal-
lenges, etc., a project which also necessarily involves the pursuit of truth
as constructed (epistemology) on the one hand, and truth as oriented
towards the discovery of objective reality (ontology) on the other. From
this angle, realist AL thus considers the correspondence theory of truth as
essential to both research and pedagogy. Researching AL phenomena also
as educational realities means looking at how truth and the knowledge of
it are related, and given the moral (because inherently critical ) nature of
education, how curriculum organization are linked to broader social real-
ities including ideologies, market pressures and the unequal distribution
of power and resources within society. This section extends the previous
discussion on the realist view of emergence and causality by looking at
the issues of truth and knowledge from a realist angle. This discussion
bears direct relevance to AL scholarship in general, although particularly
the type of research invested in the teaching and learning of languages
as well as in issues of identity, ideology and social equality in relation to
language and its social uses.
To begin with, while realism accepts the idea that reality and our
understandings of it are related, they are never understood as the same
thing or as epiphenomena of each other. This means that a realist
perspective is grounded in recognition of (a) a reality outside people’s
understanding of it, and (b) people’s understandings of that reality as
inherently about that reality. These principles provide the grounds for the
correspondence theory of truth, further demarcating realism from anti-
realist positions such as certain strands of positivism and anti-positivism,
radical constructivism and postmodernism, which reduce social reality
to discursive constructions (Mackenzie, 2011). The realist view of truth
is summarized by Mackenzie (2011: 542, emphasis original) with the
argument that

To say of a statement that it is true is to endorse it. It is to do just what one

does when one asserts the statement. In either case, if one subsequently
becomes convinced that the statement is not true, one must withdraw
one’s endorsement. Any evidence relevant to the content of the statement
is relevant to the claim.
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 275

Furthermore, a realist view of truth—and the knowledge of it—is

grounded in a study of empirical evidence through conceptual engage-
ment, or theorization, which is a social activity inherently oriented
towards the description and explanation of objective reality. As Williams
(2002, cited in Maton & Moore, 2010) puts it, “some knowledge claims
can be considered more epistemologically powerful than others. That
is not to say such knowledge is unchanging, eternal Truth, but rather
there are rational grounds for comparing the relative merits of knowl-
edge claims in terms of their explanatory power.” In other words, while
we can never access truth directly or produce infallible truth claims, we
can nevertheless produce intelligible, reasonable, more or less rational
and non-arbitrary—and quite importantly, empirically justifiable—state-
ments about things possessing specific characteristics and powers. In this
way, realism rejects the conflationary approaches of both successionist
and interpretivist perspectives, while also rejecting (a) the modernist
assumption about an ultimate truth waiting to be found, as well as (b)
the postmodernist notion of truth as either justified through consensus
and/or its practical uses.
According to Elder-Vass (2012), the more radical social construc-
tionist approaches can be identified as problematic from a realist angle if
we consider, for example, three of their core assumptions about language
as (1) the central force in shaping our views of the world (rather than
language both being about the world and shaping certain aspects of the
world), (2) the core mechanism in the creation of human understand-
ings of the world (rather than human perception of that world) and (3)
determining the meanings we give to linguistic units (not necessarily by
making references to the world but rather through particular forging of
power relationships within that world). In short, our knowledges of social
reality are, from a radical social constructionist angle, mere knowledge
claims, themselves discursive products resulting from unequal power rela-
tionships. As Elder-Vass (2012: 78, emphasis original) warns, this sort of
argument

leads to strong epistemic relativism: We must become relativists about all

knowledge claims, because if our very concepts are the product of power
and can only be altered by the operation of competing powers, there can
276 J. Bouchard

be no objective basis on which to judge that any one claim about the
world is better founded than any other.

In contrast, the author stresses that “all social entities are ulti-
mately composed of material parts (primarily people) […] if we are to
understand their causal powers we must ultimately demonstrate their
rootedness in the material” (Elder-Vass, 2012: 20, emphasis original). To
sum up, the realist view of truth and knowledge is rooted in acceptance of
the correspondence theory of truth on the one hand, and acknowledge-
ment of the need to clarify how theories relate to other theories on the
other. Realism, in this sense, sees the importance of grounding theories
in empirical facts, while not succumbing to empiricism. With regards to
interpretivist assumptions about the socially constructed nature of reality,
and the related overemphasis on local realities, realism would suggest that
there is no particularly convincing reason why local knowledge should
be less (or more) fallible than knowledge about larger populations or
about the more abstract, transitive aspects of social life. Also important
to underline: when subjectivists argue that local knowledge is “more real”
or “more useful” to educational practice because it comes from direct
access to and analysis of empirical data, for example, they are not actu-
ally being subjectivists: rather, they are also providing a description of
how the world “actually is.” Indeed, our ability to deem things as more
useful and/or “more real” than others depends on consideration for the
correspondence theory of truth, thus on our commitment to objective
knowledge.
At the same time, to say that a statement is about objective reality is
not a denial of its social/cultural nature. Specific to the context of educa-
tion, objective statements (as information to be learned, for example)
undergo multiple complex ideological reformulations, or “pedagogiza-
tion,” from policy to classroom practice. In discussing Bernstein’s (1990)
notion of pedagogical device, Maton (2013) identifies an important
feature of the realist understanding of the relationship between the fields
of knowledge production and pedagogy, stating that the latter “is a prin-
ciple for appropriating other discourses from the field of production and
subordinating them to a different principle of organization and relation –
they are pedagogized” (p. 48). Within educational contexts, pedagogized
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 277

knowledge becomes to some extent an ideological site where the arbi-

trary and the non-arbitrary are reproduced and transformed through the
accomplishment of educational projects.
However, acknowledgement of ideology should not lead to a denial
of objectivity. Indeed, educational discourse being pedagogized not only
serves specific purposes, it interacts with objective reality in dialec-
tical fashion, with theory guiding practice and practice testing theory
(Huckle, 2004). This interaction is further facilitated through ongoing
commitment to (a) objective knowledge and the correspondence theory
of truth, and (b) a particular type of educational discourse emphasizing
communication, shared agency and discovery of knowledge. Huckle
(2004: 39) describes a critical realist approach to education as seeking
to

Overcome the epistemic fallacy that suggests that reality is simply what
experience or experiment tells us it is. It claims that the world cannot be
changed rationally unless it is interpreted adequately. Such interpretation
requires teachers to engage dialectically with students to:

• probe experience;
• liberate knowledge of deeper realities (structures, processes and
events);
• reveal those structures and processes that produce and reproduce
powerful interests that prevent people from realising their potential;
• expose knowledge or ideology that sustains such interests; and
• reflect and act on alternative structures, processes and knowledge
which allow a greater degree of self-determination and democracy.

Together, these educational principles explain the core of realism’s

approach to truth, knowledge and education, issues of crucial impor-
tance to AL research, especially its strand concerned with elucidating
language learning and teaching, language learning programmes and
broader educational programmes in schools, as well as phenomena
linking language with identity, ideology and social equality. In the next
section, I attempt to further link realism and AL by summarizing a realist
278 J. Bouchard

view of language based on realist principles and the various commentaries

about language made in the book thus far.

Language in Realist AL
A realist approach to AL research is rooted in an emergentist, non-
conflationary conceptualization of language, which begins by identifying
language as an emergent product of the complex interaction between
structure, culture and agency. In Bouchard (2018), I describe language as
a stratified entity composed of (a) language as a relatively rule-governed
cultural emergent resource, and (b) language as situated, contingent
practice of meaning sharing. Language is seen from this perspective
as emergent in that it is more than a particular set of rules and lexi-
cogrammatical elements, which means that it cannot be reduced to these
rules and components, nor can it be reduced to the situated interac-
tions which have largely contributed to the emergence of these rules
and conventions over time. The more fixed elements of language consti-
tute “a cultural resource manifesting itself in the form of constraints
and enablements, an abstract set of tools and rules used to represent
objects and processes, part of complex and situated semiotic processes,
and an important element in the emergence of discourse and practice”
(Bouchard, 2018: 9). To be clear, the “more fixed elements of language”
are not crystallized “natural” elements of language, for languages remain
human creations which undergo constant changes over the years. At the
same time, these elements are “more fixed” than other elements such
as fashionable expressions suddenly emerging in teenager discourse at
one time in one region of the world and disappearing shortly after-
wards, or the kind of language we hear every day on the street, for
example. This is because, as antecedent elements of the CS, they are
recognized by language users as “more fixed” and therefore as possessing
intransitive, more systemic features. If we consider the vast industry
devoted to English proficiency testing, for example, we can recognize
that test-takers are involved in activities which rely on a stratified view of
language—i.e., recognition by test-takers at some level that language and
related phenomena such as standardization and variability are distinct
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 279

and emergent products of the structure–agency relationship, and that

they need to be learned in order to pass the test. Mackenzie (1998:
61) also acknowledges this stratified layering of language as conceptually
important when making the point that “the structure of verb tenses in
English is a human construction but not alterable by individual effort.”
In other words, while rules change over time, they change not because
of one person’s desire that they do but rather as the outcome of the
complex structure–culture–agency relationship over rather long periods
of time. It is important to recognize the ontological properties of this
particular stratum of language, since it helps us explain why speakers or
writers (in any language) can judge the value and correctness of specific
language forms, and do not reinvent language from scratch whenever
they communicate; instead, they communicate ideas by drawing in large
part from an antecedent and relatively enduring set of linguistic and
semiotic resources which both constrains and enables their communica-
tive endeavours. This particular aspect of the structure–culture–agency
relationship endows both language and human communication with
certain systemic properties. Indeed, in addition to grammar books and
dictionaries which map out much of the content and extent of languages
as CS resources, corpus analysis has been very helpful in revealing the
systemic features of situated language use, or language within the SC.
The expression “drawing from” here does not mean merely reproducing
language as a CS resource: it means taking information and inspiration
from

a cultural (not a material) emergent property, not detachable from human

beings but emergent from their biological attributes and their practical
engagement with the world. Access to linguistic resources is conditioned
by material relations but language, as emergent, has a degree of autonomy
both from individual speakers and from material relations. (Sealey &
Carter, 2004: 32)

The conceptual distinction between the relatively rule-governed

aspects of language on the one hand and language as a social practice on
the other also means that knowledge of lexicogrammatical units and rules
does not determine how language learners will actually use the language
280 J. Bouchard

in situ. This conceptual distinction is not simply the outcome of an ideo-

logical exercise by linguists unconcerned with empirical evidence, but
rather “an important step in human beings’ ongoing quest to make sense
of their world and their place in it” (Bouchard, 2018: 9). This view is
aligned with that of Layder (1997: 30), who points out that a system
view of language and a situated and fluid view of it are not dichotomous
or mutually exclusive:

Language is also a reservoir of ready-made meanings as well as a stock

of materials (words, grammatical rules and syntactic rules) out of which
an infinite supply of newly minted meanings and interpretations may
emerge. The existence of such resources means that a high degree of
flexibility and negotiation can take place in human interaction.

To further clarify the notion of language possessing autonomous prop-

erties, Popper’s (1972) distinction between three categories of reality,
or “worlds,” is helpful in distinguishing between different aspects of
language as a stratified social phenomenon, thus reinforcing the realist
view of language. According to Popper, World 1 includes physical events
and objects such as biological entities; World 2 includes the realm of
individual mental processes (what the phenomenologists would be most
concerned with); and finally World 3 is the realm of abstractions, and
corresponds to contemporary human knowledge and cultures. According
to realist principles, Worlds 1, 2 and 3 are causally related to each other,
both affected by and affecting processes in other Worlds. What matters
for a realist view of language is that World 3 is partially autonomous,
detached from situated interaction. For example, the theories we have
about language, its learning and its real-world uses are part of World 3
and can reinforce specific views held by teachers and learners regarding
language and how it should be learned (realities located within World 2).
Sealey and Carter (2004: 37) explain Popper’s three worlds concept and
its relevance to the realist view of language thus:

The signs and symbols that constitute language enable the development
of a fund of common meanings, ideas and understandings, or what we
refer to, following Popper (1972), as the ’World 3’ of the products of
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 281

human consciousness. In this schema, ’World l’ is the physical world,

’World 2’ is the subjective experiences emerging from the engagement
of human consciousness with World 1, and World 3 is the realm of the
externalized products of the engagement of human consciousness with
the world beyond itself. World 3 is pre-eminently symbolic.

This ontological perspective contradicts constructionist accounts

which generally present language not as a resource found, for example,
in dictionaries and grammar books, but instead as whatever people say
or write in context. As argued earlier in this book, this overemphasis
on the local offers an ontologically flattened view of language because it
disregards its World 3 features, or as Sealey and Carter (2004: 119) put
it, “its relations of coherence and logicality, its grammatical, syntactical
and lexical patterns and relations.” The constructivist view, in this sense,
complicates attempts to account for how language makes sense to people
in the first place, and by extension how languages change over long
periods of time, because constructivism’s inherent empiricism cancels
its ability to explain specifically what is being understood or changed,
or even why. Furthermore, the constructivist view of language cannot
explain, for example, the study of extinct languages, and is somewhat
antithetical to philological explorations of the structure and historical
development of a language or languages, for example. As Sealey and
Carter (2004: 23) point out with regards to the constructivist view of
language,

The corollary of their claim would seem to be that the structures of

languages are the effect of members’ beliefs about languages, of contem-
porary action and perception. It then becomes difficult, on both counts,
to explore the interplay of language with agency, with the efforts of people
to modify or maintain some aspect of social reality.

From a realist ontology, there is no doubt that linguistic and cultural

processes are principally fluid and most often instantiated through agen-
tive performances or actions. In this sense, realism can also agree with
a postmodernist perspective, given its concern for complexity, differ-
ence, relationship, and reflexivity in social research. At the same time,
and in sharp contrast with other postmodernist perspectives, realism
282 J. Bouchard

is characterized by ontological depth-ness, and maintains its commit-

ment to objective knowledge. While The Douglas Fir Group (2016:
19) is somewhat justified in arguing that, in today’s intensely globalized
world, “language use and learning are seen as emergent, dynamic, unpre-
dictable, open ended, and intersubjectively negotiated,” it is crucial to
add that there remains some degree of predictability and stability here,
namely the fact that language learners and users are drawing from an
antecedent and relatively enduring shared resource—i.e., language as a
World 3 entity—and that even in today’s intensely globalized world situ-
ated intersubjective negotiations of meaning are both constrained and
enabled by language—and languages—as CS resource, and of course by
the ineherent need people have to understand each other. After all, the
statement that situated language use is emergent must inevitably be based
on awareness of language also as a World 3 entity, thus on awareness of
language as a stratified social phenomenon equipped with properties and
powers beyond situated interaction.
A realist view of language also distinguishes language from discourse.
Elder-Vass (2012: 11, emphases original) explains that language “pro-
vides us with the tools to express meaning and therefore shapes how we
may do so, whereas discourse, at least as Foucault uses the term, relates to
the regulation of the content of what we say.” A realist view of language
also adopts the Saussurean distinction between langue and parole (see
Chapter 3 for discussion). As Elder-Vass (2012: 88) puts it,

we can relate the langue/ parole distinction to the realist account of causa-
tion. On the one hand, langue may be seen as a collection of causal
mechanisms, or at least as the structures that underpin those mechanisms.
Each sign, as a psychological phenomenon, is a mental property of the
individual concerned, and its structure, in combination with the indi-
vidual’s generalised language processing capacities, gives the individual
the capacity, or we might say the power, to associate a specific concept
with a specific signifier-set.

The langue/parole distinction, maintained in realism, has been crit-

icized notably by poststructuralists to justify the view that signs are
arbitrary, and the corollary view that other signs can also emerge as
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 283

salient in the signifier-signified relationship. However, this argument

is rather incomplete. Considering, for example, that I am bound by
the conventions of academic discourse when writing this book, what
poststructuralists often miss is explanation for the fact that individual
communicators cannot choose freely which signifier to use. And this is
also precisely where Saussure’s theory fails: it does not explain how langue
becomes parole, or how agency as well as social, cultural, political and
historical factors together act as powerful causal forces in the reality of
language use.
The existence of linguistic and communicative conventions, and how
they relate to broader socio-economic realities, reveal the stratified nature
of language on the one hand, and explains why language-as-resource,
when used and interpreted in communicative events at the level of prac-
tice, becomes one of many factors of causal importance. As Elder-Vass
(2012: 116, emphases original) explains,

When we turn from langue to parole, the indeterminacy of the meaning

of the sign is resolved as a normal product of the linguistic process.
Langue provides us with a toolkit of flexible signs, whose very flexibility
depends on their meaning being underdetermined. Parole makes use of
these linguistic resources, combining them with contextual features to
provide specific meaning.

The realist view of language, which in part builds upon the Saus-
surean langue-parole distinction, thus affords antecedent properties to
language as both a social construction and as possessing emergent sui
generis properties (Lass, 1980), subjected to morphogenetic processes, as
do other social and cultural realities, with human agency and underlying
generative mechanisms as causally efficacious forces.
The emergentist view of language provided by realism is, in my
view, necessary to progress in AL research, especially in sociolinguistics,
because it raises important questions about “real” language. The notion
of “real” language, often perceived in common-sensical terms yet rarely
conceptually unpacked by AL scholars, inevitably brings attention to the
stratified nature of language, and from a critical angle, provides fertile
grounds to explore the sociological roots of linguistic preference. Of
284 J. Bouchard

course, interest in the notion of “real” language is not germane to realism.

Hymes (1974) and Firth and Wagner (1997) famously brought atten-
tion to this notion in their calls for a new kind of linguistics concerned
with real-world language experiences. Sealey and Carter (2004: 65) iden-
tify three different claims about “real” language in AL scholarship: (1)
as empirically accessible evidence of language, (2) as structured, thus
as possessing antecedent properties existing beyond the communicative
act, thus requiring a distinction between form and meaning and (3) as
emergent product of situated interaction, yet not reducible to such inter-
action, the structure and properties of which can arguably be revealed
through extensive corpus-based research.
However, consensus regarding “real” language among AL scholars
has, over time, concentrated attention on (a) localized manifestations
of language-related processes—i.e., what people do with language in
context, how they construct identities, etc., and most predominantly (b)
“practical” linguistics—i.e., pedagogical strategies for teaching languages.
Although yielding valuable insight into languages and language-related
processes, the notion of the “real” in AL research has, in other words,
largely been reduced to language as an empirical phenomenon—i.e.,
language practice—thus overlooking claims (2) and (3) above by Sealey
and Carter. From that basis, a division between pedagogical and theo-
retical AL unfortunately emerged, gradually leading to a blurring of the
necessary links between theory and practice in AL.
For realist AL, “real” language refers to an underlying mechanism (or
mechanisms) allowing language users to produce and perceive language
in all its forms, or again the emergent properties of language as CS
resource which allow situated interaction within the SC (Sealey & Carter,
2004). Language is “actual” in the sense of all the language-related
phenomena which do happen (as opposed to those which could happen
under different circumstances but do not—e.g., all the dialects and vari-
eties of a language currently existing in the world). Finally, language is
“empirical” in the form of observable language-related behaviours and
phenomena. This laminated viewpoint allows for a view of language as
an emergent outcome of the structure-culture-agency relationship, emer-
gent because it cannot be fully explained through a study of situated
communication, nor can it be explained fully through a study of its
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 285

systemic features and internal structuring of symbols alone. Language

is also emergent in the sense that, while it is partly about the material
world, it retains properties that are distinct from it. As a CS resource
with antecedent and relatively enduring properties, language also enables
and constrains communication and people’s actions. In turn, language
is also restrained by how the world is. Ultimately, however, empirical
evidence of language shows the crucial role of human agency in deter-
mining precisely how language resources are deployed, as a result of the
interaction between people and context. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 83)
remind us,

It is human beings – and not languages – which do things in the social

world. In seeking to accomplish things in the world, social actors must
use language. Whenever they do so, however, there is an engagement
with the linguistic resources available or accessible to them. Through this
engagement they experience these resources in enabling and constraining
ways.

In this way, we can assume the existence of a feedback process between

human agents, the language they use and the objective reality they
interact with and are part of. Looking at language through a realist lens
allows us to move beyond the ontologically flatted view of the “real”
as either “empirical” (e.g., how A uses language x to express identities
1, 2 and 3) or as “useful” (e.g., AL research must lead to improvement
in classroom practice), to ask more critically engaged and sociologically
relevant questions about issues in AL research such as What is the role of
language in language education? Should language teachers use the target
language exclusively? How does language education fit within a broader
educational curriculum, agenda, policy or philosophy? How can language
teachers relate what goes on in their classrooms with political, cultural,
economic and social realities affecting the lives of their students?
286 J. Bouchard

Realist AL Research
As mentioned at the onset of this chapter, much of realist social research
is grounded in a critique of conflationary thinking. As such, in a realist
AL research project the following tasks become necessary to reveal the
stratified nature of the phenomena under investigation: (a) explaining
both conceptually and through the study of empirical data the relational
nature of phenomena, including language and its users, and (b) differen-
tiating between contingent empirical phenomena and phenomena which
are a necessary outcome of underlying generative relations and mecha-
nisms. The distinction between contingent and necessary mechanisms
and outcomes is important with regards to emergent properties, because
in order to explain emergence we must demonstrate that the relations
which bind the parts and produce emergent outcomes are necessary
rather than contingent. This brings us back to Elder-Vass’s (2010)
distinction between temporal and synchronic emergence discussed in the
previous chapter.
The necessary/contingent distinction is also important when eluci-
dating causal links. For example, studying the impact of a language
policy on particular (or situated) language practices, or the impact
of a new curriculum on language learning, require a distinction
between contingent outcomes which emerge in specific contexts at a
specific period of time, involving certain people, under specific contin-
gencies on the one hand (e.g., diverging effects of monolingualism
within language maintenance policies around the world), and necessary
outcomes which must exist in order for other things to happen (e.g.,
a teacher needing certification to implement a government-approved
school-wide curriculum, based on localized language-in-education poli-
cies). In parallel with a CDST approach to AL research, Sealey and
Carter (2004: 196–197) also emphasize the need to recognize this
distinction:

The world of social interaction is an emergent, complex, densely symbolic

world, where relations themselves, not isolable variables, are constitutive
of ‘what works’. Applied researchers may feel much better equipped to
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 287

address the policy-makers’ concern with ’what works’, if the question can
be reformulated as ’what works for whom in what circumstances?’

To answer the last question, the realist thinkers Pawson and Tilley
(1997) recommend scholars to consider people as reflexively endowed
yet differently resourced powerful particulars, who over time make
constrained choices within a contingent social realm, in light of their
goals and aspirations. From this basis, and in order to transcend succes-
sionist and interpretivist influences within AL, Sealey and Carter recom-
mend AL scholars to, in part, invest more energy and time ensuring that
all analytical categories and variables in a study are theoretically unpacked
in adequate fashion—i.e., in terms of their distinct and emergent prop-
erties and powers—before concentrating on the technical aspects of
data gathering instruments (which usually involves tasks such as devel-
oping questionnaires based on a specific sample size, and maintaining
consistency and transparency during interviews). This advice follows
long-established research traditions: theory should in principle lead to
methodology and not the other way around—i.e., the selection of
theories which justify already selected methods.
Although realism (and CDST as well) does not prescribe specific sets
of methods, methodological questions can, in part, be approached from
a realist perspective by answering the following questions:

1. What type(s) of language/discourses are under focus—language prac-

tices in the classroom or in the community? textbooks? public
discourse about language education? language policies? academic
discourse about language education?
2. Which structural, cultural, institutional realities influence the type(s)
of language/discourses under focus, and how does this influence
unfold?
3. How do human agents in the study negotiate, mediate, resist, etc.
these influences in the pursuit of their goals?
4. What are the effects of this interaction between agency, culture
and structure? Is it leading to the reproduction or transformation
of empirically observable language practices? What other emergent
language practices can be observed?
288 J. Bouchard

5. From the findings, what can be said about subsequent structure–

culture–agency interactions?

As is hopefully becoming more obvious to readers, answers to

these questions necessitate a balance between conceptual and empir-
ical work. They also require a multidisciplinary approach to studying
how phenomena unfold within and across different strata of the social
realm. The study of each level via the application of multiple research
approaches should, in principle, reveal much of the complexity discussed
by CDST adherents (as discussed in the following chapters). Unfortu-
nately, yet quite understandably, theoretical, methodological, financial
and logistical complications can significantly impede this sort of engage-
ment. Even if a comprehensive critical realist study is difficult to conduct
in practice, however, researchers can nevertheless:

a. identify the different layers or levels involved,

b. reveal as much insight about each as possible,
c. develop research methods applicable to each level and
d. look at possible trans-level mechanisms involved.

Throughout this process, realist AL scholars should keep in mind (a)

the core principle of emergence, and (b) the principle that what we
study are complex systems composed of complex parts which interact in
complex ways to produce, at higher levels of organization, the complex
and irreducible phenomena under investigation. In other words, while
realist AL research involves greater involvement in theory and method-
ology than successionist and interpretivist approaches, and can become
overwhelming on many fronts, the work is possible, particularly in
collaborative settings involving scientists from different fields and with
different expertise. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 202) observe, “social
realism is not a research method (nor yet a methodology), and studies
may well draw eclectically on the extensive expertise developed by social
and linguistic researchers during the previous century, including surveys,
official statistics, questionnaires, interviews, observation, ethnography
and even introspection.”
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 289

Specific steps can be said to characterize the realist approach to

AL research. Firstly, the researcher provides a comprehensive survey of
existing empirically informed research to provide some general causal
propositions. For example, Bouchard and Glasgow (2019) look at a
series of empirical studies of language policy and planning processes
around the world, and offer a preliminary understanding of the causal
relationships binding elements of agency and language policy and plan-
ning processes as complex systems, as outlined in these empirical studies.
In doing so, the authors also provide further clarity into epistemo-
logical priorities shaping research on agency in language policy and
planning. The second step involves looking at emergent powers and
properties of agency, structure and culture in order to locate some
of the core attributes of causal links, thus potentially refining causal
propositions. These more refined propositions, or middle-range theo-
ries, should eventually be tested against empirical data. Once these two
initial steps are accomplished, the empirical research project begins and
can include the collection/analysis of data, followed by the testing of
causal propositions, and by the subsequent refinement of causal propo-
sitions. The likely outcome of such research is a rich and complex
list of causal configurations, which become the basis for answer to the
complex realist question “what works for whom in what circumstances
and in what respects?” (Pawson, 2006: 74). From this angle, Bouchard
and Glasgow (2019) outline a realist approach to studying agency in
language policy and planning contexts which begins with an analysis of
the context and domain of language use, and follows with an analysis
of specific language policies to reveal their cultural and structural influ-
ences. Thirdly, researchers conceptualize the interface between agency
and language policy and planning processes by notably identifying the
types of reflexive approaches deployed by the agents involved. Fourthly,
a movement back to structural and cultural influences helps researchers
revisit how policy enables and/or constrains agency. This approach ends
with an exploration of how agency arches back to influence—or fail
to influence—the creation or revision of subsequent language policies.
Throughout this process, the drafting and revision of causal propositions
remains ongoing.
290 J. Bouchard

I end this chapter with a short discussion on corpus analysis and crit-
ical discourse analysis (CDA), two important strands in contemporary
AL scholarship which, although not exclusively “realist,” can nevertheless
be identified as appropriate approaches to the study of “real” language,
as understood within realism.

Corpus Analysis, Critical Discourse Analysis

and “Real” Language
By looking at large bodies of data statistically and through concordance
analysis, corpus analysis is effective in revealing overt patterns of use,
as well as the relatively patterned structure of everyday communica-
tion. Sealey and Carter (2004) note that corpus evidence contradicts
the traditional division between words and sentences, or lexis and
syntax. Corpus findings also lend strong empirical evidence to support
claims regarding the existence of widely shared norms and structured
patterns of language use, claims which contradict the popular interpre-
tivist/postmodernist view of language and communication as personal
and idiosyncratic. Corpus analysis, however, unfortunately isolates texts
from their contexts and fields of production. Rajagopalan (2004: 411)
notes that “what corpus linguistics produces are snapshots of language
in a constant process of evolution. Rather than purport to capture the
putative ‘essence’ of, say, word meanings, its findings point to statis-
tical tendencies of collocation, colligation, and so on, which are subject
to constant change and are thus by definition unstable.” Sealey and
Carter (2004) disagree, stating that while corpus analysis reveals empir-
ical “traces” of underlying processes, it is vital that we analyze those traces
to understand the relationship between language and its social context.
As the authors observe, corpus analysis produces a body of attested
language behaviour which “points both towards the unobservable but
nevertheless real structures underlying that behaviour, and towards the
equally real, but not exhaustive, empirical experience of language in use
which we can observe everywhere around us. The most significant feature
of a corpus […] is its demonstration of the intersubjective properties of
 5 Social Realism and Applied Linguistics 291

language” (p. 75). Despite its limitations, corpus analysis thus offers a
unique view into what realists would call “real” language.
Unlike the focus on overt patterns of use in corpus analysis, CDA
is interested in what links language and society together, and is partic-
ularly concerned with ideological tendencies (i.e., covert tendencies)
within spoken and written text (Bouchard, 2017). It is mainly focused
on elucidating underlying processes and mechanisms linking discourse
practices (e.g., the production and consumption of policy texts) and
particular manifestations of power structures and relationships in society.
In Bouchard (2017), I describe CDA as “an approach to research specif-
ically concerned with issues of reflexivity, triangulation, and validity
in the study of complex social phenomena, as observable through
text, discourse and social practices” (p. 125). For the most part, CDA
researchers have prioritized printed materials, and only recently have they
begun to consider interactional data and other multimodal discursive
forms more explicitly.
In many ways a realist scholar himself, Fairclough (1992, 2010)
develops a CDA approach based on the distinction—and appreciation
for the relationship—between organizational structures and agency. His
text-oriented discourse analysis (TODA) provides a stratified view of
text as composed of three layers: text, discourse practice and social prac-
tice. In turn, Wodak’s (1996) discourse-historical method places greater
emphasis on the study of original documents and their interaction with
agents in context, as revealed through ethnographic work. Countering
CDA’s tendency to overemphasize printed text, Kress and van Leeuwen
(1996) look at visual images and multimodal forms of semiosis as
part of their analysis. Also informative, van Dijk (2001) socio-cognitive
theory looks at ideological discourse from macro and micro viewpoints,
although this strategy unfortunately blurs the important distinction
made by Fairclough between text and discourse practice. Given its wide
epistemological scope and perspectives, it is therefore impossible to iden-
tify CDA clearly and exclusively with any specific research methodology.
As an overall body of work, however, it can be identified as an ontolog-
ical perspective which successfully addresses discourse as a stratified social
phenomenon.
292 J. Bouchard

Existing CDA research, however, has been criticized as failing to

combine sociological and linguistic theory. It has also been criticized for
its marked emphasis on text-based linguistic processes, and for providing
incomplete accounts of contextual influences on the production and
consumption of discourse (Rogers et al., 2005). Since its principal
focus is on identifying and dismantling ideology within text, CDA
thus becomes essentially concerned with linguistic “effects” rather than
“facts.” This shortcoming is noted by Widdowson (2001), who dismisses
CDA as a mere projection of analysts’ own partiality. I do not agree
with Widdowson on this point, considering that Fairclough, Wodak and
Van Dijk have indeed provided numerous arguments, conceptual models
and methodological approaches which effectively deal with the problem
raised by Widdowson. More importantly, and as with corpus analysis,
CDA offers a unique viewpoint into what realists understand as “real”
language by, again, approaching language essentially from a stratified
viewpoint, and by opening up new conceptual avenues for exploring
the complex interplay between linguistic “facts,” discourse practices and
social, cultural and political forces at play.

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 6
Complex Systems and Social/Cultural
Morphogenesis

So far in this volume I have concentrated on emergence and causality—

two of the three core concepts under focus in this volume—in relation to
the social sciences and AL research. In doing so, I have presented realism
as a robust ontological perspective beneficial to a renewed AL scholar-
ship. In this chapter and the next, I focus more explicitly on the notion
of complexity and argue that CDST is also much needed in AL scholar-
ship in order to move beyond positivism and its deductive-nomological
model of causality on the one hand, and the at times counterproduc-
tive relativism of postmodernism and interpretivism on the other. The
system view of CDST also adds further sophistication to realism’s view
of system, and allows AL scholars to map out in more precise terms
the distinct and emergent properties and powers of social phenomena as
complex systems. In addition, CDST’s view of causality adds a great deal
of sophistication to AL scholars’ understanding of non-linear processes,
including self-organization as a higher level of order, and of how parts
and wholes (of both natural and social phenomena) are causally related
to each other. Furthermore, CDST—presented by Juarrero (1999) as a
theory-constitutive metaphor which allows us to study the causal rela-
tionship between parts and wholes—offers even greater engagement with
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 297
Switzerland AG 2021
J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_6
298 J. Bouchard

transdisciplinarity than that which can be found in realist literature. As

the applied linguists De Bot et al., (2005: 116, emphasis mine) under-
line, “insights from neurolinguistics, social constructivism, cognitive
linguistics, connectionism, social network theory, political science and
many other fields have enriched [CDST’s] understanding of language in
use. However, none of these approaches have been able to fully acknowl-
edge the dynamic nature of language systems in the multilingual mind.”
The authors go on to state that language, languages and language users
can effectively be studied through the application of CDST-grounded
AL research because they possess (to some extent) the core characteris-
tics of complex and dynamic systems, including openness, non-linearity,
emergence and autopoiesis (i.e., the ability of living systems to maintain
and renew themselves by reorganizing their composition, as they interact
with their environment). This view draws from Juarrero (1999: 195),
who argues that

dynamical processes homologous to those of self-organizing, far-from-

equilibrium abiotic and biological systems are also at work in people and
their mental states. In response to disequilibrium either within an agent’s
own cognitive organization or between the agent’s cognitive state and
other internal dynamics (psychological, emotional, desiderative, motor,
and the like), a person’s current frame of mind can undergo a phase
change and recalibrate to rectify the disequilibrium.

CDST also provides a convincing explanation for the non-linear

progression of human thought and behaviour. As Juarrero (1999: 166)
ponders, “if the brain is a complex adaptive system, no covering-law
approach, including a behaviorist one, could ever account for human
action. If the brain is fundamentally stochastic, as are many other
complex adaptive systems, the novelty and unpredictability are in prin-
ciple so as well.” CDST also allows us to explain why we can nevertheless
observe patterns at both the individual and collective levels, and from
this basis make informed guesses about future behaviours of complex
systems, including social phenomena such as languages, people and soci-
eties. Ball (2004: 6, emphasis mine) expresses this idea when asserting
that “it is possible to make some predictions about how [people] behave
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 299

collectively. That is to say, we can make predictions about society even

in the face of individual free will.” What provides the basis for attempts
at prediction is an understanding of how complex adaptive natural and
social systems unfold within context and over time.
As argued previously, the concept of emergence is central to both
CDST and realism. Together, they provide convincing and useful
approaches to understanding social phenomena, including language(s),
language learners, language learning, education, schools, policy processes,
etc., as stratified, complex, emergent, open and dynamic systems, within
a complex and contingent social realm. These conceptual parallels
between realism and CDST afford researchers not only ontological depth
but also valuable theoretical and methodological possibilities for studying
complex causality, or multiple non-linear causal relationships within the
social realm, and thereby avoiding many of the pitfalls of both succes-
sionism and interpretivism. CDST is, however, criticized in this chapter
on three fronts: (1) its limited insight into human agency, and by exten-
sion (b) its limited engagement with critical theory and (c) the rather
liberal use by CDST adherents of notions and insight from the natural
sciences as metaphors to describe social processes.

CDST in a Nutshell, and Some of its Important

Notions
Given the growing popularity of CDST in AL and the social sciences
at large, and considering the complex and transdisciplinary nature of
research inspired by CDST principles, a single chapter on the subject is
clearly insufficient. Readers of the current book are therefore encouraged
to consult more comprehensive resources to get a richer and more solid
understanding of complexity theory and its various uses (e.g., Buckley,
1998; Byrne & Callaghan, 2014; Cilliers, 1998; Ellis & Larsen-Freeman,
2009; Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020; Juarrero, 1999; Larsen-Freeman &
Cameron, 2008; Ortega & Han, 2017). The Encyclopedia of Complexity
and Systems Science (Meyers, 2009) provides one the most extensive and
detailed explanations of CDST notions pertinent to both the natural and
the social sciences to date. In this chapter, I instead look at specific issues
300 J. Bouchard

in CDST which bear relevance to the study of social phenomena, AL

issues, and to the overall argumentation in this book.
CDST has a rather short history. Its roots can be traced back to
Chaos Theory in mathematics, which emerged in late ninteenth Century
through the works of French mathematician and philosopher of science
Jules Henri Poincaré, although most of its principles and concepts were
developed during the postwar period. However, some of the principles
in CDST can be traced further back in history. Hiver and Al-Hoorie
(2020) show rather clearly how complexity perspectives have deep roots
in the philosophical and sociological works of Adam Smith, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Karl Marx, Herbert Spencer, Émile Durkheim, Talcott
Parsons, Jurgen Habermas and Anthony Giddens, for example, thus
revealing a rather rich heritage in the humanities. From a historical
standpoint, and given the evolution of complexity theory to this day,
it is therefore mistaken to characterize complexity theory exclusively as a
product of the natural sciences, and by extension as external to the social
sciences. Although complexity theory has roots in the natural sciences,
or more specifically in mathematics (Lowie, 2013), Byrne (2005) argues
that the emergence and development of complexity theory within the
social sciences should not be considered simply as a process of one field
borrowing ideas from another field: “Rather it involves thinking about
the social world and its intersections with the natural world as involving
dynamic open systems with emergent properties that have the poten-
tial for qualitative transformation, and examining our traditional tools of
social research with this perspective informing that examination” (p.98).
According to Williams and Dyer (2017), Chaos Theory has led to new
insight into both natural and social phenomena. Examples of empir-
ically accessible complex and dynamic phenomena displaying chaotic
behaviour include the double-rod pendulum, which demonstrates how
changes in complex, non-linear systems are highly sensitive to initial
conditions. The butterfly effect, another important principle of Chaos
Theory, attempts to describe how small changes in a non-linear system
can lead to large differences over time.
At the same time, and despite arguments made earlier in this book
regarding the distinct properties of natural and social phenomena (to be
further elaborated later in this chapter), we should not be alarmed to
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 301

find multiple ontological parallels between natural and social objects.

For example, Lowie (2013: 1808) observes that “research in the field
of neuroscience shows that the coordinated behavior of the brain is
also largely determined by self-organization […] The same conclusion is
drawn from other findings in cognitive research.” Over forty years ago,
Lass (1980: 114–115) pondered this issue in a very similar fashion thus:

If […] we find considerable apparent indeterminacy even in biological

systems at fairly high levels of organization, we shouldn’t be surprised
to find the same – or worse – in systems involving far more complex
and less well-understood properties: e.g., mentation (conscious or uncon-
scious), and its various offshoots such as symbolic behavior, socialization,
etc. We might expect language – and especially its history – to be a
paradigmatically non-nomic domain.

More recently, Williams and Dyer (2017) observed that, while they
retain important ontological differences (e.g., different properties and
powers), natural and social phenomena nevertheless occupy the same
world, which strongly suggests that they must share some ontological
properties. Moreover, because they are both subjected to influence from
random variables, both natural and social phenomena can be considered
as complex.
Tracing the origins of CDST, Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020) see impor-
tant conceptual exchanges between the natural and the social sciences,
noting that in the natural sciences complexity perspectives have led to
the emergence of multiple converging conceptual models and theories
including Chaos Theory and non-linear dynamical system theory in
mathematics, synergetics and complex adaptive systems in physics, dissi-
pative structure theory in chemistry and autopoietic system theory in
biology. They also explain that complexity perspectives have penetrated
multiple areas of the social sciences including philosophy, sociology,
anthropology, political sciences, health studies, economics, psychology
and management studies. Similarly, Hilpert and Marchand (2018: 2)
observe that components of complex systems can take “material, concep-
tual, or semiotic forms such as individual students, and teachers, and
302 J. Bouchard

technological objects; motivation, behavioural, affective, epistemolog-

ical and cognitive variables; or words, text, symbols, and discourses.” As
Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020) explain, a core element in CDST—as with
other versions of complexity theory—is complexity as referring essen-
tially to the relationship between things (Buckley, 1998; Byrne, 1998;
Larsen-Freeman & Cameron, 2008; Morin, 2008), clearly a feature of
both natural and social phenomena.
From a realist perspective, perhaps CDST’s most valuable contribu-
tion to human knowledge is its novel view of system. Accordingly, a
system does not group parts in an aggregative fashion: parts are related
to each other in specific ways which allow for the maintenance of the
system. Juarrero (1999: 110, emphases original) explains that “a system’s
internal structure consists in the specific components and the relations
among them. Its external structure or boundary conditions consist in
the interactions between the components and the environment.” The
external structure of a system can, over time, influence how its internal
structure unfolds. Open and complex systems emerge as a result of the
flexible relationships between their parts, relationships which are neces-
sary to long-term system survival, since the strength of a system usually
diminishes when structural bonding becomes too rigid in the face of
external influences and change.
Emergence constitutes a fundamental element of open, complex and
adaptive systems which, in response to external influences, can bring
about qualitative change to their components and their relationships,
notably a higher level of system organization. Aligned with this view,
researchers adopting CDST principles have so far been much less
concerned with quantitative than qualitative change, or phase shifts,
described by Byrne (2009: 1) as “radical changes in kind rather than
marginal changes of degree.” Based on this rudimentary understanding
of the complex system, the following eight principles serve to summarize
the main principles of CDST as it applies to the social sciences:

1. Various social phenomena (people, systems, agency, causal mecha-

nisms, etc.) can be conceptualized as complex and emergent open
systems because they possess numerous features germane to such
systems.
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 303

2. Complex systems are the emergent products of their self-organizing

capacities as well as emergent products of the interactions between
their constituting elements, and between themselves and their envi-
ronment.
3. Complex systems—as emergent entities—are irreducible to their
component parts. This means that they cannot be explained by
reversing time and seeing how they came together.
4. Various states of a complex system (e.g., the weather, a class of
students, etc.) at any point in time depend on how elements within
that system interact over time.
5. Change or stability of a complex system cannot be fully predicted
because the variables with which it interacts are constantly changing
over time, as does the system itself.
6. The evolution of complex systems over time is achieved largely
through iterations of simple procedures (i.e., one process leading to
the next), but with sometimes complex and more significant effects.
7. Changes involving the parts of a complex system affect all other parts
of that system over time.
8. Complex systems vary in the sense that they are sensitive to specific
inputs at times, and to other inputs at other times.

Equipped with these eight general principles, we can now look at

more detailed issues within CDST. To reiterate a crucial point, however,
complex systems are not merely random, wild or complicated: their
behaviours reveal underlying causal patterns including feedback loops, a
notion which recalls the realist notion of double morphogenesis discussed
in Chapter Four. As we saw, double morphogenesis occurs in the struc-
ture–agency relationship when agency transforms structure while also
being transformed as a result of both external and internal forces. In this
way, double morphogenesis can be said to necessarily involve a feedback
loop or a combination of loops, and that these complex exchanges are of
a causal nature. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 27) stress the importance of
feedback loops in a CDST view of change, and in their explanation, we
can denote echoes of the notion of morphogenic cycle: “complex systems
304 J. Bouchard

do not remain passive to changing events but rather adapt to and antic-
ipate an ever-changing environment, and in turn initiate change to that
environment.”
Feedback loops can be negative or positive: negative feedback loops are
aimed at maintaining a system’s integrity so as to ensure its functioning.
They are products of a system’s internal regulating powers emerging as a
result of that system’s interaction with other systems. Positive feedback
loops, on the other hand, principally involve a system repeating actions
deemed effective because they have worked well previously. Positive feed-
back loops, also called self-augmenting feedback, involve energy transfer
between system parts, constantly feeding off each other, amplifying their
powers and properties, a process also called loop gain. When applied to a
realist ontology, positive feedback loops can be associated more closely
with system morphostasis and negative feedback loops with system
morphogenesis. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 28) explain these processes
with reference to human communication thus: “too much negative feed-
back will shut the interaction down and lead to an impasse between
interlocutors, while too much positive feedback can result in conflict
with one interlocutor dominating the interaction, or both interlocutors
competing for space in the interactive event space.”
The CDST view of system, emergence and causality finds numerous
conceptual echoes within realist literature. Again, we must remind
ourselves that CDST is a rather young perspective in the process of estab-
lishing increasingly more solid ontological and epistemological grounds
within the social sciences. Throughout this process, it is likely that the
parallels between CDST and realism will become more evident. Walby
(2007: 456) states that CDST is not a unified theory; rather, it is “an
emerging approach or framework. It is a set of theoretical and conceptual
tools; not a single theory to be adopted holistically. The author observes
that the implications of CDST to social theory and research tend to be
understood differently. For example, while Byrne (1998) sees complexity
theory very much in realist terms, Cilliers (1998) aligns CDST with
postmodernism. In my view, however, Byrne’s assessment is more accu-
rate than that of Cilliers, given the marked rejection of the very idea
of a system within postmodernism, as well as CDST’s commitment to
objective knowledge.
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 305

As suggested in the Introduction, to understand CDST one must first

distinguish between things being complicated and things being complex.
Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020) define complicated as a quantitative differ-
ence from simplicity, and the task of understanding complicatedness is
breaking things into their parts and then putting them back together. In
this way, complicated systems are the sum total of their constituent parts.
In contrast, the authors define complex as referring to a qualitative differ-
ence, adding that understanding a complex object/phenomenon cannot
be achieved by breaking it into its constituents. According to Cochran-
Smith et al., (2014: 107), this is the case “since unexpected consequences
arise as a result of the dynamic interactions of parts, which provides chal-
lenges to researchers trying to understand the system.” Juarrero (1999:
123) similarly explains that complexity

is not an additive measure (as is the complicatedness of, for example, a

sand dune) but a measure of organization and order. A system emerges
when previously uncorrelated particles or processes suddenly become
coordinated and interconnected. In subsequent steps of an evolutionary
sequence, components and processes are correlated and interconnected
differently — in an even more complexly differentiated hierarchy. What
makes each step of a self-organized process new is that its components
are systematically interrelated in qualitatively novel ways.

This distinction between complex and complicated parallels another

important distinction in CDST between restricted and general
complexity. In restricted complexity, it is the interaction between the
parts which leads to the emergence of the complex system in question.
In light of this distinction, causality can thus be understood as what
happens as a result of those interactions (Byrne & Uprichard, 2012). In
general complexity, however, complex systems possess properties that are
distinct and emergent from the interaction between their parts (Byrne &
Callaghan, 2014). For social scientists, general complexity is therefore a
more appropriate concept.
This brings us back to emergence as a pivotal notion which helps
us distinguish between restricted and general complexity, and between
306 J. Bouchard

complicated and complex systems. As Mason (2008a: 2, emphasis orig-

inal) points out, “complexity theory’s notion of emergence implies that,
given a significant degree of complexity in a particular environment,
or critical mass, new properties and behaviours emerge that are not
contained in the essence of the constituent elements, or able to be
predicted from a knowledge of initial conditions.” This fundamental
feature of complex systems necessarily implies that (a) complex systems
can never be reduced to their constituent parts, and (b) their causal rela-
tionships with other entities and systems is non-linear, and are therefore
impossible to capture fully through the formulation of laws. As with
realism, CDST therefore rejects the notion of causal laws and instead
prioritizes causal mechanisms (Maxwell, 2012).
When applied to the study of social phenomena, CDST is grounded
in a conceptualization of society as a complex system emerging from the
interaction between its component parts (e.g., people, groups, institu-
tions, etc.), which are also complex systems. Because of this focus, CDST
embraces the notion of an objective reality and the principle that social
phenomena can be explained in causal terms. It understands causality
as situated, thus rejecting the pursuit of universally applicable knowl-
edge (i.e., the pursuit of the nomothetic principle). Another parallel
between CDST and realism is that the former is “against both the
sterility of structuralism […] and the disengagement of relativist post-
structuralism as the meta theory of postmodernity from any practical
engagement at all of social science with processes of social transfor-
mation” (Byrne, 2005: 98). From this basis, CDST-grounded social
research aims to account for the components and emergent properties of
complex systems, for the assumption is that the production of complex
arrangements over time—or complex assemblages between subsystems
and between complex systems and other systems—happens because of
the process of emergence (Byrne, 2009). Gerrits and Verweij (2013: 168)
explains this crucial element in complexity theory thus:

The world is composed of open systems that are nested within, and have
nested within themselves, other open systems. This openness means that
systems, although bounded, interact with other open systems in their
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 307

environment. This interaction results in changes to the systems as envi-

ronmental influences become part of the system’s structure. However,
such environmental influences are not magically transferred to the system;
the components that form the structure of the system interact and it is
through this interaction that environmental influences become internal-
ized. The process by which this happens is referred to as emergence:
structure is formed through the interaction of components, and the
resulting structures are not linearly traceable to their roots. Without inter-
action, there is no structure, only a sum of components. Thus, complex
reality consists of open systems that are emergently structured.

At the same time, while emergence is central to realism and CDST,

the notion is sometimes understood in different ways, notably as either
relational or temporal . Most references to emergence in the literature are
of the temporal kind, which notes the initial appearance or development
of a new phenomenon, thus providing a rather weakened and incomplete
view of the emergence of complex systems over time. We can see marked
adherence to this perspective among CDST adherents, for example,
when they discuss the importance of the “initial condition” of a complex
system, and when they argue, for example, that emergence can only be
the product of self-organization (e.g., Goldstein, 1999). Specifically, self-
organization means drawing resources from context firstly, and secondly
changing oneself (or itself ) so as to respond to these constraining and
enabling resources and the constantly changing environment (Allen,
2009). As Lowie (2013: 1808) states, “in self-organization, the system as
a whole is shaped by the interaction of lower-level subsystems.” However,
as Elder-Vass (2010: 21) points out: “water molecules, for example,
are not self-organised complex systems, as these terms are used amongst
complexity theorists, and yet on a relational understanding of emer-
gence they are entities with emergent properties.” Given the limitations
of the temporal view of emergence, we must therefore consider rela-
tional emergence which considers, at a moment in time, how a complex
system emerges out of the interaction between its components, and in
the process gains properties and powers that the components do not
possess, and which it would not necessarily possess if its components
were organized differently (Elder-Vass, 2010). Arguably, the relational
view of emergence takes us beyond the somewhat problematic notion
308 J. Bouchard

of “initial condition” (discussed below) to provide a compositional view

of complex systems, in relation to other complex systems. From this
basis, what social scientists aligned with a CDST perspective need to
explain is how relationships (both between system parts and between
systems) act as mechanisms leading to the development of the emer-
gent property under scrutiny. This recalls the important point made by
Donati and Archer (2015: 18, emphasis original) cited in Chapter Four
on realism that a “relation exists, that is, it is real in itself, irreducible to
its progenitors, and possesses its own properties and causal powers.”
However, complex systems are not understood within CDST as
undergoing change only because of external causal forces, but rather
because of the process of self-organization, concisely (although somewhat
problematically) defined as a bottom-up causal mechanism by Hiver
and Al-Hoorie (2020: 32) thus: “self-organization is a process, across
time, through which systems acquire their structure and their functions
without interference. […] Self-organization, then, refers to the sponta-
neous pattern formation and change in systems.” Similarly, Guastello and
Liebovitch (2009: 23) define self-organization as a process which “does
not require the intervention of outside agents; rather it is often character-
ized as order for free. [Self-organizing] mechanisms vary in their emphasis
on feedback loops between subsystems and bilateral interactions among
agents (subsystems) within a system.” Determining at which stage of the
process a complex system is, and looking at how the system evolves and
acts, are therefore two scientific endeavours requiring the identification
of an attractor state, which as will be explained below can be understood
also as a causal mechanism.
Arguably, attractor states can also be understood as providing
both constraining and enabling resources and influences unto agency.
Verspoor (2015: 40–41) explains that “the notion of an attractor is remi-
niscent of the classical developmental notion of a stage, suggesting that
development is a process creating a sequence of attractors.” In a more
specific sense, researchers can look for signature dynamics, which “pro-
duce a particular time signal or trajectory of change over time in the state
space that is essential for understanding the causal complexities of system
development or change” (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020: 34). There are
two general types of attractor states: fixed-point and strange. Fixed-point
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 309

attractor states are the simplest, and constitute single points of equi-
librium where complex systems settle. Strange attractors, on the other
hand, are chaotic and are often beyond the reach of complex systems.
Using realist terminology explored in Chapter Four, we can thus identify
modus vivendi as a fixed-point attractor state, or a point where human
agents reach some kind of equilibrium in relation to cultural and struc-
tural constraints and enablements. In contrast, people’s dreams, hopes
and ultimate goals can be identified as strange attractor states.
Yet, while complex systems are said to self-organize, external influ-
ences must come into play, not as organizing forces but rather as triggers
for self-organization to take place. As Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 36,
emphasis original) explain, “self-organization can only proceed if there
is a trigger such as a significant perturbation that nudges a system out
of an existing attractor state.” In this sense, human reflexivity—when
defined from this perspective—operates when triggered by cultural and
structural constraints and enablements, forces which can be character-
ized as external sources of energy and influence. Hiver and Al-Hoorie
also point out that complex systems are not chaotic per se, because self-
organization unfolds in a rather systematic fashion, towards stability,
despite possible variations. These more or less regular and stable processes
are labelled control parameters, which in light of the discussion on realism
in previous chapters, can also be understood as causal mechanisms. As
such, phenomena such as social norms and people’s reflexive search
for modus vivendi can also be considered control parameters. As the
effects of control parameters are felt by the complex system via its self-
organizing powers, system-wide patterns of behaviours emerge, as the
system itself reaches some degree of morphostasis. At this point in time,
control parameters then become order parameters, which then act as
forces constraining future movements by the system. In other words,
complex systems aim to retain stability, largely by relying on past expe-
rience, as they react to ongoing contextual influences and interact with
other complex systems in their environment.
Coming back to, and further unpacking, the system view provided
by CDST, we must also distinguish between the homeostatic view of
system—a system (e.g., an organism or a cell) reaching equilibrium
mainly as a result of self-regulating processes—with the morphogenic view
310 J. Bouchard

of system—a system whose structural features develop over time, as a

result of a complex interaction between internal and external sources
of pressure and influence. Buckley (1998: 71) clarifies this important
distinction thus:

If we see the system as only homeostatic we tend to view variations as

abnormal, external, and potentially disruptive and hence always coun-
teracted by a system whose viability hinges on maintenance of a given
structure. If we see the system as morphogenic, we are prepared to see
variations as normal, internally generated, potentially constructive, and
utilizable by a system whose viability may be promoted by structural
change. (p. 71)

With this argument, Buckley characterizes CDST essentially as a

theory of change, a view also expressed by Byrne (2005). Again, it would
be mistaken to conclude from the above discussion of core features of
complex systems that they are chaotic, hopelessly fluid and constantly
shifting entities. On this point, Williams and Dyer (2017: 4) observe
that, “in the social world, most outcomes exist within relatively stable
rule-bound social structures, but change comes about as a result of
perturbations – the greater the perturbation, the greater the change.”
From a sociological perspective, while we can posit that society and its
constituting parts are complex systems, and that all complex systems
are characterized by indeterminateness (Denzin, 1983), we must also
account for

how it is that social order exists and is maintained and, perhaps para-
doxically, how sometimes it breaks down or changes quite dramatically.
Added to this, if the world was so indetermined […] the constraints
that prevent us from doing just as we wish (laws, rules, sanctions and
physical constraints created by humans) should be routinely capable of
transcendence, but they are not. (Williams & Dyer, 2017: 2)

As such, while CDST has largely been characterized as a theory of

change, or as a set of explanatory concepts related to the study of change
in a complex system (Ramiah, 2014), it is also necessarily concerned
with morphostasis, or the maintenance of complex systems, for “the
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 311

possible trajectory of a system also depends on where in its temporal

life course it is. This is not just about expectations of change” (Byrne &
Uprichard, 2012: 123). In a way, this is to be expected, for change cannot
be successfully studied without consideration for stability as well. If we
consider, for example, that the continued existence of social organiza-
tions “is not simply the product of morphostatic causes, but the outcome
of an ongoing interplay between morphostatic causes, morphogenetic
causes and structural possibilities” (Elder-Vass, 2010: 36), we can under-
stand how change and stability are profoundly related, and why CDST’s
interest in change is balanced by an equivalent interest in stability. As
Verspoor (2015: 41) points out, “viewed from a dynamic perspective,
stability is a special case of variation in which a dynamic system seeks an
equilibrium state or approaches an attractor” In other words, stability is
a temporary state of a complex system which suggests order in the face
of an attractor or a perturbation, rather than a fixed trait or characteristic
of the system itself. With regards to system morphostasis, Byrne (2003:
174) explains that

complex systems are robust in two senses. One is that for much of the
time they basically stay the same kind of thing with changes being neither
trivial nor transformative. In complexity terminology their trajectory is
contained within a torus-style attractor. The other is that they can change
radically in terms of form – in complexity terminology undergo a phase
shift – while retaining systemic integrity.

Knowing whether we are dealing with change or stability therefore

requires consideration for time as an important factor in our analysis.
Specifically, we must gain a sense of the position of a system within its life
course, and explain how it is maintained over time, or how morphostasis
occurs in relation to that system.
In this section, I have highlighted some of the most important notions
in CDST, and attempted to relate them to realist terminology when
possible. There are, of course, numerous other principles and concepts
central to a CDST perspective, some of which will be covered and related
to a realist ontology in the remaining pages of this book. Of particular
312 J. Bouchard

relevance to the current volume is CDST’s view of causality, a subject

which I now turn to.

A CDST Approach to Causality

The issue of causality in the social realm is understood and discussed by
realist and CDST adherents in similar ways: they both view causality not
in terms of causal laws which apply uniformly across contexts, but rather
as the emergent outcome of the interaction between complex, multiple
and contingent mechanisms, and as analytically apprehensible through
theory. Byrne (2005: 105) highlights this particular conceptual parallel
between CDST and realism thus:

Causal processes in complex systems cannot be accessed by simple anal-

ysis. The trajectories of complex systems will always be directed by
complex and contingent cause. History will matter. There will be path
dependency. Context will matter. Agency will matter. This account of
causation corresponds exactly with the essentials of the scientific realist
description of cause.

Complexity theorists in general express considerable concern over,

and have been more explicit in their rejection of, the covering law
model of causality discussed in Chapter Two. Hiver and Al-Hoorie
(2020: 25) discuss the non-linear quality of complex systems within AL
contexts, and offer an explanation which allows us to explain system
complexity in relation to time: “in complex systems social institutions,
language communities or classrooms where many different components
and factors interact over time, small differences in some factors at an early
point in time can have a substantial impact on the eventual outcome.”
As we have seen with regards to realism, time is a central element to
consider in the morphogenetic cycle proposed by Archer, specifically
how it relates to causality and how structure and agency influence each
other in a-synchronous fashion (see Chapter Four). Consideration for
time in AL research is important also because it allows us to avoid
the tendency to conceptualize causal relationships as hydraulic, a view
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 313

which has grounded variable-based AL studies to date. Juarrero (1999:

3, emphasis mine) extends this critique to the social sciences, arguing
that “understanding all causes as collision-like, and the explanatory ideal
as deduction from deterministic laws, are two examples of a trend that
has characterized the history of philosophy for over two thousand years:
the progressive elimination of time and context from metaphysics and
epistemology.” The author explains how this model of causality unfor-
tunately remains largely accepted in contemporary theories of action,
particularly in how social scientists seem to explain the links between
intention, volition and action in behavioristic terms—i.e., reducing their
explanatory claims to stimulus–response patterns. In this sense, Juarrero’s
overall argumentation is of considerable value to CDST and realism as
they pertain to language learning and agency. Of particular interest to the
author is the fundamental epistemological shift currently taking place
in the social sciences with regards to the issue of causality, especially
considering how both philosophy and the social sciences have largely
failed to explain and predict human behaviour. As the author explains
with regards to the study of agency, “philosophers lack a satisfactory
theory of how causes cause and how explanations explain. Considering
this egregious lacuna, it is not surprising that philosophers are unable
to conceptualize and explain either voluntary self-motion or an agent’s
purposive actions” (Juarrero, 1999: 15).
In short, realism and CDST share the convictions that (a) accounting
for causal relationships is central to social research, (b) causality is not
hydraulic but rather complex, multiple and contingent and (c) the study
of causality involves looking at the interaction between structure, culture
and agency (including the involvement of underlying mechanisms) over
time. The CDST view of action, notably the one provided by Juarrero
(1999), also allows for an understanding of agency, of top-down and
bottom-up causation and of the notion of self-cause or self-organization.
Juarrero points out that self-cause has largely been rejected by scien-
tists and philosophers throughout much of history because of the almost
hegemonic Aristotelian model of causation which only accepts the idea
that causality can happen only if it is between two (or more) ontologi-
cally different things (an argument which I have made previously in this
volume). With self-organization, complex systems can be explained as
314 J. Bouchard

able to initiate changes within themselves partly in response to external

influences. According to the author, “complex adaptive systems are typi-
cally characterized by positive feedback processes in which the product
of the process is necessary for the process itself. Contrary to Aristotle,
this circular type of causality is a form of self-cause” (Juarrero, 1999: 5).
With self-organization, we can conceptualize not only the possibility
of parts affecting complex wholes, but also of complex wholes affecting
their parts—i.e., inter-level causality. The understanding here is that,
when complex systems are no longer in equilibrium, their parts begin
to fluctuate depending on the phase change involved. In response, the
complex whole constrains and restructures the movements of its parts,
sometimes in novel ways, so as to adjust to the external stimuli. In this
way, one of the distinguishing characteristics between wholes and parts
is that wholes provide a kind of framework for what takes place at the
level of the parts, something which parts are not able to provide. As
Juarrero (1999: 130) explains, “complex adaptive systems exhibit true
self-cause: parts interact to produce novel, emergent wholes; in turn,
these distributed wholes as wholes regulate and constrain the parts that
make them up.” This ontological distinction between parts and wholes
is crucial to the current understanding of self-cause, especially when
defining human agents as complex adaptive systems.
However, it is crucial to remind ourselves that the Aristotelian view
of cause is not entirely without merit. Understanding causality—at least
from a realist standpoint—requires an understanding of the distinct and
emergent properties of phenomena involved in a causal relationship.
At the same time, this does not necessarily contradict Juarrero’s point:
according to both CDST and realism, the properties of parts are different
from that of wholes—i.e., they have distinct and emergent properties
of their own. Because of that, self-cause or self-organization can indeed
be understood as a causal relationship between different things: wholes
and parts. Unfortunately, this important conceptual nuance is not always
maintained or made explicit in CDST discussions of self-cause/self-
organization.
Despite these minor shortcomings, CDST’s view of causality remains
rich and insightful, and provides much in terms of explanatory poten-
tial. Further enriching CDST’s view of causality is Waldner (2012:
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 315

79, emphases mine), who suggests five possible outcomes to causal

complexity:

Possible incarnations of causal complexity are equifinality or multiple

causes of an outcome; temporal dependence, where the causal effect of a
variable changes over time; interaction effects, where a variable causes one
outcome in some cases but a very different outcome in other cases; endo-
geneity, where outcome variables exert feedback effects on their causes,
and path dependence, where the cause of an outcome may depend on
where the cause is located in a sequence that includes many other
variables.

Gerrits and Verweij (2013: 174) see further parallels between realism
and CDST when it comes to the issue of causality: “complex causality is
an interaction of generative mechanisms in specific contexts, resulting in
unidirectional outcomes, meaning that the outcomes are subject to time-
asymmetry. […] causality is both real and complex, and, importantly, its
contingency also applies to those studying it, implying that causality is,
by definition, interpreted.” In arguing thus, the authors bring us back
to a core realist principle that causality is not an empirically accessible
and measurable phenomenon; instead, it is situated at the level of the
real, and therefore as accessible through empirically-informed theory.
The authors’ statement also makes reference to the morphogenetic cycle
and the idea that structure and agency are phenomena unfolding in a-
synchronous fashion, thus further reinforcing the conceptual parallels
between CDST and realism.
Causal complexity is also defined by Mason (2008a) in relational
terms as multi-factorial, a principle which posits that many factors are
involved in causal relationships, and that consequently researchers cannot
effectively isolate factors which can only have their effects if working
together, as in successionism and variable-based research. When applied
to the study of social phenomena, Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 68) point
out that the CDST view of causality has three important character-
istics: “(a) effects and outcomes are produced through a combination
of complex conditions, (b) several different combinations of conditions
can produce the same phenomena and (c) certain conditions can have
316 J. Bouchard

a different impact on an outcome at different times.” The authors also

argue along realist lines to suggest that complex causality is not chaotic
but rather stochastic, and underline that any account of causality in
CDST-grounded research must include time as a crucial factor in deter-
mining complex causal outcomes, as well as the conscious human agent
as complex causal force.
Again, these principles fit rather well within a realist ontology. Unlike
the Humean view of causality as constant conjunction, the general
CDST view posits that the structure of complex systems includes the
conditions of their creation. This historical view of causality, which
again is shared by CDST and realism, successfully integrates the notion
of time. Both views are also similar in their rejection of covering law
models of causality. They are also similar in that they both consider
system constraints (or in sociological terms, structural and/or cultural
constraints) not exclusively as limiting influences but also as triggers
for new possibilities: “if all constraints restricted a thing’s degrees of
freedom […] organisms (whether phylogenetically or developmentally)
would progressively do less and less. However, precisely the opposite is
empirically observed. Some constraints must therefore not only reduce
the number of alternatives: they must simultaneously create new possibil-
ities” (Juarrero, 1999: 133). As made clear in this statement, constraints
can lead to new possibilities because of the self-organizing potentials of
complex systems. From this basis we can also suggest that contextual
enablements are not exclusively about new possibilities: they also produce
constraints. For example, while the existence of an education system can
be enabling mainly by offering a broad range of learning opportuni-
ties for students, students must be part of the system to enjoy these
enablements, while also potentially ‘framing’ their worldviews within the
confines of specific ideological structures.
Furthermore, and this cannot be stressed often enough, time is a
central analytical factor in the study of complex systems, for as Juarrero
(1999: 139) points out, “precisely what makes these complex systems
dynamical is that a current state is in part dependent on a prior one.
Feedback, that is, incorporates the past into the system’s present “exter-
nal” structure. Feedback thus threads a system through both time and
space.” Rosmawati (2014: 69) expands on this notion thus:
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 317

A dynamic system interacts with factors existing in the environment and

continuously adapts itself based on the feedback from the previous inter-
action. It shapes itself via internal self-organisation […] and proceeds to
test out the newly adapted structure to collect feedback afresh, which will
then be internalised again through a self-organising mechanism […]. This
process is repetitive […]. During this massive restructuring, the system is
highly unstable and displays variability and unpredictable behaviour […].
Hence, high variability is a visible indicator of growth.

Although CDST can be said to offer interesting conceptual and

methodological avenues for studying causality, some scholars remain
sceptical about such potential. The realist scholar Forbes-Pitt (2013:
116), for example, claims that CDST is unable to provide a necessary
theory of causality, because it

rejects the kind of empiricism we would see in Humean constant

conjunctions by expressly denying the kind of ‘law’ that would enable the
statement ‘where A occurs, B will always occur’ as the very foundation of
the term self-organization denies this kind of predictability. […] So we
are left with an apparent enduring implicit meta-theoretical assumption
of relations between elements being causal, but with no causal theory that
would uphold this. This leaves complexity theorists in a weak position to
make causal claims.

The problem with this critique, of course, is that causal explanations

are not exclusively or inevitably aimed at the formulation of generalizable
predictions. Indeed, the argument can be made that complex causality
does not necessarily imply predictability. As Lass (1980: 105) underlines,
“in more complex systems (e.g., ecological interactions) the success rate
of predictions is much lower, and interesting patterns of indeterminacy
arise.” Almost half a century ago, Mayr (1968) identified four reasons for
such indeterminacy in complex systems: “the randomness of events, their
uniqueness, extreme complexity and, of course, emergence.” Further-
more, and perhaps more aligned with a realist perspective, causality can
be explained in terms of mechanisms, patterns or tendencies (Maxwell,
2012), or again trajectories (Byrne & Uprichard, 2012). The denial of
predictability in the social sciences is, after all, not a problem, since it
318 J. Bouchard

reflects a crucial understanding of social phenomena, including reflex-

ively endowed human beings, as complex, dynamic, open and non-linear
systems. At the same time, one would be justified to claim that CDST
is less specific with regards to causality in the social realm—i.e., with
regards to the complex interaction between structure, culture and agency.
The complex realist thinkers Byrne and Callaghan (2014), however, are
positive about CDST’s capacity to provide theories of causality in the
social realm, or at least provide the ontological grounds upon which such
theories can be developed.
There are, however, differences between the causal views offered by
realism and CDST. One such contrast involves the notion of under-
lying causal mechanism. As we saw in the previous chapter, critical
realism offers a robust view of underlying causal mechanisms, while
social realism offers a robust view of agency. CDST, however, holds
a rather ambivalent stance regarding agency and underlying generative
mechanisms. Mason (2008a: 9) for example, claims that “causation is
too multi-dimensional, too fast, and in some senses too unpredictable
to occupy the full focus of our attention. Complexity therefore suggests
a shift from our preoccupation with causes to a focus on effects.” For
realist thinkers, this shift from cause to effect is mistaken, for not only
does it focus on only one side of the equation, it also tilts towards
interactionism, or empiricism to be more precise, by giving much less
attention to the ontological properties and powers of underlying causal
mechanisms in the production of social life. As Elder-Vass (2010: 56)
underlines,

our causal capabilities as human individuals derive from our possession

of emergent properties in just the same way that the causal capabilities of
other entities do. If this is so, then the same type of argument that justifies
attributing causal powers to human beings may also justify attributing
them to some social structures.

This is precisely the point Mason seems to miss. Instead, he offers

a problematic view of causality, as revealed in the following statement:
“From a complexity perspective, things emerge at particular points in the
history of a set of multiple interactions through time, simply as a result of
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 319

the interactions among constituent elements, rather than as the result of

‘deep’, generative causal structures.” For critical social scientists, this view
is problematic because (a) it dismisses the reality that various mechanisms
of oppression—e.g., gender discrimination—are systems with antecedent
properties and considerable causal effects on flesh-and-blood people; and
in doing so, (b) it fails to explain why these systems, or mechanisms,
are causally efficacious in the first place, and how they are “taken in” or
drawn from by people on the ground. This shows not only how certain
strands of CDST offer little in terms of the solutions to social oppression
and the development of approaches to social emancipation (a significant
shortcoming which will be discussed later in this chapter), but more
importantly why CDST needs to be integrated within a more robust
social ontology, an argument which I will develop in the remaining pages
of this book.
In short, CDST’s tendency to focus on the local and on the effects
of things rather than their causes considerably diminishes its capacity to
explain antecedent structural and cultural constraints and enablements.
While CDST offers a dynamic view of system, its view remains influ-
enced by interactionism to some extent, and demonstrates a penchant
towards empiricism. Ragin (1987: 26) attempts to explain the difficul-
ties involved in approaching complexity in the social realm, and in doing
so, provides a perhaps more sophisticated viewpoint than that of Mason:

Social phenomena are complex and difficult to unravel not because

there are too many variables affecting them, although the number of
causal variables is certainly important, but because different causally rele-
vant conditions can combine in a variety of ways to produce a given
outcome. In short, it is the combinatorial, and often complexly combi-
natorial, nature of social causation that makes the problem of identifying
order-in-complexity demanding.

In my opinion, however, viewing causality in complexity terms should

not lead to an empiricist viewpoint, or a movement back to interac-
tionism and a prioritization of local phenomena over broader structural
and cultural realities, including underlying causal mechanisms. As we
have seen previously in this book, phenomena which we cannot perceive
320 J. Bouchard

or measure through our senses and research instruments (e.g., democratic

peace, social class distribution, social inequalities, self-fulfilling prophecy,
cognitive dissonance, endowment and contrast effects, learning, etc.) can
nevertheless play an important causal role in the production of social
realities, including the phenomena we can indeed perceive and measure.
Because of these reasons, they must also be considered as real and as
worthy of our investigative efforts.
To be clear, however, unlike other paradigms aligned with inter-
actionism, CDST does not reject the notion of underlying causal
mechanisms outright. As Mason (2008b: 35) argues, CDST

accepts the existence of certain essential generative elements in a particular

field, but suggests that the field as a whole is much more than merely
predictably determined by the primary generative element. While this
may be a trigger, and indeed only one of many triggers, of subsequent
phenomenal (in the literal and figurative sense) developments, complexity
theory suggests that it is the manifold interactions among constitutive
elements or agents, whether essential or not, that are responsible for the
phenomena, the patterns, properties, and behaviours that characterise a
particular field.

In essence, this view is aligned with a realist ontology. What needs to

be added to it, however, is that discussions about the causal potentials
of underlying mechanisms certainly do not have to be deterministic or
positivistic in structure and content, as the discussion about underlying
causal mechanisms in previous chapters has demonstrated.
In the next section, I look at the CDST view of agency which, as it
stands today, remains somewhat incomplete in sociological terms.

CDST and Agency

One of the central arguments in this volume purports that CDST
requires a robust social ontology, and that realism can offer it. One
justification for this position is that CDST—within the context of the
social sciences—has yet to offer a clear take on the structure–agency
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 321

debate (Al-Hoorie, 2015); indeed, this debate is most often dismissed

by CDST adherents as a product of “dichotomous thinking” (e.g.,
Mason, 2008b). Admittedly, not all of them agree. Al-Hoorie (2015:
64), for example, reveals awareness of the ontological differences between
people and context thus: “If our behaviour were solely a product of the
terrain, looking back and feeling proud about one’s achievements would
become meaningless.” As such, while there is recognition among some
CDST adherents of the need to ontologically distinguish structure from
agency, there remains a marked tendency among them to succumb to
relationism, particularly a Giddensian-like conflation between structure
and agency as “two sides of the same coin.” Perhaps symptomatic of
CDST’s need for a robust social ontology is its rather limited insight
into human agency. This shortcoming can be explained by the facts that
(1) CDST has yet to develop fully, given its recent introduction in the
social sciences, and (2) CDST comes to some extent from the natural
sciences, which for the most part is not concerned with human agency.
However, CDST is certainly not silent on the issue of agency, as
Juarrero’s (1999) own work attests. Byrne (2005: 97) also asserts that
CDST offers a dynamic view of human agency as causally efficacious
because it “necessarily places human social agency as of crucial histor-
ical and potential significance for the constitution of planetary reality as
a whole, precisely because human agency can change system trajectory.”
Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 22) parallel this view by suggesting that “the
centrality of agency to human and social systems makes it necessary to
include within any system’s boundaries an agent, or agents, capable of
exercising intentional action that contributes causally, though not deter-
ministically, to the outcomes and processes of change that arise from
that system under investigation.” Offering perhaps the most explicit
discussion about the nature of the structure–agency relationship from
a CDST perspective within the context of AL scholarship is Larsen-
Freeman (2019), who argues that “CDST maintains the structure-agency
complementarity while bringing to the fore the relational and emergent
nature of agency.” What is often missing from CDST accounts of the
structure–agency relationship, however, is more specific insight into how
that relationship unfolds. Merely saying that structure and agency are
equally important and that they are consequently complementary fails
322 J. Bouchard

to enrich the debate. As we saw in Chapter Three, most perspectives in

social theory begin with this premise, but end up with often radically
different conclusions about how structure and agency are related to each
other. In light of this, I maintain two complementary arguments: while
CDST’s limited insight into human agency can be explained by its lack
of a robust social ontology, CDST nevertheless offers interesting insight
into agency as complex system, as the following summary reveals.
The most interesting things CDST has to say about structure and
agency, at least from a realist standpoint, are that they are both
complex, dynamic, open and non-linear systems with the capacity for
self-organization, and that they are causally related in complex ways.
While most would agree that people can self-organize, others might
doubt that structure can do the same. However, we only have to think
about how the members of an institution or an organization can disagree
with the direction this institution/organization is moving while contin-
uing to contribute to its processes and existence, further highlighting
how structure and agency are ontologically distinct, and showing that
both structure and agency—because of their dialectical relationship—
have the capacity to take external input and produce internal changes
by, for example, reconfiguring their constituting parts. However, given
the distinct and emergent properties and powers of structure and agency
(e.g., people being biological entities, institutions being in large part
the outcomes of sets of power relationships, etc.), self-organization is
also understood as unfolding differently for agency and structure. While
humans can learn and act to change their conditions, institutions for
example cannot. It is only through the actions of their members that
institutions can change. It is, however, possible to argue from this basis
that institutions can “act” through its members, through for example
the roles and responsibilities it makes available to its members. More-
over, structures are not closed systems subjected to hydraulic forces. They
cannot be reduced to their constituting parts, nor can they be dismantled
and put back together to regain their original properties intact. Insti-
tutions are thus complex, non-linear and dynamic as well. Given these
conceptual properties and powers of people and institutions, structure
and agency can arguably—undeniably in my view—be considered as
complex systems, perhaps not of the same type, but complex systems
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 323

nevertheless. CDST can thus offer valuable conceptual insight about

both strata of the social realm, and provide explanatory insight into how
they interact over time. This contribution alone is very helpful in under-
standing why, for example, the structure–agency relationship is never
one-directional or deterministic, and why small changes or input can
lead to considerable changes for both structure and agency.
Concentrating on human agency, CDST scholar Al-Hoorie (2015:
55) recognizes the centrality of agency in the social sciences thus:

The uniqueness of the social sciences might lie in people’s ability to

choose how to behave. Particles and molecules do not make choices, as
their behaviour is predetermined and predictable by physical and chem-
ical laws. That such precise predictability is absent in human behaviour is
a strong argument for our ability to exercise free will through rational
thought. In fact, it is the human ability to think and make rational
choices that underlies ethical and moral judgments.

The author is careful, however, to argue that, unlike free will, agency
is manifested not in people’s direct control over their own behaviour,
but rather in their capacity to identify, evaluate and resist unconscious
impulses, or to choose a direction despite often diverging impulses.
Juarrero (1999: 17), on the other hand, questions this view of choice
even further: “Not all voluntary behavior, however, is explicitly ‘chosen.’
Only those acts brought about by a person’s own efforts as a result of
deliberation should be described as ‘chosen.’” Despite these conceptual
divergences, however, these are productive attempts by CDST adherents
to understand agency and its relationship with structure.
Perhaps the most explicit and extensive attempt by a CDST adherent
to explore agency from a variety of epistemological angles is by Juarrero
(1999), who also emphasizes the complementary nature of the structure–
agency relationship. As the author argues,

human beings are neither linear, closed, nor near equilibrium, nor likely
to be understood by models with these assumptions. People are neither
isolated from their surroundings nor simply dropped into an environment
that pushes them hither and yon. On the contrary, they are embedded in
324 J. Bouchard

their environment, which they in turn influence. (Juarrero, 1999: 116–

117)

Later on in her book, she provides a much more detailed view of how
this complementary relationship might unfold:

By means of second-order context-dependencies established by persistent

interaction with the environment, agents effectively import the environ-
ment into their internal dynamics by recalibrating these to incoming
signals. Over time, that is, both phylogenetically and developmentally,
people establish interdependencies between the environment and their
internal dynamics such that the former becomes part of their external
structure: their boundary conditions. (ibid : 197)

In her work, Juarrero provides a rather detailed CDST-guided expla-

nation of what she calls a “neurological hierarchy” in the brain. The
author presents self-consciousness and intentional action as examples of
agency’s emergent properties and powers, by arguing that (a) the interac-
tion among the component parts of people leads, over time, to higher
levels of neural organization through self-assemblage, and (b) greater
degrees of freedom can be experienced at higher levels which, through
this morphogenetic process, come to present constraining and enabling
influences upon the lower-level parts.
Inherent to the issue of agency is debate over the notion of free will,
and Juarrero tends to be rather sceptical on this point. She agrees with
Dupré’s (1993) argument that humans are complex because they have an
“extraordinarily dense concentrations of causal capacity,” a view which
leads her to lend support for the related view that free will should be
understood “not as the absence of external determining (Newtonian)
causes, but as the human capacity to impose order on a progressively
disordered world.” While this view is aligned with realism, it is also
important to state that having the capacity to change things and gain
some degree of control over the environment, while a distinct and emer-
gent property of human beings, does not necessarily amount to free will,
nor is it found in equal proportion among all human agents. In my
view, what Juarrero refers to is the capacity of people to do A and B,
but not C or D, given that human reflexivity and choices are structured
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 325

within contingent social contexts. In this sense, I share Juarrero’s doubts

regarding the potential for the notion of free will to provide much insight
into agency.
The problem I have with Juarrero’s CDST account of agency is that,
given the author’s explicit focus on agentive action, the author is surpris-
ingly ambivalent towards the issue of human consciousness, and by
extension, the issue of human reflexivity. Indeed, the author is quite
clear about her desire not to be drawn into what she calls the “debate on
consciousness.” In my view, her almost exclusive emphasis on the neuro-
logical and cognitive aspects of human action, presented by the author
as part of agency’s hierarchical structure, unfortunately bypasses reflex-
ivity as another important—and emergent—“layer” in agency’s complex
composition. In doing so, the author seems to present a rather direct
line between neurological processes, cognitive processes and then action.
From a realist angle, reflexivity must be included as an emergent feature
of human agency with causal potential, and as a potential complex
system in and of itself, a view which as we saw in Chapter Four is richly
developed by Archer. At the same time, CDST is not necessarily a unified
perspective, and we can certainly find other complexity theorists demon-
strating a great deal more interest in human consciousness and reflexivity.
For example, Byrne (2009: 1–2) clarifies that “in social systems we have
also to take account of the reflexive agency of the human actors in the
system. In other words, people can understand their world and act on
the basis of that understanding in order to change it.” While this signals
progress within CDST bastions on the issue of human agency, further
conceptual developments are needed.
Without an explicit theory or set of concepts related to reflexivity,
there is also a sense that CDST struggles to find a place for human
agency. When talks about agency surface, they unfortunately tend to
be of a determinist penchant. For example, assuming that agency is
a complex, open and dynamic system, and that “if the geometry of a
competing attractor state is such that the system is drawn away from the
position previously occupied, a phase shift will take place, the system
self-organising into a new pattern of behaviour” (Henry, 2015: 91),
CDST then seems to offer the picture of a human agent—as a complex
system, let’s not forget—that will inevitably self-organize in the presence
326 J. Bouchard

of a phase shift. In other words, we have an agent who is compelled

to reorganize in light of contextual constraints and enablements. This
effectively removes the role of reflexivity in explaining human action. If
we consider the additional example provided by Uhl-Bien et al., (2007:
299), who overemphasize the importance of consensus by arguing that
“complex adaptive systems are neural-like networks of interacting, inter-
dependent agents who are bonded in a cooperative dynamic by common
goal, outlook, need, etc.”, we can see more clearly CDST’s conceptual
limitations when it comes to the study of human beings in their social
environment, particularly with regards to reflexivity. Filipović (2015), an
AL scholar who approaches her work from a complexity perspective, also
reveals this tendency to overemphasize consensus in her discussion of
language maintenance and shift:

If the members of interested communities of practice continue to

use innovative forms in a series of good-willed, non-aggressive (low-
intensity) and high-quality (contextualized, purposeful) interactions with
the members of other communities of practice (enabling language lead-
ership), there is a possibility of this emergent language behavior to be
recognized outside of the interested community of practice as well.

While consensus is certainly an important mechanism in the produc-

tion of social life, it must also be stressed that human beings do not
inevitably share common goals with other agents, nor do they automati-
cally act in cooperative ways, and that even if their actions are not filtered
through consensus they can nevertheless be considered as “agentive,” thus
as consequential in the production of social life. This is not only because
people, social groups and institutions are complex systems interacting in
complex ways, but more specifically because people are reflexive complex
systems.
Offering a slightly different take, although still failing to integrate
reflexivity in the equation, is Callagham (2008), who views agency as
constitutive of structure. As we saw earlier in this book, this aggrega-
tive view of structure is simply insufficient to account for its distinct and
emergent properties and powers. When studying human beings and their
actions, it is therefore crucial to ask questions such as Why are human
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 327

agents – as complex systems – interacting with structure in the first place?;

and What prompts agents – as complex systems – to generate complex and
contingent causal links with other complex systems? Answers to these ques-
tions necessitate a model of human reflexivity, itself emergent from a
stratified view of the social world. Specifically, and as we have already
seen, human agents must deal with structural and cultural constraints
and enablements because they have (a) goals and projects to achieve, and
(b) reflexive powers to first recognize these constraints/enablements and
then calibrate their involvement in order to achieve their goals.
CDST adherent and AL scholar Filipović (2015: 36) defines agency as
“ways of interaction in various communicative domains (private, educa-
tional, professional, administrative, religious, to name but a few) which
are carried out by members of different speech communities of practice
and interest.” This definition of agency, however, is clearly reminiscent
of interactionism, and only focuses on potential outcomes, not processes.
In response to Filipović, I would ask What are ‘ways of interaction’, and
what are the conditions for their emergence? Also revealing a rather onto-
logically flattened view of agency within a contingent social world is the
tendency among CDST adherents to focus on local realities because other
things are too complex to deal with. Mason (2008a) makes this rather
unsatisfactory argument by saying that structure, culture and under-
lying generative mechanisms are simply too complex to deal with from
a CDST angle. As argued earlier, this prioritization of local matters
can be problematic especially for critical social researchers because it
overlooks the systemic features of institutional power and relationships,
notably various forms of oppression such as sexism, and the fact that
these systems have antecedent properties and considerable causal powers
to constrain the lives of people on the ground. It also overemphasizes
the effects of systems of oppression on people rather than the reasons
why oppression takes place and what this means in terms of the struc-
ture–agency relationship. Although in the next section I look at CDST’s
limited critical insight in more detail, suffice to say here that some CDST
adherents do show a propensity towards empiricism, and that when this
tendency surfaces in the study of human agency, it necessarily weakens
social critique.
328 J. Bouchard

I have shown in this section that CDST adherents have, for the most
part, failed to conceptualize reflexivity as one of human agency’s distinct
and emergent properties, and (potentially) as a complex system in itself.
Because of this, CDST’s view of agency remains weak. Despite these
problems, however, CDST is arguably on its way towards developing a
clearer view of agency. The works of Juarrero (1999), Semetsky (2008),
the entire edited volume by Dörnyei, MacIntyre and Henry (2015),
and Larsen-Freeman’s (2019) insightful article on learner agency, are
all examples of CDST-oriented works which provide a broad range of
detailed conceptual insight into agency as complex system embedded in,
and dialectically related to, context. However, directly and uncritically
applying CDST to the study of all aspects of reflexive human beings and
their actions in the real world might not be advisable. For one, not all
components of a person, a community or a social system are engaged
in processes aligned with each other, nor do they all work together
through consensus. In addition, people do not inevitably self-organize
in the face of external pressure or influence: this self-organization process
must be the outcome of internal deliberations (i.e., reflexivity). Although
the argument that human beings are complex systems is, in my view,
undeniable, what matters in a CDST approach to human agency is
explaining how people make structured choices in structured contexts
through their reflexive potentials. It is therefore appropriate to char-
acterize human beings as complex systems, but perhaps not exactly as
homologous to other complex systems in nature and society, such as the
weather or even social structures. It is precisely these distinct and emer-
gent ontological properties of humans that CDST must address in order
to fully understand the causal potential of reflexive human beings in
context. Uncovering the important distinctions between reflexive entities
(i.e., humans) and non-reflexive entities (institutions, structures, etc.) in
the social realm requires, however, different conceptualizations of core
notions in CDST, notably agency, self-organization, emergence and of
course system.
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 329

CDST and Critical Social Research

As we saw earlier in this book, a viable critical perspective necessitates
a strong version of human agency as powerful particular. Unfortunately,
CDST has been criticized in part by its adherents and by others including
myself as providing a weakened critical perspective, a problem which in
my opinion can be traced back directly to its weakened view of agency.
This problem, it must be reiterated, has profound consequences for the
social sciences concerned with educational issues, a strand which includes
AL. Applying CDST to the philosophy of education, Mason (2008a:
3) questions the use of complexity theory to a sociology of education,
stressing that CDST “is a descriptive theory that is […] silent on key
issues of values and ethics that educational philosophy should embrace.”
Similarly, Morrison (2008: 26) explains that

complexity theory is amoral, it only describes—and maybe explains—

what happens and has happened. Complexity theory alone cannot
provide a sufficient account of education, as education is a moral enter-
prise requiring moral debate and moral choices. Complexity theory does
not rule out discussions of good or bad, desirable and undesirable; it
simply regards them as irrelevant.

To be fair, since CDST adherents of all strands and persuasions advo-

cate theoretical and methodological pluralism, it is important to state
that CDST does not actually reject a critical agenda: it simply does not
provide one. This lacuna seriously undermines the commonly accepted
claim that CDST offers a meta-theory for the social sciences (e.g., Byrne,
1998; Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020). My position is aligned with that of
Davis and Sumara (2008: 8, emphases original), who state that “com-
plexity thinking does not rise over, but arises among other discourses.”
The authors instead define complexity thinking as oriented towards
explaining contingent social phenomena in viable, reasonable, relevant
and contingent terms, yet as dependent on active engagement with
reflexivity in research. To me, the latter part of this argument, although
fully justified, is more of a call for improving existing CDST principles
rather than a description of current complexity thinking.
330 J. Bouchard

Many reasons can explain this recalibration of CDST from meta-

theory to way of thinking. For one, not everything in the social realm
can be identified as complex: we interact with numerous closed or rela-
tively closed systems on a daily basis (systems with easily identifiable
boundaries which allow limited or no interchange with their surrounding
environment, such as clocks, cars, CD players, family budgets, etc.) and
these systems do play important causal roles in the production of social
life. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 20) recognize this when arguing that
certain phenomena in the social world are complex. From this basis,
it would be presumptuous to characterize CDST as providing a social
ontology, or a unified conceptual account of social phenomena in a broad
sense (Urry, 2005), or a set of coherent principles of reality and principles
of knowing (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020), or an effective way to organize
the world (Castellani & Hafferty, 2009). Given its ontological limita-
tions, it would also be presumptuous to claim that CDST provides “the
intellectual blueprint for conducting and evaluating research about the
human and the social world” (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020: 20). CDST has
also been presented by adherents as facilitating description and explana-
tion of social change, although it provides somewhat limited insight into
social stasis, which is a crucial element to consider when attempting, for
example, to explain the existence of beliefs, norms and social roles, as
well as the antecedent properties of various forms of social oppression.
Indeed, CDST seems to prefer a focus on constant flux as a permanent
condition of the social world.
More importantly, to be considered a meta-theory within the social
science, a perspective or paradigm cannot merely describe phenomena
but also explain them in causal terms and provide ways in which society
can and should evolve. In other words, it must have both ontological
depth and an ethical angle. Part of the problem here is that, when applied
to the study of social phenomena, the scope of CDST tends to be limited
by its adherents to the empirical and to situated social interaction. Hiver
and Al-Hoorie (2020: 3, emphasis mine), for example, claim that “com-
plexity is an empirical reality of the human and social world,” a view
drawn largely from Morin (2007). Let’s also remember two additional
points of crucial importance to critical social research: (1) the effects of
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 331

cause–effect relationships can be empirical, not the relationships them-

selves, and because of that, (2) causal explanations must therefore be
concerned with processes at the level of the real. I do not believe that
CDST is strictly empirical: we only have to look at its numerous state-
ments about the causal mechanisms binding complex parts and complex
wholes to realize that CDST is deeply concerned with ontological issues,
and therefore processes located at the level of the real. This limitation in
complexity thinking is, in my view, mistakenly imposed by many CDST
adherents, a problem discussed by Davis and Sumara (2008: 7) in the
following way: “we do not regard complexity thinking as an explanatory
system. Complexity thinking does not provide all-encompassing expla-
nations; rather, it is an umbrella notion that draws on and elaborates
the irrepressible human tendency to notice similarities among seemingly
disparate phenomena.” In other words, while CDST’s analogical poten-
tial is great, more work by its adherents with regards to ontological issues
needs to be done to apply complexity thinking fully to the study of social
phenomena. I therefore see the above issues not as problematic per se but
rather as part of a potential yet to be fully realized.
Clearly undermining CDST’s critical potential, however, is its rela-
tionist tendency, exemplified in Mercer’s (2015: 73–74) CDST account
of social networks: “social networks do not exclusively refer to online
networks of relationships, although it can include such a setting. Instead,
the term refers more broadly to a way of understanding the nature of
social structures and their interrelations in the form of a networked
structure.” What we have here is not necessarily a conflation of social
structures to networked relationships, but a view of structure which does
not account for their distinct and emergent powers and properties which
transcend situated interaction. Mercer’s statement about social networks
also overlooks the emergent outcomes of the interaction between people
and structure, notably antecedent—and entrenched—power inequali-
ties, as well as the potential for social transformation through active
and sustained agentive engagement. As Elder-Vass (2012: 158) right-
fully points out, “an explanatory social science must still remain a critical
social science if it is not simply to conceal by omission the operation
of social power.” Cochran-Smith et al., (2014: 110) extends this argu-
ment to apply to the research process itself: “in order to get the study
332 J. Bouchard

of a society ‘right,’ explanatory theories must include not simply anal-

ysis of the ideas that make the society possible, but also the critique of
those ideas. Challenging the structures that reproduce inequalities is thus
dependent on adequately interpreting the social world in the first place.”
It is therefore difficult to see at this point in time how CDST—at least
how it is currently being discussed and developed by its adherents—can
offer a viable critical perspective if it can only provide another version
of interactionism. After all, of vital importance to those who experience
and suffer from social injustice is not merely the possibility for them to
formulate and perform alternative identities or “rearrange” relationships:
it requires the ability to see and understand the forms of oppression
to which they are subjected as systems—i.e., as distinct, emergent and
causally efficacious outcomes of the interaction between structure and
agency—and develop collective systemic approaches to dismantling them.
In sum, because CDST generally fails to explain (a) agentive potentials
including reflexivity, and (b) the distinct and emergent properties and
powers of social structure, its current ability to provide a viable critical
perspective remains considerably limited. One must therefore question
Byrne’s (2003: 175) claim that “complexity is emancipating in terms of
the potential it offers to local actors. This is very far from trivial and
may be the most important single thing complexity can give to us.” In a
broader sense, and as I have already argued, one must also question the
rather popular claim among CDST adherents that CDST constitutes a
meta-theory for the social sciences.
Despite these considerable shortcomings, CDST has a great deal to
offer to social critique and critical social research. Its novel and dynamic
view of system are crucial not only to critical social research but to
the social sciences in general, for as Walby (2007) reminds us, social
inequalities and social change need to be understood as outcomes of
different social systems intersecting with each other. According to the
author, the issue of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991) has been rather
poorly addressed thus far in the social sciences, and we are only recently
beginning to understand the implications of oppression as a network of
multiple systems of inequalities interacting and (often) reinforcing one
another. Fortunately, CDST has much to offer in this regard:
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 333

The relationship between systems is differently addressed using

complexity notions. Rather than a simple hierarchical or nested rela-
tionship, complex adaptive systems coevolve, mutually adapting during
the process. The conceptualization of the process of mutual adaptation is
crucial to the theorization of the mutual constitution of complex inequali-
ties that is so important for the analysis of intersectionality. (Walby, 2007:
463)

And precisely because multiple forms of inequality can be conceptu-

alized as interacting complex adaptive systems, we must also attempt
to uncover the full ontological depth of each set of relations, as emer-
gent outcomes of the complex interaction between structure, culture and
agency. Walby (2007: 454) explains that “rather than there being merely
a single base to each of these sets of social relations, there is a much
deeper ontology, including the full range of domains: economy, polity,
violence nexus, and civil society.” With this in mind, and honing in on
the more detailed features of complex systems as they (potentially) apply
to the study of social inequality, one could reasonably claim that CDST
has the capacity to enrich critical social research if the notion of control
parameter —as it applies to people, social groups and social processes—
is emphasized and further developed from a sociological standpoint. As
we saw earlier, self-organization tends to be a rather systematic process
geared towards stability, leading to the emergence of control param-
eters as rather regular and stable processes and, one could argue, as
causal mechanisms as well. The complexity theorist Byrne (2003), who
provides in my view a convincing complexity view framed within a realist
ontology, also sees parallels between control parameters and generative
mechanisms: “Generative mechanisms are always contingent. Generative
mechanisms in the social world are contingent inter alia on the actions
of human beings” (p. 177). Control parameters are defined by the author
as

something which can have a profound influence on the kind of future

which comes to pass. The crucial questions are how can we elucidate and
delimit the range of possible futures and how can expertise in dialogue
with citizens help us in choosing the range of actions that can generate
the future we desire? (Byrne, 2003: 174)
334 J. Bouchard

In light of this, I believe it is fair to state that, while current CDST

can justifiably be criticized for offering weakened views of agency and
social critique, it can potentially facilitate the emergence of a broader,
more complexity-sensitive approach to critical social research, if merely
by reminding social researchers and practitioners (a) of the need to avoid
deterministic or conflationary viewpoints, and (b) that they are dealing
with complex systems interacting with each other, systems which can
change direction as a result of small changes. In other words, while
CDST does not offer a solid sociologically informed explanation for
why there is oppression and inequality in society, and while it does
not provide substantial strategies for social emancipation, it does allow
researchers to contemplate the very real consequences of social oppres-
sion and inequality as complex phenomena, along with all the theoret-
ical and methodological implications this entails. This CDST-informed
viewpoint is indeed a very powerful conceptual tool for critical social
researchers to have at their disposal. As Mason (2008b: 43) postulates
with regards to the core critical element in education,

If education is about fostering the emergence of learning, of creativity,

of imaginative and critical perspectives, then educators would be fair in
asking of complexity theory how we might set about establishing, or at
least contributing to the establishment of, the conditions, insofar as it is
possible to influence those conditions, for emergence to occur.

Although Byrne (2003: 174) agrees, he warns that

systematic understanding can be part of the basis of social action directed

towards the future. It allows progress back into the narrative. However,
what it does not allow back in is the notion of progress as inevitable
because complexity’s greatest attraction for me is that it reminds us that
futures are multiple and that social actions can determine which of the
possible futures will actually come to pass.

Perhaps the most elaborate and convincing critical perspective within

the complexity sciences to date is developed by the feminist scholar
Walby (2007), who criticizes the broad tendency in social research
towards conceptual fragmentation and cultural reductionism, especially
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 335

in how the central notion of identity has so far been developed. As the
author explains,

Not only is the intersection of gender with class important, but also
those with ethnicities, nation, religion and other complex inequalities.
While there is a wealth of empirical material on these intersections in
sociology and other social sciences, their theorization remains difficult
and contested. Their theorization as intersecting systems is challenged by
the critique of the old systems theory, but the major alternative theoriza-
tion within postmodern paradigm has a tendency to fragmentation and
to micro or cultural reductionism especially in the use of the concept of
identity […] a revised concept of social system is necessary to adequately
achieve the theorization of the intersection of multiple complex inequal-
ities. Complexity theory offers a route toward the resolution of these
theoretical dilemmas. (p. 450)

Although I do not yet consider CDST, at least in its current state, as

a robust resource for the development of critical social research, nor do
I consider it a robust meta-theory for the social sciences, there is clearly
much potential to contemplate. After all, we can all agree that all these
issues and all these sociological factors are complex and that they involve
complex systems interacting together in complex ways; and if we can
agree on that, we must then recognize the value of CDST to our attempts
at understanding them.
Walby’s approach to a CDST-informed critical social research adds
much value to the development of CDST within the social sciences,
particularly in the way she approaches the idea of complex systems being
“nested.” In my view, however, the problem here is that nested-ness
presupposes a hierarchy between systems, and therefore the existence
of “a specific set of determinant interconnections” (Walby, 2007: 460).
Arguably, some complex systems are nested within others, although
not all complex systems can be described in those terms. The author
recognizes this point by noting that a view of complex systems as sepa-
rate “enables us both to keep the notion of system, and the notion of
systematic inter-relatedness, while yet not pre-specifying, in a rigid way,
the nature of these inter-connections” (Walby, 2007: 459). Put in the
context of language learning research, for example, Walby’s approach also
336 J. Bouchard

allows us to conceptualize language learners as different kinds of complex

systems in different contexts, embodying different types of social rela-
tions depending on the contexts they are in and the purposes they seek
to achieve at different times. In other words, the complexity view devel-
oped by Walby allows us to present human agents as complex systems
moving within a complex intersection of systems of social relations, each
with their differentiated sets of constraining and enabling influences. In
this sense, Walby’s view is very much aligned with a realist ontology.
More importantly, if we consider that AL is in large part concerned with
educational issues, and that an ethical viewpoint is central to educational
projects (given that education centers on moral debate and choices and
the future of societies), a CDST-informed AL scholarship can perhaps
be further solidified by greater consideration for and engagement with
Walby’s work.

CDST, Transdisciplinarity and the Issue

of Metaphorical Borrowings
With growing awareness by scientists of all strands that their objects of
study are complex and cannot be fully accounted for through the appli-
cation of simple one-to-one, hydraulic causal models, many began to
look beyond their academic disciplines for answers, leading in part to
growing interests in exploring the numerous parallels between natural
and social phenomena. CDST emerged out of this desire for new insight,
making CDST-informed inquiries prime examples of transdisciplinary
scholarship. Davis and Sumara (2008: 3) define transdisciplinarity as

a research attitude in which it is understood that the members of a

research team arrive with different disciplinary backgrounds and often
different research agendas, yet are sufficiently informed about one
another’s perspectives and motivations to be able to work together as a
collective.

From this perspective, most CDST-informed research to date has

emphasized methodological plurality and transdisciplinary approaches,
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 337

and embraced the possibility of multiple ontological parallels between

natural and social phenomena. Within the field of SLA, The Douglas
Fir Group (2016) cogently reveal the multifaceted, multi-layered and
complex nature of both language learning and use in the real world—
and by extension, justify the need for transdisciplinarity in SLA research.
They also identify numerous benefits and challenges emerging from the
application of a CDST approach to the study of language learning and
teaching. Beyond AL scholarship, CDST and other complexity-based
approaches have also been adopted in transdisciplinary fashion to (a)
study a broad range of natural and social phenomena, and (b) trigger
important shifts in the structure of knowledge within both the natural
and the social sciences (Larsen-Freeman, 2015).
A broad range of (often) diverging understandings and applications
of transdisciplinarity can be noted, however. Although my goal in this
section is not to provide a comprehensive summary of those divergences,
I do want to identify some of the problems related to what I would call
“casual” or “liberal” applications of transdisciplinarity in AL research,
or what Davis and Sumara (2008) label “soft complexity science”—
i.e., the practice of borrowing concepts from other fields of knowledge
and applying them directly to the study of language-related phenomena.
Block et al., (2012: 9) offer similar warnings, arguing that transdis-
ciplinarity, “if it is to create new insight for the disciplines involved,
must do more than simply cross-reference. It must define the parame-
ters within which the common ground is being established and in so
doing, it may shine a new light on the core concepts of the different
disciplines.” This is not a mere empirical exercise: as with the task of
elucidating causal relationships in our data, defining these parameters—
as this section will argue—requires active engagement with ontological
issues, and thus with theory.
In my view, thinking of CDST as a mere “way of seeing the world,
an interpretive system rather than a route to or representation of real-
ity” (e.g., Davis & Sumara, 2008: 18) creates metaphorically laden (thus
ontologically problematic) accounts of the phenomena under scrutiny.
This problem can be observed in “casual transdisciplinarity”: an approach
which, in part, encourages casual “level-jumping” between agentive and
structural phenomena without acknowledging important ontological
338 J. Bouchard

differences between levels. Level jumping offers a simplistic scalar view

of structure and agency (i.e., agency/small/local – structure/big/global),
reduces structure to a mere aggregate of multiple agentive realities, and
promotes a somewhat mechanistic understanding of the complex and
contingent relationship between structure and agency. Level jumping,
in this sense, is very much the same process as making direct equiva-
lences between natural and social phenomena: ontological parallels are
seen as evidence that, at their core, things are all pretty much the same,
and can therefore be explained using the same conceptual and method-
ological tools. Both theoretically and methodologically, level jumping is
considerably problematic.
Of particular concern here is the CDST-informed transdisciplinary
view of AL research provided by Filipović (2015: ix, emphasis mine),
who describes transdisciplinary research as “a complexity driven process
which does not respect boundaries of scientific disciplines, or define research
problems using exclusively scientific terminology.” This is a radical
reading of a more tempered statement by Byrne (2005: 97, emphasis
mine), who argues that complexity theory “breaks down the bound-
aries between natural and social as objects of knowledge and action.”
Although the boundaries between natural and social realities are certainly
porous, and while there is arguably much value in eliminating some
of the epistemological confines perhaps artificially imposed by tradi-
tional scientific views (which are indeed grounded to some extent in
acceptance of artificial boundaries between disciplines), not respecting
the boundaries of scientific disciplines is a rather different and certainly
more problematic matter. For one, it implies that scientific insight gained
from diverging disciplines can be used without consideration not only
for the ontological differences between objects studied across disciplines
(e.g., rocks and people are, at their core, the same ‘things’ ), but also for
the epistemological traditions which have emerged over time within
specific disciplines, traditions which are fundamental to our collective
understanding of the phenomena we study.
Filipović also promulgates a somewhat inconsistent ontological view of
the social realm when discussing issues linking macro and micro realities,
as pertaining to AL scholarship. The author explains that her approach
to CDST-driven AL research is
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 339

a systematic formation of a bottom-up, complexity-driven approach to

language education policy stemming from the concept of language lead-
ership and based on learning understood as an emergent process in which
human action is reshaped through adaptive and creative communicative
processes which equip and encourage the learners to seek for new points
of view and look for innovative, socially adapted solutions. (Filipović,
2015: ix )

Although the principles outlined here are of great value to an emanci-

patory AL scholarship, Filipović is unfortunately not committed to this
view throughout her book. For example, while her focus remains very
much on local realities and bottom-up processes, she also defines her
approach as “based on macro-complexity-driven language study in which
language is viewed as a function of communicative action, as an integral
component of human social interaction, deeply and absolutely rooted
in cultural, historical, political, social and other domains of our private
and public lives” (pp. ix–x ). This confusion between agency-based and
structure-oriented viewpoints becomes more apparent in her statement
that “the structure of our social and speech communities, which directly
and indirectly impact each individual’s positioning on a social hierarchy
based on power, segregation and hegemony, stands in close and intrinsic
correlation with language choices we make every time we engage in social
interaction” (p. 1). Again, even if acceptable at face value, the problem
is that Filipović is level jumping rather too freely, not only in the above
cited statements but throughout her entire book. The unfortunate result
is that micro and macro realities are distinguished not at the level of
ontology but merely in scalar terms, thus overlooking the important
emergent properties and causal powers of people and social structures.
To her credit, Filipović identifies crucial features and advantages
of transdisciplinarity in AL scholarship, pointing out that “transdisci-
plinarity does not define research problems using exclusively scientific
terminology; rather, it includes a wide range of interested parties into
the process of problem identification and definition, as well as its solu-
tion” (p. 60). This is an important argument to consider when engaging
in transdisciplinary social research, particularly that which is concerned
with educational issues. However, her statement actually has less to do
340 J. Bouchard

with the need for robust and scientifically grounded ontological state-
ments about AL phenomena, and more to do with emphasizing and
nurturing the links between scientific research and social practice. While
a practical approach to AL scholarship is crucial for the development of
the field—let’s not forget that AL is an applied field of inquiry—one
must remain cognizant of the important differences between research as
a practice of inquiry and discovery of the world on the one hand, and
the application of research findings to real-world tasks and problems on
the other.
More importantly, while disciplines do stand on common epistemo-
logical grounds to a large extent, there are discipline-specific terminolo-
gies to acknowledge—a fact which incidentally is emblematic of our
collective commitment to objective knowledge—and acknowledgement
of this fact is crucial to transdisciplinary engagement. In the type of
transdisciplinary engagement advocated by Filipović, however, there is
the very real danger of scholars using terms and concepts from a variety
of diverging fields for metaphoric effects rather than for the development
of sound and reliable ontological insight. To be fair, the author rightfully
points out that “different stakeholders, different interested parties, very
often possess not only different types or degrees of scientific knowledge,
but also enter the research process with extremely different cognitive
cultural models and ideologies” (p.61). What is left unaddressed in this
statement, however, is how researchers invested in transdisciplinarity can
enrich their work and add further sophistication to their fields without
making casual—thus problematic—equivalences between ontologically
distinct natural and social phenomena.
Another advantage of transdisciplinarity highlighted by Filipović is
that it helps researchers overcome positivism and other forms of reduc-
tionism by facilitating the introduction of a complexity perspective in
both research and problem-solving processes. Transdisciplinarity does so
principally by countering a diametrically opposed problem: the galva-
nization of disciplines as separate areas of knowledge evolving exclusively
according to their own resources and specificities. For transdisciplinarity
to achieve this result, Filipović encourages increased and “continuous
dialogue with a number of stakeholders within and outside of academic
communities with an ultimate goal of improving peoples’ lives” (p. 71).
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 341

While arguing thus, however, Filipović prioritizes the adoption of qual-

itative research approaches to transdisciplinary studies, thus overempha-
sizing the inductive element in social research and foregoing the potential
of quantitative approaches, including statistical analysis, to describe
broader, population-based complex realities. Again, the issue here is
ontological: it has to do with the author’s problematic macro–micro
distinction, which leads her to dismiss quantitative research as “dog-
matic” and positivist. In other words, while Filipović expresses numerous
ideas of considerable value to a renewed and transdisciplinary AL schol-
arship, these ideas are not grounded in a robust social ontology, leading
to a problematic epistemological position which, in my view, coun-
ters the author’s goal of transforming AL scholarship into a genuinely
transdisciplinary discipline.
To see why Filipović’s CDST approach to transdisciplinarity is prob-
lematic, let’s consider the following example. Arguably, viewing both
human beings and the weather as complex systems, and identifying a
series of parallels between both phenomena, can be instructive in the
sense that it can remind us that the natural and the social are not mutu-
ally exclusive universes but rather parts of what we understand broadly
as “the world.” At the same time, as emergent complex systems, the
weather and people do have important distinct and emergent properties.
For example, natural phenomena are said to possess dissipative struc-
tures, or the capacity to dissipate energy/matter through the process of
adapting to contextual pressure or change. In more extreme cases where
such external forces become overwhelming and undermine the integrity
of natural complex systems, leading to “uncontrollable” internal distur-
bances within these systems, it is possible for weather patterns to “fall
apart” or “dissolve.” Filipović (2015: 32) explains this process thus: “If
the information becomes such a large disturbance that the system can no
longer ignore it, the real change is at hand. At this moment, jarred by
so much internal disturbance and far from equilibrium, the system will
fall apart. In its current form, it cannot deal with the disturbance, so it
dissolves.” As a language teacher, I must ask at this point: Can language
learners also ‘fall apart’ or ‘dissolve’ when they face problems or disturbances
during the language learning process? What becomes clear here is that
two profoundly diverging understandings of dissipation, of system collapse
342 J. Bouchard

and of complex systems are discussed by the author: one pertaining to

natural phenomena and another pertaining to people. Without explicitly
contextualizing these complex processes within an understanding of the
distinct and emergent properties and powers of language learners and the
weather, it is difficult to see how some of the metaphorical terminology
within CDST can be of use to the study of people and social phenomena,
much less elucidate their causal involvement in social contexts.
Also problematic in terms of its metaphorical quality is the notion of
initial condition, a notion central to a CDST perspective and discussed
earlier in this chapter. Verspoor (2015: 38) explains the relevance of this
notion to our understanding of complex system change and adaptation
in the following way:

A dynamic system traces a particular (1) trajectory (i.e. a sequence of

states) (2) over time (3) in the state space. The emergence of such a
trajectory is based on the fact that a dynamic system describes iterative
processes; take the first state to produce the second, take the second to
produce the third, take the third to produce the fourth, and so forth for as
many successive states as are needed to describe the system’s time course.
The iterative nature of the processes involved is central to the notion of
development, where the next ‘state’ of development is a function of the
preceding state and a condition for the next state.”

While arguing that initial conditions of complex systems are crucial

for determining the trajectory of change, Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020:
49) explain that “all complex systems have a history and no system
can be conceived of without taking that history into account. Nonfi-
nality is an important aspect of that history; what this means is because
final states do not exist for system development, complex systems are
not defined by progressing towards an endpoint.” This is an impor-
tant argument to make, especially with regards to phenomena studied
in the social sciences, given the high degree—and different kind—of
complexity involved when studying human beings. However, how can
the notion of initial condition be conceptualized as a core characteristic
of a complex system marked by nonfinality? Similarly, Sealey and Carter
(2004: 12) also question the usefulness of the concept of initial condition
(or critical condition) to many of the phenomena studied in the social
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 343

sciences. As they point out, “it is difficult to establish the primary […]
constituents of marriage, since it is an institution which has changed over
a long historical frame. It is the emergent product of previous emergent
products, as contemporary social practices nearly always are.” Similarly,
in defining the language learner as active agent within a contingent social
realm, I would question the usefulness of the notion of initial condition
as (a) allowing complex systems to evolve over time, while (b) being rela-
tive to the observer, or not being “initial” in a literal sense (Hiver &
Al-Hoorie, 2020). This problem is noted by Juarrero (1999: 257) in the
following way: “since we carry our history on our backs we can never
begin from scratch, either personally or as societies.”
As a potential solution to this conceptual dilemma, some researchers
including Verspoor (2015) have suggested that, in the study of human
beings, the concept of initial condition should refer to the first moment
the data is collected by the researcher. The realist thinker Elder-Vass
(2010: 33–34) makes a similar argument thus:

There is no single causal explanation of any particular state of affairs,

since this will inevitably be a consequence, not of a single previous state,
but rather of a series of previous states at different points in the past. It is
a matter of judgement which previous states of affairs we consider most
relevant in any particular case, although it is common to think in terms
of the most recent change as the most relevant cause.

Although a sensible solution, it goes somewhat counter to the need

to understand contextual factors at play, including the historical roots
of complex systems in order to understand how they evolve and how
they relate to context as well as other complex systems. Although the
notion of initial condition is not without value to the study of social
phenomena, more needs to be said regarding how it applies to people
and their engagement in the world, and how it can illuminate causal
relationships in a specific ontological sense.
This section has revealed how some of the concepts in contemporary
CDST literature are, upon greater scrutiny, not necessarily well-suited
to the study of humans, despite the fact that the latter can undeniably
be presented as complex systems. In many ways, this highlights some of
344 J. Bouchard

the important challenges involved in transdisciplinary research, notably

the need to acknowledge and respect the important differences between
scientific disciplines. Huckle (2004: 38) identifies three core differences
between the social and the natural sciences:

• The subject matter of the social sciences cannot be reduced to that

of the natural sciences (e.g., human behaviour cannot be reduced to
biochemical reactions), there are qualitative differences;
• Social reality is pre-interpreted. Society is both produced and repro-
duced by its members and is therefore both a condition and an
outcome of their activity (social relations and structures). The social
sciences have a subject-subject relationship with their subject matter,
rather than a subject-object one of the kind that characterizes the
natural sciences;
• Social structures, unlike biophysical structures, are usually only “rel-
atively enduring.” The processes they enable are not universal or
unchanging over time and space.

Admittedly, many CDST adherents have, to date, identified a range

of challenges in applying complexity thinking to the study of people
(e.g., Davis & Sumara, 2008), including the problem of metaphor-
ical borrowing across disciplines. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 6), for
example, argue with regards to AL research that

uncritically importing mathematical methods wholesale from complexity

science would be of limited productivity, given that the objects of interest
in applied linguistics sometimes differ radically from those in the natural
sciences, and because the social sciences do not have the sort of data that
the physical sciences use to model complexity mathematically.

However, CDST adherents have yet to explain in detail why

metaphors, although perhaps intellectually productive, inspiring and in
the spirit of humans’ marked capacity for analogical thought, can indeed
complicate the development of robust ontological statements necessary
for the development of knowledge within and across disciplines. While
there is certainly a great deal of potential involved in transdisciplinary
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 345

exchanges of insight, there needs to be acknowledgement by CDST

adherents that ontological differences between the natural and the social
are real, and by extension, different phenomena require different concep-
tual and analytical approaches, and not all of these will necessarily benefit
from, or might be relevant to, a complexity perspective. As Elder-Vass
(2010: 21) observes,

different kinds of entities need different kinds of theories to explain

the mechanisms that produce their emergent properties, and complexity
theory may be useful in helping us to understand some of these mech-
anisms, but even quite simple objects can have emergent properties and
it may be entirely possible to explain these properties without the help of
complexity theory.

In light of this, one might ask the following question: What moti-
vates a complex system to follow specific pathways and not others? For
plants and insects, movements in one direction and not another are
most likely the outcomes of an interaction between internal and external
forces, although we would not necessarily categorize these movements as
“choices” in the same way a human might choose, for example, to learn
a language, engage in altruistic behaviour, strive to attain a life of luxury,
or commit suicide. Clearly, these human phenomena entail a different
kind of complexity to that which is experienced by non-reflexive enti-
ties in the world. Although not entirely disconnected from the need
people have to survive in this world, reflexive choices are possible for
reasons other than an inherent system-preserving function. Stated differ-
ently, human reflexivity cannot be reduced to the pursuit of instrumental
goals. Furthermore, unlike animals or other natural entities, humans are
also able to radically change their environment and, at times, bypass
or bifurcate external forces. For example, people can “escape” (to some
extent and only momentarily) a particular environment by moving very
far away from it; they can also escape the clutches of (some but certainly
not all) structural and cultural pressures (although it is crucial to state
here that they can only do so at a cost). Moreover, while there are certain
structural and cultural realities from which we simply cannot extricate
ourselves—e.g., our need to use symbiotic means to communicate, our
346 J. Bouchard

need to secure specific physical and material conditions for survival,

etc.—there are other structural and cultural realities from which we can
temporarily “do without”—e.g., not paying taxes for a while, teachers
disregarding state-mandated language-in-education policies. Of course,
we can learn different languages and engage in alternative modes of
communication, a power which non-reflexive, complex natural entities
simply cannot enjoy. These differences matter a great deal when we try
to understand what people do in context and why they do so.
Given that some of the principles and notions in CDST are more
pertinent to the study of non-reflexive complex systems, an improved
transdisciplinary CDST research of benefit to AL scholarship therefore
requires a thorough review of the concepts of relevance across disciplines,
and those of discipline-specific value. To that end, I encourage readers to
consult Byrne (2009), Cochran-Smith et al (2014) and Reed and Harvey
(1992), who discuss the usefulness of CDST to the social sciences,
without in my view losing sight of the important features differenti-
ating people and other natural objects. In the process, they can also gain
a clearer understanding of the challenges involved in transdisciplinary
scholarship.
Possibly, complex realism—a recent fusion between complexity theory
and realism—offers a broad range of possibilities in this regard.
According to Byrne and Uprichard (2012: 110),

a complex realist perspective to the social necessitates a radical re-jigging

of some of the key building blocks of empirical social science. Further-
more, we are aware that the language we use is taken and adapted from a
relatively wide range of disciplinary fields, so some readers might under-
stand some terms (e.g., near neighbors, state space, control parameters)
with respect to their research backgrounds, which may or may not be
precisely what is meant.

In other words, this acknowledgement necessitates a critical approach

to the use of metaphors in the development of scientific discourse,
and a rejection of casual level jumping. CDST-informed AL research
also requires acknowledgement that humans are also natural objects
embedded in a natural world. This position is important to a realist
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 347

ontology, particularly as it applies to causality. Acknowledgement of

humans as natural objects embedded in a natural world, however, should
not lead to the posthumanist conflationary argument that social and
natural phenomena are ontologically equivalent (see Chapter Two for
discussion).
The issue of metaphors in scientific discourse is indeed a difficult
one to untangle, if not mainly because human thought is in large part
analogical and nourished by creative associative processes. By extension,
just as all scientific terminologies are theory-laden, both the natural and
the social sciences depend on metaphors to develop ontological state-
ments about their objects of study (Lopez, 2001), as metaphors serve
rather specific and important ideational purposes. As Juarrero (1999:
239) explains,

the purpose of using concrete imagery and metaphors is to induce the

explainer or interpreter to “see it fresh” by recognizing that criteria used
to identify “similar” and “different” reflect the particular shared experi-
ence from which they are formulated. Metaphors and analogies become
especially necessary when explainer and explained do not share a common
tradition.

Considering that we use language to conduct research, and that

language is inherently associative and possesses core non-representational
functions, it is appropriate to acknowledge the metaphorical grounds
upon which our work as scientists becomes possible. Brumfit (1997) is,
in this sense, correct when arguing that researchers constantly navigate
between idealizing and explaining, or apprehension and explanation. As
we attempt to balance these two projects, “metaphors act as hypotheses,
to be rejected where they are felt to be no longer useful” (p. 89). My
point, however, is that the use of analogies and metaphors for their
illustrative potentials is one thing, and the scientific development of
ontological statements about particular objects of study is another. Both
processes are, of course, deeply related and certainly mutually influential,
but they are certainly not the same. Dörnyei et al. (2008) also identify
this tendency as part of a soft complexity approach, and warn against
348 J. Bouchard

liberal metaphorical borrowings from the hard sciences by underlining

the distinct and emergent properties of people. As the authors note,

many of the core metaphors of complex dynamic systems theory – for

example the central notion of ‘attractor states’ – originate in pure math-
ematics […] and it is questionable whether we can meaningfully deploy
such metaphors by mapping them onto a social reality. […] The social
and the mathematical realms are not isomorphic. (p. 3)

From a similar standpoint, Byrne (2005) warns against letting CDST

become a mere metaphorical apparatus in the social sciences. However,
I disagree with the author on the point that “this can only happen if
the complexity frame of reference shapes the actual tools of investigative
social science themselves.” For one, and as I have suggested previously,
not everything in CDST is useful to the study of language users as
people and human agents. For example, the notion of fractals is, in my
view, not a particularly insightful one because it can lead to problematic
observations about people and societies being structurally similar, only
to be distinguished on scalar terms, thus bifurcating their respectively
distinct and emergent properties and powers. Davis and Sumara (2008:
43) define fractals as

generated through (potentially) infinite recursive processes—in contrast

to Euclidean forms, which are built up through finite linear sequences of
operations. At each stage in a recursive process, the starting point is the
output of the preceding iteration, and the output is the starting point
of the subsequent iteration […] every stage in this process is an elabora-
tion, and such elaborations can quickly give rise to unexpected forms and
surprising complexity.

In my view, there are considerable problems with using fractals as

metaphors to explain different social phenomena such as people, groups,
institutions, structures and society. Granted, fractals are not identical
in shape, but the reason why scientists discuss fractals as important
elements is that they are judged to be sufficiently—i.e., statistically—
similar enough for them to draw causal inference between them, or to
be more precise, between smaller parts and larger wholes. Fractal theory
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 349

demonstrates this parallel essentially through statistical analysis, specif-

ically to demonstrate that certain phenomena and objects (both small
and large) in the natural world are not only morphologically or geomet-
rically similar but that they are also “scale-free,” a notion which does not
fit well within a stratified and emergentist realist social ontology. Specif-
ically, fractal-based statements lack the ontological depth necessary to
the formulation of robust claims about causal links between people and
organizations. In this sense, Davis and Sumara (2008: 66) are correct
when specifying that while nested phenomena “can be understood to
have deep similarities, they cannot be collapsed into or reduced to one
another. New laws emerge and new rules apply at each level of complex
organization.” Again, this is because of the process of emergence, which
produces more complex interactions at higher levels of organization.
Given the commitment to objective knowledge advocated by both
realists and CDST adherents, metaphorical analogies should be under-
stood merely as temporary labels to be replaced by more conceptually
sophisticated language when possible. Aligned with this view, complexity
theorists Davis and Sumara (2008: 70–71, emphasis mine) propose the
notion of interobjectivity in the following terms:

Efforts at the generation of knowledge are suggested [within a complexity

perspective] to be not just matters of intersubjective accord, but of the
mutually affective relationships between phenomena and knowledge of
phenomena – that is, interobjectivity. […] interobjectivity does not assert
a direct causal connection of descriptions and the things described. The
point is not that things change because they are noticed and described,
but that knowers’ actions are altered by virtue of their descriptions.

At the same time, objective knowledge is what we are after, not neces-
sary how we discursively—and further along, metaphorically—appre-
hend reality. Let’s remember that our various and variegated transitive
understandings of the world are about the intransitive aspects of that
world, rather than exclusively about those understandings themselves.
Because of that, we must be mindful of how we formulate our obser-
vations about the world so as to develop robust ontological statements
which are not complicated by the weight of metaphors. For example,
350 J. Bouchard

the statement which says that language (or languages, language learners
or language classrooms for that matter) is like or similar to a complex
system in the natural world, and the statement which says that it is the
same as any complex system in the natural world, present two funda-
mentally different epistemological positions regarding language. The first
one can be insightful and perhaps even motivate researchers to consider
alternative conceptual possibilities, while the second is somewhat contro-
versial and is very likely to be contradicted by conceptual and empirical
research. Liberal uses of metaphors in soft complexity science can, in
other words, lead researchers to overlook the need for robust theoret-
ical principles to describe and explain the social world, the phenomena
within it, and the complex causal relationships between them.

Emphasis on Evolutionary Change

Another important aspect of CDST deserving critical scrutiny is its
emphasis on evolutionary change. This is noted by Morrison (2008:
19–20), who states that “complexity theory is a theory of change, evolu-
tion, adaptation and development for survival.” To be sure, evolutionary
approaches within the social sciences are not germane to complexity
theory, nor are they particularly new, as social scientists of various strands
began to adopt evolutionary principles not long after the publication
of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in 1859. The characterization
of Marx as an early social evolutionist provides a good example of
the importance and relevance of Darwin’s work to the social sciences.
Evolutionary theory has helped shape social fields such as evolutionary
anthropology, anthropological genetics, paleoanthropology, as well as
influencing a range of theories in psychology, human cognition, language
studies, economics, archaeology, law and politics. Within realist bastions,
evolution is considered an important underlying generative mechanism
within society, with Sayer (2000: 26) stating that “social change is evolu-
tionary – path-dependent yet contingent, shaped by legacies yet affected
by contingently related processes or conditions.” In this section, I do
not argue that evolution-based ideas cannot be applied to the study of
social phenomena; rather, I argue that they cannot explain the full range
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 351

of possible human thoughts, discourses and behaviours. Extending the

argument made in the previous section, I also aim to identify some of
the problems associated with CDST adherents making direct conceptual
equivalences between evolutionary processes shaping natural phenomena
and those shaping social phenomena.
Akin to emergent processes to some extent, there are undoubtedly
numerous social phenomena that can be characterized as outcomes of
evolutionary processes. For example, we can compare tribal social struc-
tures with the emergence of international institutions such as the World
Health Organization and reasonably conclude that a great deal of social
complexity has emerged throughout history as a result of evolutionary
processes. At the meso level, a similar observation is made by Allen
(2009: 454) thus: “successful organizations require underlying mecha-
nisms that continuously create internal microdiversity of ideas, practices,
schemata, and routines […] It is this that will drive an evolving, emer-
gent system that is characterised by qualitative, structural change.” We
can also consider a person’s growth over the years and observe that the
development of his/her sense of morality, maturity and so forth are the
results of years of cognitive, emotional and moral evolution, in the sense
of greater complexity and ability to deal with structural and cultural
constraints and enablements. Clearly, evolution plays a big part in the
ongoing production of individual and social phenomena.
CDST posits that the initial conditions of a complex system allow it to
evolve over time through an intricate process of co-adaptation between
phenomenon and context (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020). With particular
relevance to the issue of learning, adaptation is also understood within
CDST as the self-organization capacity of a complex system essentially
geared towards improvement and optimal performance, and not merely
to reach a balance or ensure stability. In light of these core principles and
more, Morrison (2002: 6, emphasis mine) defines CDST as highly prag-
matic, as “a theory of survival, evolution, development and adaptation
[which] suggests that what is right at any moment is what works at that
time to ensure survival” (p. 27). Mason (2008b: 40) echoes this view
thus: “Darwin and complexity theory are […] complementary in their
explanation of evolution, in their explanation of the nature of change.”
Allen (2009: 454) explores complex non-linear system theory as it relates
352 J. Bouchard

to organizational psychology, and draws a direct link between CDST and

the theory of evolution thus:

Evolutionary drive was put forward some years ago […] as the underlying
mechanism that describes the change and transformation of complex
systems. In this view, evolution is driven by the interplay over time of
processes that create microdiversity at the elemental level of the system
and the selection operated by the collective dynamic that results from
their interaction together with that of the system with its environment.

Juarrero (1999) offers a slightly more general understanding of

complex systems as goal-directed rather than goal-intended, reflecting
a consensus among CDST adherents that evolution is core to the
complexity approach, acting as a generative causal mechanism, with
survival as the ultimate purpose of complex systems. A similar point is
also made by Ramiah (2014).
At the same time, progress can be more than an evolutionary trajec-
tory and can indeed be defined in myriads of ways. In my view, when
CDST adherents discuss education or language learning as an evolu-
tionary process, for example, they are referring largely to evolution of
a moral kind. While survival and evolution are certainly important
processes explaining the trajectories of complex natural systems, moral
or ethical judgments are more or less irrelevant to an understanding
of those. In light of this, can we apply the same strategy (or perhaps
metaphor) to the study of human beings and social institutions? Can we
say that language learners, for example, “do what they do” because they
are engaged in a quest for survival in hostile social and natural worlds,
and that regardless of their engagement in this process, researchers have
no justifiable reasons to offer moral judgement? Obviously, this leaves
a lot unaccounted for, notably the complex, rich and non-linear nature
of human reflexivity and the moral nature of educational projects. It is
also difficult to overlook the teleological core of this social evolutionary
viewpoint.
Processes observed throughout human history, including language
learning, are aptly described as complex outcomes of the interaction
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 353

between multiple causes and underlying mechanisms—themselves emer-

gent outcomes of a contingent, diachronic relationship between agency,
culture and structure. Evolutionary social progress can indeed be consid-
ered as one of the possible mechanisms, although not the only one.
When looking at human history, for example, we must also account
for realities such as social regress or lack of progress, destruction, geno-
cides, unequal access to education based on gender and socioeconomic
status, and of course the persistence of such systems of oppression and
inequality over decades and centuries. In other words, evolutionary prin-
ciples are insufficient because they fail to account for social morphostasis
and morphogenesis on critical—i.e., moral—terms. After all, it would
certainly be dubious, if not morally reprehensible, for us as social scien-
tists to characterize genocide, social inequality, bullying and domestic
violence as parts of an evolutionary social trajectory, and to think of
evolution in the social realm solely in terms of progress. This bears
considerable relevance to AL research, especially with its close philosoph-
ical parallels with education as a fundamentally moral enterprise. This is
largely because the process of natural selection—core to the evolutionary
model—provides an incomplete, perhaps even morally dubious, explana-
tion of educational activities including language learning and teaching.
Morrison (2008: 29) also notes this problem in the context of education,
and suggests that

complexity theory needs to clarify whether it is a theory of survival in an

unfriendly world, or simply a call to development. If it is the former then
whether this is an apt model for education is questionable. Education
should be touched by humanity, rather than being red in tooth and claw.

Offering a possible resolution to this ambiguity is Guala (2012), who

explores the conceptual links between biology and the social sciences
in general by looking at how evolutionary theory can be applied to an
evolutionary social theory. As the author clarifies,

The unifying trait of evolutionary social theory is the use of biolog-

ical models of transmission and selection in heterogeneous populations.
A major difference between [the evolutionary program in the social
354 J. Bouchard

sciences] and those of sociobiologists or evolutionary psychologists is that

contemporary theorists do not attempt to provide explanations of human
behavior based exclusively on genetic mechanisms of transmission and
selection. (pp. 437–438, emphases mine)

This point seems to be missed by Elder-Vass (2010: 92), who argues

that sociobiology and evolutionary psychology are mistaken because they
attempt to account for human behaviour in relation to human genes. As
Guala (2012: 437) reminds us,

contemporary theorists do not attempt to provide explanations of human

behavior based exclusively on genetic mechanisms of transmission and
selection. The commitment to genetic explanation nowadays is consid-
ered unnecessary – indeed a liability that has caused more harm than
good to the evolutionary program. [...] most contemporary evolutionary
social theorists take a pluralist or agnostic stance concerning transmis-
sion mechanisms, while retaining the Darwinian emphasis on population
thinking.

From this pluralist or agnostic stance and its understanding of evolu-

tion not exclusively in genetic terms but as a general mechanism of
change, we can begin to consider learning and social change as evolu-
tionary in the sense of being contingent and historical , thus moving
somewhat beyond the confines of the Darwinian model. Since the social
world in which we live is an open system, and that what happened in
the past has had various consequences for what has happened subse-
quently since, it is reasonable to view human agents and social processes
together as engaged in an evolutionary trajectory. To follow such trajec-
tory is to be inherently historical, while also being time-irreversible: two
core principles in CDST.
The problem with this viewpoint is, of course, that evolution is given a
central role. Stated differently, this viewpoint posits evolution as the prin-
cipal mechanism of change, a strategy which somewhat goes against both
CDST and realist principles of causality which stipulate that changes in
the social world result from multiple, complex causality, not the result of
a single causal force. While a complex system is sensitive to initial condi-
tions, it also possesses a certain degree of freedom with regards to how
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 355

it will “evolve” beyond its initial state. This is because complex systems
are open, dynamic and emergent, which means that considerable unpre-
dictability is to be expected with regards to how they change—or stay
the same—over time.
Also of importance, changes in complex systems—whether these are
languages, discourses, or reflexive human beings—may not necessarily be
aimed towards constant improvement, as they might also fail to improve
and even degenerate. Focusing on culture, Lewens (2012: 458) formu-
lates a similar view thus: “Evolution is change, and a theory of cultural
evolution, one might argue, is any theory that explains cultural change,
cultural stability, cultural divergence, or cultural homogenization over
time.” Focusing more explicitly on the process of natural selection, the
author argues that

natural selection can promote the spread of skills or moral values, regard-
less of whether it is genetic inheritance or learning which explains their
transmission. What’s more, skills and moral values are not only trans-
mitted vertically from parents to offspring: They can be passed from
children to their friends, from teachers to children, from role models to
adults, and so forth. (p. 459)

From a realist standpoint, however, objections could be raised on

grounds that this view of cultural change and elaboration endows evolu-
tionary mechanisms with agentive properties and powers rather than
people. Also problematic in Lewens’ argumentation is his depiction of
ideas as examples of entities acting as replicators, elements which are
essential to evolutionary processes. Specifically, he argues that since ideas
spread from mind to mind, they can also be understood as making copies
of themselves and show a capacity to adapt or fit to new circumstances,
or act as replicators. The problem with this analogy is that ideas remain
inert entities; as such, they do not replicate themselves, nor do they act
reflexively and purposefully in the world. Ideas do not have agentive
powers, nor can they be equated to cells which do have the capacity for
self-organization. Instead, ideas are part of the CS and serve as cultural
resources. When drawn upon by human agents through their reflexive
powers, ideas then come in the form of constraints and enablements.
356 J. Bouchard

Ideas can be causally efficacious when “acting through” the sense-making

capacities of people who believe in them, but even then it is people who
think and act, not ideas. Therefore, Lewens’ analogy constitutes a prob-
lematic metaphorical statement about ideas rather than an ontological
position regarding the nature of ideas. To be fair, the author does identify
some of the problems in this analogy.
At surface level, it must be noted that an evolutionary perspective
can indeed be appealing from a moral perspective—i.e., the idea that
through greater moral engagement and sophistication, people and soci-
eties can evolve beyond predatorial instincts towards solidarity, and in
the process survive the test of time. At the same time, the application
of evolutionary theory to the study of social phenomena (a) considerably
diminishes humans’ agentive potential, (b) presents evolution as the main
causal mechanism and (c) conjures a teleological view of social processes
and phenomena. Although Lewens (2012) notes that Darwin refuted
a teleological viewpoint in his theory of evolution, the basic fact that
evolutionary theory places survival as the central purpose of transmis-
sion, selection and adaptation makes his refutation a rather unconvincing
one. For one, it is difficult to deny that the self-interest principle—also
core to evolutionary theorizing—provides a rather incomplete explana-
tory model for human phenomena such as altruism, for example, or
even suicide (to be distinguished from acts of self-destruction in the
animal world aimed at the survival of the species). If we see human
beings and their variegated reflexive engagements with the forces of struc-
ture and culture solely from the lens of evolutionary theory, altruism
then becomes nothing more than a strategy to maximize one’s benefits
or gains, and phenomena such as suicide or altruism become inexpli-
cable human phenomena. These conclusions are unsatisfactory precisely
because they bypass the importance and complexity of human reflexivity.
In sum, evolutionary thinking seems to be aligned with a restricted
view of complexity (Bastardas-Boada, 2019; Byrne & Callaghan, 2014),
which is more appropriate to the study of non-reflexive entities, rather
than general complexity, which is better suited to the study of the
social world as a multi-layered, non-linear and radically open reality.
CDST adherents should, in this sense, provide more nuanced interpre-
tations of evolution as a mechanism for change, and justify why the
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 357

term “evolution” is preferred when “change” (a much broader and useful

concept in my view) seems to be what they have in mind. Viewing
social phenomena through a CDST lens therefore necessitates a view of
evolutionary progress in the social realm as interacting with other causal
mechanisms, a view which does not conjure teleological, positivist or
hydraulic interpretations of change, a stronger view of human agency,
and a view which also affords researchers the possibility for justifiable
ethical judgments.

A Tendency to Overemphasize
the Relationship Between Things
As we saw in Chapters Three and Four with regards to structural
functionalism, historical materialism, Bourdieu’s theory of habitus,
Habermas’s lifeworld/system distinction, as well as the various strands
of realism, most social theories (despite their diverging emphases) recog-
nize the need to appreciate the distinct and emergent causal powers
of social phenomena including agency and structure. Stated differently,
these perspectives can be said to appreciate the stratified nature of society
in different degrees and in their own ways. As we also saw previously,
however, some perspectives in social theories such as social construc-
tionism, symbolic interactionism, poststructuralism, posthumanism and
structuration theory show a propensity towards relationism (i.e., towards
central conflation) by defining social phenomena as existing only because
of their relationship with other phenomena.
The basic principle guiding relationism—and the reason why rela-
tionism can only provide a flattened ontological viewpoint—is that if
society and individuals are so deeply connected, differentiating them
must then be counterproductive to social research. With Giddens’ struc-
turation theory, for example, we saw that structure and agency are
defined as two sides of the same coin, which means that studying
them involves looking at different aspects of the same thing. We also
saw how conflationary thinking complicates causal explanation in large
part because it fails to integrate emergence as part of the inquiry and
as precondition for causal explanation (i.e., the notion that the power
358 J. Bouchard

of phenomena to cause or influence other phenomena is part of their

distinct and emergent properties). The problem under focus in this
section, therefore, is a tendency among social scientists to confuse distinc-
tion with dichotomization. To clarify, the act of distinguishing things
ontologically is essential to the task of formulating causal explanations,
whereas the process of dichotomization is problematic when it comes
to issues of causality because two ontologically different things are thus
defined as “opposites”, thus diminishing their interplay. What usually
follows this problematic conclusion is an epistemological (and perhaps
even moral) choice regarding the importance of one over the other (e.g.,
structure = bad; agency = good ). As we also learned, realism rejects
dichotomization, and while it sees science very much as a quest to
understand how things are causally related, conceptual differentiation
(contra relationism) remains of capital importance to the production of
ontological statements and the refinement of scientific knowledge.
CDST adherents, although not necessarily committed to relationism,
are unfortunately less clear on this issue. Recognizing the stratified
nature of society and complex systems, Juarrero (1999: 127) stressed
the distinct and emergent properties of complex systems, explaining
that “autocatalysis’s ‘goal’ is its own maintenance and enhancement in
the face of disintegrating pressures from the environment. It is to that
extent partially decoupled from and independent of the environment:
autonomous.” Here, causality is seen by the author as a relationship
unfolding between two ontologically different phenomena: the human
agent as a specific kind of complex system, and the environment as a
different kind of complex system. Byrne and Uprichard (2012: 117) are
perhaps more explicit on this point, arguing that

ultimately, the search to empirically describe and explore complex

causality in a sociologically meaningful way is a focus on difference. A
focus on difference is proposed by Cilliers, who has written about this at
some length. […] once we move from variables to cases, and we think
about cases over time, then we are immediately forced to think about
sorting out types of trajectories.
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 359

The strand known as complex realism is thus more explicit on this

point, and provides much insight into the importance of understanding
difference when explaining both change and stability in the social realm.
At its core, complex realism assumes that while there is constant flux
in society, patterns are observable and are worth investigation, and such
investigation is likely to reveal underlying mechanisms. Complex realism
is thus also specifically concerned with causality, and tends to consider
probabilistic causality, defined by Williams (2021: 60) as “the philo-
sophical and methodological approach that aims to distinguish between
mere association and causal properties. Probabilistic causality is simply
stated: A causes B if A’s occurrence increases the probability of B occur-
ring.” The author adds that accounting for probabilistic causality within
a complex realist ontology requires tolerance for “a certain amount of
error and still be a good enough explanation of real phenomena. The
methodological aim is to reduce error” (ibid : 61). In addition, Byrne
and Uprichard (2012: 117) remind us that, within all realist strands,
complex or otherwise, consideration for both differences and similarities
are crucial. Similarly, Henry (2015: 84) understands that relationships
unfold between different complex systems, explaining that

the study of a system’s dynamics involves the investigation of the connect-

edness of the system’s constituent components, and the links between
these components and those of other systems […] This means that the
researcher needs to map out the system under investigation, identify its
focal components, take note of other systems operating simultaneously
and plot the relationships they might have with the focal system. All the
while, the researcher is considering how focal components are interacting
and changing.

In short, although relationships are seen as occupying central impor-

tance to research, there is clear recognition among many CDST adher-
ents that the complex phenomena under scrutiny must also be seen as
different from each other if complex causality is to be revealed. At the
same time—and this is core to the critique in this section—this perspec-
tive is not always maintained consistently among CDST adherents. For
360 J. Bouchard

example, while Juarrero (1999) can be said to provide numerous obser-

vations about complex systems which fit rather well within realism’s
stratified viewpoint, she also argues that “it is nonsense to claim that
we end at the contours of our body, or that our individual concepts
and intentions exist independently of our experience and surroundings”
(p. 212). While the boundaries of complex open systems are obvi-
ously porous and difficult to demarcate, and that they share a deep
and ongoing relationship with other complex systems and contexts, it is
certainly not nonsensical to point out the ontological differences between
complex systems. Again, the problem here results from equating differ-
entiation with dichotomization. What Juarrero seems to miss is that it
is also nonsensical to see individual concepts and intentions as mere
epiphenomena of experience and context. To put it differently, confla-
tion should not be the remedy to dichotomization. Later on in her book,
Juarrero (1999: 246) moves back to a stratified viewpoint, arguing that
“dynamical systems are also partly independent of their parts, which, in
self-organizing, have become replaceable components. Once organized,
a system’s attractors serve as its formal and final cause, both preserving
its identity and drawing behavior into its overall organization.” In short,
her argumentation constantly moves between differentiation and confla-
tion, a conceptual ambivalence which, in my view, can be explained
by a weakened social ontology, and which considerably complicates the
development of causal statements.
Other complexity theorists also adhere to relationism. For example,
Osberg et al. (2008) argue that knowledge and reality should not be
distinguished from each other because, according to them, they are part
of the same complex system. Again, we have the “two sides of the same
coin” problem here. From a realist perspective, although knowledge of
the world is understood as inherently about that world, the position held
by the authors is problematic because it clearly conflates ontology and
epistemology within a single layer of knowledge. Perhaps more radical
in this approach is Davis and Sumara (2008: 34), who argue that “in a
complex network, no part of the system has any meaning in isolation
from the rest of the system (an assertion shared by coherence theorists),
and so one must take into account the structure of the whole system.”
This view is clearly problematic when applied to the study of social
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 361

groups. In AL worlds, for example, we would face serious ethical difficul-

ties if we were to claim that no individual language learner—as complex
system—“has any meaning” in isolation from other language learners
or the classroom. It is indeed unfortunate that Davis and Sumara argue
thus, given that much of their overall argumentation reveals appreciation
on their part for a stratified view of the social realm, particularly when the
authors discuss the issue of level jumping in their complexity approach
to education, or when they argue (rightfully in my opinion) that “it is
the system – and not the system’s context – that determines how it will
respond to emergent conditions” (p. 99). The issue, again, involves the
need for scientists to maintain their commitment to objective knowledge,
a scientific necessity which directly contradicts relationism.
Filipović (2015) is another complexity theorist providing a simi-
larly flattened, relationist social ontology, almost entirely constituted by
complex relationships, as opposed to different complex entities. As she
argues, complexity theory

is deeply rooted in the notion of interaction, in the idea that all there
exists in this world is comprised of a much larger number of complex
(rather than linear, ordained) systems consisting of components which
cannot be analyzed or understood independently or in simple, one-on-one
relationships. Constituents of any complex system interact with other
constituents within that same system (as well as with members of other
systems) in a number of ways, thus producing novel and unpredictable
results which are beyond the simple objectivist paradigm (p.30, emphases
mine).

This statement is considerably problematic, if not contradictory, for

two reasons. Firstly, if people cannot be analyzed or understood inde-
pendently from their social relations, how can their rich, complex and
enduring internal lives and reflexive engagement with the world be
accounted for? Secondly, while this statement is clearly guided by rela-
tionist principles, it also fronts emergence as an important analytical
element. This is a considerable problem when attempting to understand
the relationship between institutions and people, for example, because if
people cannot be understood or analyzed independently from structures
362 J. Bouchard

and institutions, their causal potentials to affect the world they live in
are simply nullified.
What CDST scholars succumbing to relationism fail to recognize is
that complex systems are related to each other in complex ways because
they are also ontologically distinct from each other. This understanding is
fortunately clearly formulated by Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 29) thus:

All social and human systems possess or establish functional boundaries

that situate them within their environment and demarcate where their
constitutive components start or stop […] Rather than cutting off the
system from the rest of the environment, these boundaries remain open
and allow the system to remain adaptive and robust. […] These open
boundaries connect a system with its environment and to other systems
through a notion known as coupling. In the absence of a coupling rela-
tionship, very little adaptation between the system and its environment
will take place.

Although there are parallels between CDST’s constructivist penchants

and the relationist tendencies within poststructuralism, for example,
CDST adherents including Larsen-Freeman (2017) and Hiver and Al-
Hoorie (2020) are also careful to point out that their ontological bases
differ significantly when it comes to accounting for complexity and
emergence in a contingent social world. Furthermore, many CDST
scholars recognize the existence of both discursive and material realities
as important to social processes, and in doing so, they also reject the
view of knowledge as entirely discursive and thus arbitrary. In light of
this, CDST is, in my view, not necessarily dependent on a relationist
viewpoint; rather, it is more closely aligned with realism’s stratified and
emergentist ontology. This perspective is captured by Hiver and Al-
Hoorie (2020: 54) thus: “CDST enables a notion of knowledge which is
real but bounded by the complex and dynamic contingencies of the social
world.” Bhaskar (1998, 2008) would add to this argument that the tran-
sitive objects of science are always bound by the intransitive objects of
nature, a notion which in my view easily parallels CDST principles. In
terms of language learning, Ushioda (2015: 47) offers a similarly robust
complexity perspective, arguing that
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 363

learners contribute to shaping their contexts through how they interact

with input. After all, the ways in which language learners orient and
respond to language input will affect the content, quantity and quality of
further input in the developing context of the interaction. In this sense,
there is a dynamically evolving relationship between learner and context,
as each responds and adapts to the other. […] through this process of
co-adaptation, the learner necessarily becomes an integral part of the
unfolding context of the interaction.

The focus in Ushioda’s statement is not whether learners are related

to their contexts or not, but rather how context and learner are related
through complex causal interaction. It is unfortunate, however, that
later in her paper Ushioda (2015) overemphasizes the interrelation-
ship between context and learner when claiming that “learners are not
simply located in particular contexts, but inseparably constitute part of
these contexts” (p.48, emphasis mine). This provides another example
of occasional inconsistencies within CDST literature, and a tension
between CDST’s relationist penchant and the stratified viewpoint it
requires to account for complex systems, their parts, as well as their causal
interaction.
One can reasonably argue that a language learner, as a complex system,
occupies the role of language learner largely because of the relationship
(s)he shares with other learners, teachers, materials, educational struc-
tures, etc. After all, social roles are inherently relational. It is important
to point out, however, that this learner also exists as a biological entity, as
a person, as a friend, stranger, citizen, as a complex being with complex
cognitive, emotional and mental realities unfolding somewhat outside
the language learning situation. All of these features and elements are
essential to the constitution of this language learner as complex system,
although they may not necessarily depend on (i.e., they may be external
to) the relationships found within a specific language learning situation.
In light of this, we therefore cannot argue that, as a complex system,
this language learner can only exist in relation to other realities within
the language learning situation. The boundaries and distinct properties
of that language learner (i.e., his/her distinct and emergent powers and
properties) must also be accounted for. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 23)
364 J. Bouchard

discuss the boundary issue in CDST thus: “if everything is connected to

everything else in a complex and dynamic way, how can the representa-
tion of a complex system be reached, and how can researchers delineate
the system of interest from context and from other systems without
drawing lines that break up what is being explained?” In response, they
propose the notion of functional wholes, whereby “instead of drawing
arbitrary boundaries for systems or for units of analysis scholars remain
concerned first and foremost with explaining phenomena, and any parts,
processes or boundaries that are examined in the research design depend
on what is being explained” (ibid ). Although an interesting sugges-
tion, I believe that it mainly offers a teleological viewpoint by reducing
objects to their functions, and by extension, bringing us back to the
problematic relational principle. Instead, and as discussed in Chapter
Four, the distinct and emergent properties of complex social objects
and processes must be delineated before claims about relationships—i.e.,
causality—among social objects and processes can be formulated.
In sum, when we identify ontological differences between social
phenomena (e.g., people are different than institutions for the following
reasons …), we are not engaging necessarily in dichotomous thinking.
We are merely noting important differences between things, a strategy
which allows us to explain their causal effects upon each other. While the
notion of complex systems being relational entities “produced by a set
of components that interact in particular ways to produce some overall
state or form at a particular point in time” (Larsen-Freeman & Cameron,
2008: 26) has considerable value to the study of human phenomena, it
is equally important to question the notion of “complete interconnect-
edness” (e.g., Osberg & Biesta, 2010), which essentially leads to a central
conflation, à la Giddens. Furthermore, and as Elder-Vass (2010: 22)
succinctly puts it, “although relations are thus crucial to emergence, this
is sometimes exaggerated into the view that it is relations and not enti-
ties that compose our world – or the social world, at least.” In my view,
CDST can easily shed its relationist tendencies, in large part because they
are not necessary to its development and refinement. However, doing so
will remain difficult without an understanding of the crucial difference
between differentiation and dichotomization.
 6 Complex Systems and Social/Cultural Morphogenesis 365

Conclusion
As social scientists, it would obviously be incredibly difficult for us
to deny that human beings and human collectives (e.g., language
learners, teachers, groups of students, etc.) are complex, non-linear, open,
dynamic, emergent and contingent entities, and that both modernist
and postmodernist perspectives have not necessarily been successful at
elucidating such complexity. In this sense, CDST arguably offers a way
out of the tension between modernism and postmodernism, towards a
renewed understanding of people and human processes through the lens
of complex causality. This is no small feat indeed, and while I have iden-
tified a range of problems in current CDST literature, I do believe future
conceptual developments are promising.
Although this chapter did not provide a comprehensive summary of
CDST (for that, I encourage readers to consult other, more elaborate
and informative references on CDST mentioned and cited above and
in the remaining chapters of this book), it provided justification for the
inclusion of complexity thinking in the social sciences by outlining some
of CDST’s core concepts and by explaining CDST’s unique contribu-
tions to our understandings of complexity, emergence and causality in
the social realm. This chapter has also shown how numerous aspects
of CDST fit rather well within a realist social ontology. As Dooley
(2009: 440) points out, complexity thinking “provides a host of gener-
ative mechanisms that explain the “how” of causation and thus enables
existing theories to go beyond surface-level descriptions. It also suggests
that causation can take many forms that are not simple – nonlinear,
time varying, and mutual.” In this chapter, I also identified problems
and unresolved issues within CDST, notably (a) its weakened view of
human agency, (b) its weakened approach to critical social research, (c)
the problem of metaphorical borrowings and (d) its relationist tenden-
cies. In the next chapter, I extend this analysis by looking at some of
these issues and others in relation to AL research.
366 J. Bouchard

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 7
Complex Dynamic System Theory
and Applied Linguistics

The Relevance of CDST to AL Scholarship

Given that current CDST-guided AL research is rather new and under-
going rapid development, and considering some of the problems with
CDST-related social research highlighted in the previous chapter, it is
reasonable to ask—and provide a reasonable answer to—the question
Why do we need CDST in AL scholarship at all? The short—and very
convincing—answer to this question is that most issues, variables and
processes studied by AL scholars are complex, non-linear and emergent.
Pickering (2016: 181–182) provides a more prudent response: “Lin-
guists are increasingly interested in complex systems theory because of
its perceived ability to bring a unity and coherence of explanation to
diverse linguistic phenomena, and to suggest hypotheses for investigation
that can be modeled and tested.” Although this answer is satisfactory in
many ways, there is more to CDST than its perceived potential.
For one, CDST provides a productive way out of the empiri-
cism emerging from successionism and interpretivism, as well as the
modernism/postmodernism tension which has unfortunately monopo-
lized much energy and debate among AL scholars for decades. Within
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 373
Switzerland AG 2021
J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_7
374 J. Bouchard

AL scholarship, CDST can thus convincingly be presented as facilitating

a renewed—and in my view, realist —understanding of language learners,
teachers, classrooms, etc. as complex, non-linear, open, dynamic, emer-
gent and contingent phenomena, something which AL has long needed.
CDST also allows AL scholars to move beyond mentalist tendencies, and
question enduring yet problematic concepts such as skill and acquisi-
tion. As De Bot et al. (2013: 199) point out, two core principles guide
CDST-oriented research on second language learning and teaching:

We use the term second language development (SLD) rather than second
language acquisition (SLA) in acknowledgement of two issues: the first is
the bidirectionality of change in one’s language ability and performance
(involving both growth and attrition), in contrast to the unidirectional
vector associated with the term acquisition; the second is to emphasize a
shift from seeing language as a product or thing and rather to emphasize
linguistically relevant and enabled processes.

When this statement is put in the broader context of educational

research, we can note that CDST offers much to a renewed and more
dynamic view of education, for as Davis and Sumara (2008: 6) argue,
“a great many phenomena that are currently of interest to educational
research might be considered in terms of complex dynamics. Specific
examples […] include individual sensemaking, teacher-learner relation-
ships, classroom dynamics, school organizations, community involve-
ment in education, bodies of knowledge, and culture.” Specific to AL
issues, De Bot et al. (2005: 117) point out that “any language system
(in a speech community at a given time or across time, in a monolin-
gual or bilingual speaker, in an L2 learner, and so on) is by definition
a dynamic system in that it meets the defining principles of a dynamic
system.” Although certainly not its exclusive area of concern, much of
AL research to date has been devoted to understanding and facilitating
the language learning process. Because of that, we can reasonably argue,
from a CDST perspective, that one of AL scholars’ central purposes in
doing research is to understand and improve learning systems, which
is after all what CDST is mostly interested in. Later in this chapter, I
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 375

summarize the general CDST view of learning, and how it pertains to

the learning of languages.
Although not the only reason but certainly an important one, CDST
has considerable potential for growth in AL scholarship because it offers
the concept of emergent complex causality. Sealey and Carter (2004:
89) also note this important contribution, pointing out that “Larsen-
Freeman is one of the few researchers who have begun to explore more
fully the implications of rejecting successionist accounts of causation, in
characterizing SLA as a complex nonlinear process.” Assuming that some
perhaps more problematic CDST concepts will eventually be fine-tuned
to specifically address language-related phenomena in the years to come,
the potential for CDST to become a leading perspective in AL schol-
arship is certainly possible. Weideman (2009) already calls CDST the
seventh and most recent dominant AL approach since the mid-twentieth
century, beginning with (1) AL guided by behaviourist principles, then
by (2) the extended paradigm model, followed by guidance from (3) the
multidisciplinary model, then by a focus on (4) second language acquisi-
tion research, leading to the emergence of (5) constructivist AL and then
(6) postmodernist AL.
The scope of CDST-informed AL research has also broadened in
recent years. Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020) note that CDST has pene-
trated different areas of language studies, including language develop-
ment and acquisition, attrition, change, ecology, evolution, landscapes,
pedagogy, policy and planning, lingua franca English, bilingualism and
multilingualism, conversation analysis and the list goes on. In terms of
the research process, Rosmawati (2014: 71) points out that CDST has
introduced “novel perspectives into at least three levels of SLA research,
that is, the basic conceptual level underpinning the research, the prac-
tical level, and the methodological level of research design.” Although I
hold the perhaps more conservative view that CDST has yet to become
a dominant perspective in the field, it is not only clear that increasing
attention is now paid to it in our field, that active and ongoing refine-
ment of CDST concepts in AL scholarship has already been taking place
for quite some time since Diane Larsen-Freeman’s pioneering efforts in
the late 1990s, and that any comprehensive discussion surrounding the
issues of complexity, emergence and causality in AL research necessitates
376 J. Bouchard

active engagement with CDST. The existing body of CDST-oriented AL

scholarship, in my view and despite my own critique of it, is certainly
beginning to occupy a dominant presence in our field, which suggests
that Weideman’s positive assessment is largely justified.
To gain a clearer view of the relevance and importance of CDST to
AL scholarship, let’s begin with a general understanding of CDST’s view
of language and related phenomena. De Bot et al. (2013: 200, emphasis
mine) state that CDST

recognizes that a language (be it first, second or third), language learners

(young or old), and language communities (in naturalistic or instruc-
tional settings) are each complex, dynamic systems. Systems are groups
of entities or parts that function together. Any system is inclusive of
embedded sub-systems, all of which dynamically interrelate with one
another. The term dynamic as it is used in [CDST] has a fairly straight-
forward meaning and refers to the changes that a system undergoes due
to internal forces and to energy from outside itself.

At the same time, not everything within AL worlds requires the

application of CDST approaches, as AL phenomena do have to meet
specific ontological criteria to be considered “complex” and be of perti-
nence to a CDST viewpoint. Lowie (2013: 1806, emphasis mine), for
example, lists three such criteria which language and language develop-
ment can be said to possess: “the existence of interconnected subsystems;
the tendency to [self-organize]; and the occurrence of nonlinear, chaotic
patterns of development.” More elaborately, and outlining a general
CDST approach to AL research equipped with ample suggestions for
methodological possibilities, Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020) explain that
the type of complex systems of pertinence to a CDST approach in
AL must: (1) be shaped by heterogeneous components—including at
least one agent—in context; (2) have its components interact with each
other at multiple levels; (3) experience change at the levels of parts and
system, as a result of component interaction; and (4) exhibit system-
wide patterns of behaviour due to the effects of component interaction.
Although not a CDST theorist, Ragin (1987) mentions two approaches
to dealing with what he calls the “order-in-complexity” problem: (1)
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 377

looking at the common characteristics of multiple cases (e.g., most

language learners seem to respond rather positively to this particular teaching
approach)—a strategy which can involve clarifying statistical relation-
ships—and then creating models of the types of characteristics which
exist; and (2) looking at various combinations of causes and outcomes
within and across cases to reveal potential causal mechanisms. The author
argues that the second approach to the order-in-complexity problem is
preferable because “it is relevant to the general concern in social science
for causation, which, in turn, is central to explanation” (p. 20).
Again, and this cannot be stressed often enough, a complexity view-
point may not apply to everything in AL research projects. Hiver and
Al-Hoorie recognize this possibility in their discussion of a case as a
complex system, where the authors stress that “individuals, groups and
interactions are [from a CDST perspective] all suitable units of analysis
(i.e., cases), but components, abstract variables and other artefacts are less
so” (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020: 22, emphasis mine). Of course, this does
go against the commonly shared view that CDST offers a comprehensive
meta-theory for AL research. Rather, CDST’s potential and usefulness
as a research perspective can be appreciated more fully in the study of
specific AL phenomena which have so far been difficult to apprehend
both conceptually and methodologically through other perspectives.
As mentioned earlier on a few occasions throughout this book, an
important part of AL scholarship is devoted to the teaching and learning
of languages. This means that AL research also requires educational
theory. The next section hones in on this issue by exploring some of
the basic CDST principles regarding knowledge and learning, and by
exploring how CDST can be better aligned with contemporary educa-
tional theory through the improvement of specific concepts. Although
what follows includes a rather selective take on educational theory, what
will be made clear is the marked postmodern view of knowledge within
CDST-informed AL scholarship, a tendency which, it must be pointed
out, contrasts somewhat from recent developments in educational theory
and research.
378 J. Bouchard

CDST and the Question of Knowledge

Although a unified CDST perspective on knowledge has yet to emerge,
there is consensus among its adherents that knowledge is not “a pre-
existing entity, a ‘thing’ and learning [as] a process of acquiring and
internalising the ‘thing’” (Ramiah, 2014: A62, emphasis mine). Knowl-
edge is not understood within CDST bastions as existing “out there”
waiting to be consumed by learners; instead, it is generally seen as
developed by learners as a result of the complex exchange of meaning
amongst learners as both interactants and complex systems. This view is
outlined by Cilliers (1998) who identifies the complexity view of knowl-
edge as inherently local and echoed by Byrne (2005: 99) who argues
that knowledge is local and socially constructed, although neither rela-
tive nor reified. However, unlike the postmodernist view of knowledge,
which rejects the notion of universal knowledge altogether, complexity
theorists recognize that some aspects of knowledge exist beyond local
interaction. Nevertheless, as Abbott (2001: 5) proposes, “there is only
[…] a universal knowledge emerging from accommodation and conflict
rather than from axioms, a universal knowledge that provides tentative
bridges between local knowledges.”
In my view, this position is acceptable but somewhat unsatisfactory. If
we consider, for example, Lowie’s (2013: 1809) valid point that “learning
takes place over time, and is strongly dependent on the preceding state
of the system […] learning strongly depends on pre-existing knowledge”,
it is rather clear that, within CDST, a distinction between subjective and
objective knowledge in the Popperian sense (Popper, 1972) is presup-
posed. At the same time, this stratified view of knowledge remains rather
ill-defined within CDST, for the notion of “pre-existing knowledge”
remains underdeveloped. Do CDST adherents mean the type of pre-
existing knowledge available in dictionaries and grammar books? Or
do they only refer to pre-existing knowledge accumulated exclusively
within the mind of individual learners? As these two possibilities point
in sharply diverging conceptual and methodological directions, such
ambiguity needs to be resolved.
What is clear, however, is that knowledge is not seen by CDST adher-
ents as static, unchanging, or universal, but rather as a situated process
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 379

taking place between learners as interactants. Within the context of AL

research, Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008: 131) justify the notion of
knowledge as process with the argument that “from a complexity theory
perspective, it is a mistake to assume that the result of the language acqui-
sition process is an autonomous static competence or a fixed inventory of
symbolic knowledge.” Osberg et al. (2008: 213) more or less characterize
as outdated the view of knowledge as “a representational epistemology:
one which holds that knowledge is an accurate representation of some-
thing that is separate from knowledge itself.” As a replacement, the
authors adopt a relationist angle to argue that “‘knowledge’ and ‘the
world’ should not be understood as separate systems which somehow
have to be brought into alignment with each other, but that they are
part of the same evolving complex system” (p. 214). In their own words,
this view provides a novel view of education and the development of
knowledge:

This understanding of knowledge suggests that the acquisition of curric-

ular content should not be considered an end in itself. Rather, curricular
content should be used to bring forth that which is incalculable from the
perspective of the present. The epistemology of emergence therefore calls
for a switch in focus for curricular thinking, away from questions about
presentation and representation and towards questions about engagement
and response. (p. 213)

In other words, this process-oriented view of knowledge is perhaps

an important area of potential development, particularly when it comes
to dealing with CDST’s currently limited critical potential, as discussed
in the previous chapter. As I attempt to demonstrate below, this view
of knowledge as situated engagement and response is justified to some
extent, but it also leaves a lot unsaid, notably the idea that engagement
and response by students do not come without some form of presen-
tation and representation of both knowledge and truth, two concepts
which, within CDST at least, remain underdeveloped.
For one, if we assume that human knowledge of A is inherently about
A (i.e., knowledge of atoms requires atoms to exist prior to our attempts
at knowing what they are, and by logical deduction, that those attempts
380 J. Bouchard

must be about atoms existing as realities ontologically separate from

those attempts), then it is reasonable to accept the idea that A and the
knowledge of A are two distinct complex systems, even if closely inter-
related. In this sense, the CDST view of knowledge and its object as
parts of the same complex system remains, at least from a realist angle, a
problematic proposition because by placing truth and people’s concep-
tualizations of it within the same system, ontology and epistemology
become two aspects of the same thing, thus constituting a central confla-
tion. Even more problematic, of course, is the statement by Osberg
et al. (2008: 214) above that “‘knowledge’ and ‘the world’ should not be
understood as separate systems which somehow have to be brought into
alignment with each other,” which clearly rejects both the correspon-
dence theory of truth and scientists’ necessary commitment to objective
knowledge, and entirely reduces knowledge to a social construction.
I believe that, from a CDST perspective, it is entirely possible—and
necessary—to maintain a commitment to objective knowledge by, in
part, distinguishing between ontology and epistemology, and by distin-
guishing between knowledge, people as entities with the capacity to
know, and the objects known. This distinction between knowledge,
knowers and objective reality is vital to education, particularly when it
comes to assessment because it is from this conceptual distinction that we
can judge the value of information to be taught and construct curricula,
develop effective assessment strategies, and in the process extend our
commitment to objective knowledge. As Winch (1998: 194) puts it,

If truth is relative to conceptual schemes then one scheme cannot be

employed to form judgements about the truth of propositions in another,
since the truth conditions for that judgement would not be acceptable to
those who adhered to the other. This conclusion strikes at the heart of
education as a truth-imparting exercise, as it suggests that there are no
coherent grounds for supposing that adult rather than child conceptual
schemes have any monopoly of truth.

Furthermore, distinguishing between knowledge, knower and the

known object does not in any way undermine or counter engagement
and response, which Osberg et al. (2008) identify as core to CDST’s
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 381

view of knowledge, truth and education. Quite the opposite: it intro-

duces precisely the stratified and emergentist perspective necessary to
education and social critique.
To be fair, the perspective on knowledge criticized here is perhaps
more characteristic of a postmodernist approach to AL, and it would
certainly be mistaken to conclude that all CDST adherents hold homol-
ogous views towards truth and knowledge. At the same time, there is
unmistakeable evidence that postmodernism has sway within CDST,
and this can be observed in, for example, an ambivalent commitment
by some of its adherents to the notion of objective knowledge. Before
I go any further, however, let’s revisit the distinction between objective
and subjective knowledge, and how this distinction is necessary to the
development of educational projects including language learning and
teaching.
Echoing Popper (1972), Sealey and Carter (2004) distinguish between
subjective knowledge, or what anyone of us knows at a particular
moment, and objective knowledge, or the type of knowledge found in
theories, notions, models, etc.—i.e., knowledge which exists regardless
of whether anyone of us knows it or not. Although theories and models
are human creations, and therefore very much the products of discursive
processes, they are necessarily about realities beyond people’s understand-
ings of them. They also possess objective properties in that they also
occupy a place beyond situated interaction, which is why we can collec-
tively refer to certain theories as being “wrong”, “outdated” or “at the
cutting edge of scientific development”, and work to improve them. In
a very clear sense, it is impossible to conceive of CDST adherents devel-
oping CDST views without there being some form of understanding
on their part that CDST concepts and models are about phenomena
distinct from these concepts and models, and that these concepts and
models can be shared and improved because they also occupy a place
beyond debates and deliberations among scholars—i.e., as CS resources
distinct from interaction within the SC. According to Sealey and Carter
(2004: 15), objective knowledge is “independent of anybody’s belief, or
disposition to assent, or to assert or to act. Knowledge in the objec-
tive sense is knowledge without a knower; it is knowledge without a
knowing subject.” For realists, and arguably for anyone interested in
382 J. Bouchard

developing theories and human knowledge in a general sense, objective

knowledge beyond local interaction is therefore indispensable, if only as
a necessary force guiding—and helping us improve—our situated and
culturally-laden negotiations of knowledge. As Sealey and Carter (2004:
15) underline with regards to objective knowledge,

precisely because it is ’knowledge without a knower’, it is capable

of refinement and methodological development. The social practice of
knowledge production has this as an aim, albeit one which is often
imperfectly and only partially realized. Without objective knowledge it
is hard to make any case for improving theoretical understanding or for
the epistemic authority of research.

The notion of objective knowledge in the social sciences does

not conjure the positivist notion that humans can also be rationally
autonomous, detached from context, able to access unmediated truth
through a human nature “out there” which predates human history. It
is rather a critique of perspectivism, or the kind of hopeless relativism
found in much of postmodernist thought, which posits that because
knowledge is (partly) socially constructed, there is simply no truth to
be sought or any a-political form of knowledge available. The postmod-
ernist rejection of objective knowledge comes from a radical and rigid
adherence to the idea that concepts or categories of human thought are
inherently situated, historical, and deeply cultural, and that ultimately
the work conducted in the social sciences is inescapably contingent on
culture. Accordingly, the knowledge included in textbooks and other
resources of relevance to educational projects can never be understood as
neutral: all of it is inescapably biased. Postmodernism then builds upon
this idea to justify the broad critical project of “decolonizing” knowl-
edge and discourse. Given that even our identities and social positionings
are also seen by postmodernists as exclusively discursive (i.e., cultural
and therefore biased) phenomena, the process of decolonization then
becomes a matter of valorizing localized negotiations of knowledge, at
the cost of insight into structural phenomena. In Chapter 3, I discussed
at length why such a view is problematic.
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 383

Sealey and Carter’s distinction between subjective and objective

knowledge cited above also serves as a critique of “the ‘myth’ that objec-
tivity requires that cognitive agents be ‘disengaged from the world’”
(Siegel, 1998: 31). It is also reaffirmation of a core assumption at the
heart of all scientific endeavours that, while humans do not access and
analyse brute facts directly or neutrally, while scientific observation is
theory-laden and therefore profoundly cultural, and while science will
never provide a theory of everything, science is inherently oriented
towards the discovery of objective knowledge. This means that the
scientifically-grounded answers we currently have are not ultimate truths
per se: they are instead the best answers we have so far. Sealey and Carter’s
distinction is also a reminder that the correspondence theory of truth is
central to this discussion and to scientific endeavour in general. To reit-
erate, the correspondence theory of truth posits that the truth or falsity
of a statement is determined only by how it relates to the world and
whether it accurately describes (i.e., corresponds with) that world. As
the philosopher Radford (2008: 145) notes,

The concept of correspondence between propositions and their objects, of

a mind-independent reality that is represented in our language, remains
a necessary assumption of rational empirical enquiry. The only way in
which we can understand our propositions as bearing truth is, at least
theoretically, in relationship to that which they represent and which is
accessible to us through our experience.

Of particular concern here, of course, is the issue of criticism (further

elaborated below). If we accept the postmodernist view that there is
no objective knowledge, that instead knowledge is entirely situated and
negotiated in local contexts, and if we accept this view as a compre-
hensive account of human knowledge, then on what basis can we build
any viable critical agenda? If knowledge is simply a discursive—and by
extension, political —exercise of persuasion without any rational basis
or relationship with objective knowledge, and if education (an inher-
ently moral enterprise, let’s not forget) is a mere question of developing
and sharing perspectives, how can educators then provide moral view-
points, deal with questions of truth, reinforce particular values beyond
384 J. Bouchard

the immediacy of convenience and pragmatic uses, and judge the values
of students’ expressed perspectives? In asking these questions, I am not
suggesting that teachers are doing (or must do) their job from a purely
neutral perspective. What I am instead suggesting is that being biased
or inescapably cultural does not in any way remove the fact that we also
live in a world occupied by objects and phenomena which possess objec-
tive properties and powers distinct from our understandings of them,
and of capital importance to our understandings of them. Again, it is a
conceptual mistake, as some CDST adherents seem to make, to assume
that the understanding of objective knowledge necessitates an a-cultural,
a-ideological being to access it. This relationship between subjectivity
and objectivity should therefore not be controversial in the least, for
as Siegel (1998: 27) states, “our representations in some sense depend
upon our interaction, as agents, with the world which our representa-
tions represent.” In other words, while our perspectives are cultural, they
are also inherently oriented towards the discovery and development of
objective knowledge; and this remains a core purpose of all scientific and
educational endeavours.
What therefore needs to be asserted more forcefully in current CDST
literature is a reaffirmation of CDST’s commitment to objective knowl-
edge, a commitment which again is not only a feature of realism but
also of complexity thinking and hopefully of all approaches to scientific
inquiry. As Siegel (1998: 23, emphasis original) puts it, the realist view of
knowledge stipulates that “truth is independent of the beliefs of epistemic
agents: our thinking that something is true does not make it so; what
does make it so is its successful capturing of some independent state of
affairs which obtains independently of our thinking that it does.” This
understanding goes at the heart of educational research and practice,
because students must develop the skills necessary for rational inquiry
and a moral approach to social life. They must therefore be able to eval-
uate the value and veracity of knowledge presented to them, rather than
merely developing perspectives relevant to their own lives or to the goals
they set out to achieve. We only have to remember that rules and princi-
ples learned in math class, for example, are not developed by students
themselves. We can also remember the nonsensical claim by Trump’s
press secretary Kellyanne Conway that there are “alternative facts” out
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 385

there to understand that (a) subjective and objective knowledge, while

ontologically different, are nevertheless related to each other in complex
ways and that consequently (b) human knowledge is not exclusively a
local process of negotiated interaction: our deeply subjective attempts to
understand the world are inherently constrained by, and geared towards
the discovery of, objective truth.
While CDST adherents are partially justified in claiming that “all
knowledges are at best partial and multiple, always in interplay, always
in flux and never definitive” (Ramiah, 2014: A70), it is also important
to note that, because knowledge of a particular thing or phenomena
is socially shared and developed, to undergo these processes knowledge
must necessarily occupy a position “outside” human interaction—i.e., as
a resource with antecedent properties distinct from everyday interaction.
While knowledge is indeed negotiated, it must also be understood as an
emergent entity in itself, and not be reduced exclusively to the local-
ized practice of knowledge performed by human beings (as this view
constitutes an upward conflation). Reducing knowledge to the prac-
tice of knowledge development (or mere perspectivism) also seriously
diminishes the value of knowledge itself, for it suggests that all perspec-
tives towards reality are equally justifiable. When put in relation to the
study of the Holocaust, the two nuclear detonations over Hiroshima
and Nagasaki, or the Covid-19 pandemic, for example, this view obvi-
ously loses all credence. While we are justified in being relativist about
knowledge, we simply cannot afford to be relativist about truth.
The next section looks at how learning has so far been presented by
complexity theorists, and reveals perhaps more explicit traces of CDST’s
ambivalent yet evolving commitment to objective knowledge.

CDST, Language Learning and Change

Although CDST requires a more explicit and ontologically layered view
of knowledge, its view of learning is, however, more developed and
aligned with a realist view. Positing the CDST approach to learning in
contrast with much of psychology-oriented educational research to date,
Davis and Sumara (2008: 12–13, emphasis original) define learning as
386 J. Bouchard

“a matter of transformations in the learner that are simultaneously phys-

ical and behavioral – which is to say, in biological terms, structural .
Learning is certainly conditioned by particular experiences, but it is “due
to” the learner’s own complex biological-and-experiential structure, not
an external stimulus.” In other words, learning is not understood as
the direct outcome of teaching—as an external, empirically observable
force—but very much as a process or mechanism of self-organization—
i.e., the result of a causal interaction between parts and wholes—and,
in a broader sense, as a process of emergence involving not only cogni-
tive processes but rather a complex and emergent interaction between
neurological, cognitive, behavioural, emotional and cultural changes,
all complex and layered realities in themselves unfolding in relation
to contextual constraints and enablements. This view is further devel-
oped by Lowie (2013: 1808), who notes that “language acquisition, like
other phenomena expressing natural growth and development, is a self-
organizational process […] This position is corroborated by increasing
amounts of evidence in favor of an emergentist view of language acqui-
sition.” CDST thus sees learning as a process unfolding also beyond
the individual learner, to include groups, classrooms, communities,
language(s), norms and expectations, material realities and conditions,
and so forth.
From a realist standpoint, however, CDST is less explicit on the point
that these stratified realities are ontologically different. These ontolog-
ical differences suggest, for example, that the type of change human
brain cells undergo during the learning process is not homologous with
the learning a language learner experiences or the kinds of decisions
and actions undertaken by a group of learners in a language classroom.
Although there might exist some parallels, they are not exactly the same
because the properties and powers of phenomena within different layers
of a complex system are not isomorphic. Because of this, it is impor-
tant for AL scholars adopting CDST perspectives not to use principles
as metaphors to describe processes uniformly across layers or strata.
While complexity theorists Davis and Sumara (2008: 14) argue that
“it is not at all inappropriate to say that a discipline “argues” or a cell
“knows” or a culture “thinks””, realists would warn that such phrasings
can be construed as manifestations of anthropomorphism, and that while
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 387

numerous parallels can certainly be found across layers, the distinct and
emergent powers and properties of phenomena situated at various layers
should remain of primary epistemological importance, particularly in
the formulation of causal statements. Stated differently, although self-
organization (and by extension emergence) can be said to take place
at multiple levels, the process cannot be deemed ontologically identical
across levels.
To a large extent, CDST provides a view of learning which can
reasonably be identified as stratified and emergentist. Looking specifi-
cally at second language acquisition (a term which incidentally Larsen-
Freeman (2019) rightfully dismisses as modernist, instead preferring the
more complexity cognizant term development ), Lowie (2013: 1809), for
example, argues that “applied to L2 development, resources comprise
the learner’s internal capabilities, such as aptitude and working memory,
as well as pre-existing capabilities and motivations. They also include
external resources, such as the learner’s environment, time, and material
resources.” The author also states that this stochastic view of language
development (i.e., as statistically analysable although not predictable) is
supported by ample evidence from numerous longitudinal AL studies.
Learning, when seen from a CDST perspective, is understood as a
process of self-organization that unfolds largely because of variations
within the learner and the context of language learning acting as poten-
tials for change. In this sense, the CDST view of learning departs some-
what from both positivism/behaviourism and postmodernism—and
adherence to the postmodernist view of knowledge discussed earlier—
because it is layered, and as such it remains grounded in an appreciation
for the stratified nature of the social world and the phenomena within it.
Again, learning does not take place entirely within the mind of learners,
nor is it a direct outcome of teaching. To understand how students
learn, researchers must therefore contend with other important realities,
including the classroom itself as a complex system, and how learning
unfolds at the collective level. In this sense, Davis and Sumara (2008:
92) are justified in arguing that

phenomena such as personal cognition, collective action, educational

structures, and cultural knowledge are dynamically similar. All are
388 J. Bouchard

learning systems, where learning is understood as a process through which

a unity becomes capable of more flexible, more creative activity that
enables the unity to maintain its fit to its ever evolving context.

With this complex, dynamic, and non-linear view of learning comes

the associated view of teaching, which Davis and Sumara (2008: 100)
also define rather well: “the act of teaching must be understood in terms
of a sort of emergent choreography in which the teacher’s and students’
actions are able to specify one another.” This view clearly departs from
the commonly accepted notion in behaviourist/successionist AL scholar-
ship that teaching must somehow lead to learning, or that application
of the ideal teaching approach or use of the ideal teaching materials
is sufficient to improve learning outcomes, commonly presented by
scholars through pre-test/post-test studies. The principal reason why
the causal relationship between teaching and learning is never one-
directional and so difficult to apprehend by researchers is that teaching
is largely an empirically observable phenomenon—i.e., we can see and
record a teacher giving a lesson—whereas learning is an underlying
mechanism—i.e., we cannot pinpoint any exact moment when learning
happens, we can only conceptualize it. In other words, they unfold at
different levels. As such, most of the complex causal relationships at play
within the language classroom, including learning and teaching, must
be unpacked conceptually, or at the level of the real, with consideration
for phenomena beyond what is available in empirically gathered data.
This important distinction between the empirical and the real is made
by Ragin (1987: 26), who argues that

the problem that social scientists face is to unravel the empirically rele-
vant causal combinations. In other words, once the possibility of multiple
conjunctural causation is admitted, it is necessary to determine how
different conditions fit together – and in how many different combina-
tions – to produce a given outcome. The identification and interpretation
of these causal configurations (or causal complexes) allows the investi-
gator to delineate the different empirical processes and causal mechanisms
relevant to a specific outcome.
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 389

In contrast, pre-test/post-test comparisons simply cannot reveal the

causal links between teaching and learning, or other underlying mecha-
nisms at play in the language classroom for that matter. As revealed in
the previous chapter, there are tendencies among some CDST adherents
to look at complexity research as a strictly empirical endeavour. However,
this is simply an oversight on their part, for much of the argumentation
they provide can indeed be characterized as stratified and emergentist.
Specifically, the consensus among complexity theorists regarding educa-
tion stipulates that the teaching–learning relationship is dynamic and
non-linear because it is emergent, and so for them to claim that CDST is
strictly an empirical exercise is simply mistaken. Mercer’s (2015: 73) own
complexity view also captures this idea rather well: “complexity perspec-
tives highlight how we are fundamentally social beings embedded in
multiple layers of contexts and social relationships stretching across time
and place. The challenge for researchers is to find ways of capturing this
socially embedded complexity of individuals within a dynamic systems
framework in an empirically researchable way.” To this statement, I
would add that facing this challenge requires a combination of empirical
data analysis and conceptual development of causal models appropriate
to the object(s) of inquiry. Although as previously argued the notion of
scale is somewhat problematic from a realist standpoint, De Bot (2015:
32) offers a similarly layered CDST view, and emphasize the importance
of time, or timescales, in this sort of research:

Language development is a complex process that takes place on many

interacting timescales, and the timescale chosen will have an impact
on the selection and interpretation of the data. […] Development on
one scale is influenced by what happens on smaller and larger scales.
[…] Higher level skills, such as conceptual processing, take more atten-
tional resources than highly automatized skills, like lexical access and
articulation.

From this perspective, language learning can then be conceptualized as

the emergent outcome of the complex interaction, or causal influences,
between various phenomena including (although not exclusively) neuro-
logical, cognitive, emotional, psychological, interactional and cultural
390 J. Bouchard

phenomena over time. This would explain, to some extent, why the
teaching of a pragmatic feature of language, for example, might not lead
to learners’ improved pragmatic performances soon after the teaching
episode has concluded; rather, it can potentially be observed over time,
through repeated instruction, exchange of meaning and both targeted
and holistic practice. De Bot (2015: 36) also talks about motivation in
similarly stratified and temporally-sensitive terms:

motivation to learn a foreign language can vary from one moment

to another and may be influenced by different types of motivation
on different timescales. Long term motivation may come from career
plans, shorter term motivation from the wish to pass an exam, an even
shorter term motivation from expressing a view in class. The motiva-
tion at different timescales interacts with other processes and may vary in
strength over time. In order to study motivation in a particular setting,
for example in a classroom, data from different timescales have to be
gathered and combined to get the full picture.

This view is in synch with the realist view of motivation “not as

an individual characteristic, nor as a quantifiable variable possessed in
different measures by different learners, but as emergent from rela-
tions between human intentionality and the social world” (Sealey &
Carter, 2004: 206). It is also closely related to Juarrero’s (1999: 201)
complexity view of human agency, and her argument that “cognitive-
affective attractor regimes, including intentions, must be viewed whole
cloth as open dynamical systems embedded in a physical, historical, and
social fabric.”
The CDST view of teaching and learning outlined thus far has
profound ramifications for AL studies of language learning and for the
development of teacher training programs because, for one, the teacher
is no longer seen as the main source of information and “engineer” of
human knowledge. Stated differently, causal efficacy does not come from
a single source in the CDST model of learning, but is rather distributed
among classroom actors. Classroom activities, when viewed from a
CDST perspective, are indeed much more distributed undertakings
where the exchange of information between classroom actors (teachers
and students alike) matters most, although they never quite fully escape
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 391

structural and cultural constraints and enablements. This viewpoint

also posits that teacher-centered approaches are more constraining than
enabling, thus potentially counterproductive to the learning process
(although given the complexity of the culture–agency relationship, this
claim cannot be made uniformly with regards to all cultural contexts).
Moreover, classroom-based activities do not require the use of ideal peda-
gogical strategies and materials, for those are understood as making sense,
or relevant, only within a hydraulic or mechanistic view of the teaching–
learning relationship. In addition, while there is a noticeable tendency
towards interactionism in the complexity vision outlined so far, CDST’s
stratified outlook ensures that the ontologically flattened view afforded
by interactionism is largely avoided.
In short, CDST-informed AL scholars generally accept a stratified
perspective towards language learning and teaching, although relationism
tends to surface in CDST literature at times. The Douglas Fir Group
(2016: 24–25, emphases mine), for example, demonstrate adherence to
both stratified and conflationary viewpoints in the following mission
statement:

We see L2 learning as an ongoing process that begins at the micro level of

social activity (the smallest concentric circle), with individuals recruiting
their neurological mechanisms and cognitive and emotional capacities
and engaging with others in specific multilingual contexts of action
and interaction, resulting in recurring contexts of use that contribute
to the development of multilingual repertoires […] The engagement in
these contexts uses all available semiotic resources, including linguistic,
prosodic, interactional, nonverbal, graphic, pictorial, auditory, and arti-
factual resources. These contexts are situated within and shaped at a
meso level (the middle concentric circle) by particular sociocultural insti-
tutions and particular sociocultural communities, such as those found
in the family, school, neighborhood, places of work, places of worship,
social organizations like clubs, community sports leagues, political parties,
online forums of various kinds, and so on. Importantly, the institu-
tions and communities at the meso level are powerfully characterized
by pervasive social conditions (e.g., economic, cultural, religious, polit-
ical), which affect the possibility and nature of persons creating social
identities in terms of investment, agency, and power. Together, these
392 J. Bouchard

institutions, communities, conditions, and possible identities provide or

restrict access to particular types of social experiences. Finally, at the
macro level (the largest concentric circle) there are large-scale, society-
wide ideological structures with particular orientations toward language
use and language learning (including belief systems and cultural, polit-
ical, religious, and economic values) that both shape and are shaped by
sociocultural institutions and communities (middle circle) as well as by
the agency of individual members within their locally situated contexts
of action and interaction (smallest circle). While each of the three levels
[…] has its distinctive characteristics, no level exists on its own; each exists
only through constant interaction with the others, such that each gives shape to
and is shaped by the next, and all are considered essential to understanding
SLA. They persist only through constant interaction with each other and so
exist in a state of continuous change.

This view is inconsistent with both realist and CDST perspectives

because it presents the processes involved in learning as layered on the
one hand, yet with the obvious relationist angle adopted here, also as
epiphenomena of each other on the other. At the same time, much
of what is said in that statement is valuable to the development of a
more robust CDST-oriented AL scholarship, because the authors present
learning not as a moment of change but as a trajectory of changes occur-
ring at different levels of a complex system over time, as the system
interacts with contextual constraints and enablements. In other words,
without the relationist angle, this statement by The Douglas Fir Group
can indeed be considered as aligned with a realist perspective.
With regard to learner motivation, Larsen-Freeman (2015: 12) is more
specific when arguing that “system change is seen as movement in a
trajectory across a ‘state space’ or ‘phase space’. As the learner’s motiva-
tional system moves across state space, it is attracted to certain regions of
state space, repelled by others. The former constitute attractors in space,
places where the system settles, usually temporarily.” The main implica-
tion for AL research methodology is that accounts of learning involve
the identification of phase space on the one hand, and some form of
historical narrative (Byrne & Uprichard, 2012) on the other. As Williams
and Dyer (2017: 4) point out, “within ‘phase space’, all outcomes are
possible, but some are very much more probable than others. Yet it
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 393

is often the ‘improbable’ outcome that brings about greater change.

The challenge is to develop a method that can follow these changes,
or map these trajectories, in actual systems over time.” This view is
closely aligned with the view of culture offered by the realist thinker and
researcher in education and human development Joseph Maxwell (2012),
who states that culture is not exclusively the outcome of consensus, that
it should rather be conceptualized as a combination of differences and
complementarity between people. This leads the author to argue that an
understanding of cultural change requires a conceptual emphasis on what
lies at the margins of cultural life. It is possible to extend Maxwell’s point
by adding that the closer we move towards consensus and “the rule of
the majority”, the closer we get to hegemonic cultural forces, thus closer
to cultural stasis. In this sense, what lies at the margins of a complex
system can not only be understood as phase space but also as including
the necessary conditions for morphogenesis.
Identifying phase space and developing a historical narrative require
decisions regarding the point of departure, or initial condition, of the
learning complex system. As we saw in the previous chapter, however, the
notion of initial condition is problematic given the nonfinality of human
beings as reflexive complex systems. As such, it is important not to take
the ‘initial’ portion of this concept too literally, and instead see it as the
first moment the data is collected by the researcher. The initial condition,
in this sense, constitutes an interruption in the ongoing development of
a complex system, for the purpose of research. From this basis, it is also
important not to adopt a deterministic outlook but rather conceptualize
learning complex systems as possessing some degree of freedom regarding
the direction and type of development undertaken. Let’s remember that
complex systems are open, dynamic and emergent, and that consequently
there is considerable unpredictability to contend with when mapping
the learning of a complex system through time. Verspoor (2015: 45)
discusses study abroad programs as complex systems, thereby providing
a rather clear example of the CDST view of change and learning:

The researcher who would like to take a dynamic approach to the effects
of a study-abroad programme will have to consider the initial conditions
of all the relevant sub-systems involved and measure them very frequently
394 J. Bouchard

(probably daily) in the first few weeks, as the emotional sub-systems espe-
cially are likely to show considerable variability early on. However, after
a month or so, the systems should have settled and then measuring once
a month should suffice.

This process of “settling in” can, in retrospect, be considered an

attractor state. With regards to classroom processes, Hiver (2015: 20)
observes that traces of the existence of such attractor state in learning
contexts can be noted in, for example, statements from teachers that
“things are falling into place”, or that “things just seem to click”. But
again, while these notions, causal accounts and methodological possibil-
ities are interesting in the mapping of learning within language learning
contexts, populated by real people such as students and teachers, a CDST
view should not necessarily be applied to the study of all elements
involved in language learning. If we consider the emergence of language
varieties, or the emergence of new lexical and syntactic rules over long
periods of time, for example, can we say that a language—as complex
system—learns in the same way flesh-and-blood language learners can?
Echoing realist principles, Pickering (2016: 184) would answer in the
negative, pointing out that

although the terms “complex systems” and “complex adaptive systems”

are often used synonymously, adaptivity, strictly speaking, is a property
of only some complex systems. In the case of languages, a mixture of
stability and change is evident from the fact that languages change at
a rate that is much faster than human biological evolution, but much
slower than cultural development.

To explain how a language changes, Pickering distinguishes the empir-

ical from the conceptual by rightfully suggesting that “a different
definition of language is needed, one that not only supposes that micro-
level interaction leads to the emergence of macro-level structures and
processes, but one that connects observed variation in speech to the
theoretical notion of variety and selection in complex adaptive systems”
(p. 187). Here, we have a complex view of people, language, and the
learning of languages which can comfortably be placed within a realist
ontology.
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 395

What the author also reminds us of is that change can take on different
forms and involve rather different processes, depending on the distinct
and emergent properties and powers of specific complex systems. With
language, change is not only inherently cultural, it is not initiated by the
language itself, for again languages do not have agentive properties to act
in the real world. In contrast, language learners—as reflexively endowed
powerful particulars—experience change, or learning, at the biological
and cognitive levels and so forth as a result of interacting with language
as a CS resource and the constraining and enabling forces of structure
and culture. In other words, change—or learning—is not a homologous
process regardless of the complex system being studied. Realization of
this point means that researchers must constantly address ontological
issues to delimit the distinct and emergent properties and powers of the
phenomena studied, whether they are people, language, languages, or
processes and phenomena related to language learning and/or teaching.
Without this important back and forth between empirical and concep-
tual work, there is the very real danger that CDST-informed AL research
might succumb to problematic metaphorical tendencies. Despite these
shortcomings and challenges, CDST does offer a conceptually and
methodologically layered and insightful view into the process of learning,
with profound consequences for AL research.

CDST and Research Methodology

CDST is not a specific methodology for AL, but rather provides a
perspective, a way of thinking about specific AL phenomena as complex,
open, dynamic and non-linear systems. As such, a more detailed answer
to the question Why do we need CDST in AL scholarship at all? should
perhaps look at the different stages of, and the different variables and
factors involved in, AL research projects, then determine the relevance of
CDST principles in relation to specific stages and/or variables. Arguably,
CDST facilitates the conceptual stage of AL research, specifically the
development of a robust theoretical viewpoint. Once this conceptual
work is achieved, methodological decisions must then be made, in rela-
tion to the conceptual work previously done, and here CDST offers
396 J. Bouchard

many possibilities. CDST also helps with the descriptive stage (i.e., what
is happening in my data?) and the explanatory stage (i.e., why are things
happening this particular way and not any other way?) of the research
project, and facilitates a movement back to theory. In short, CDST is
pertinent at specific stages of AL research projects and does not prescribe
one methodology or a narrow set of methods. Rather, it allows us to
understand our data as complex, shape our research projects from a
complexity standpoint, and appreciate complex causality as we formulate
causal statements.
That being said, there are both quantitative and qualitative research
methodologies that are arguably more appropriate to a complexity
approach than others. On this point, I invite readers to consult Hiver and
Al-Hoorie’s (2020) volume which surveys a broad range of both theoret-
ical and methodological issues related to CDST-informed AL research,
with clear and easy-to-understand examples. The authors identify specific
quantitative methodological traditions appropriate to CDST-guided AL
research including multilevel modeling, experience sampling method,
single-case design, latent growth curve modelling, panel designs, idiody-
namic method and time series analysis. In terms of qualitative method-
ological approaches, the authors discuss qualitative comparative analysis,
process tracing, agent-based modeling, retrodictive qualitative modeling,
social network analysis and design-based research methods. To this list,
I would add that popular approaches in contemporary AL scholarship
such as corpus analysis and (critical) classroom discourse analysis (both
discussed in Chapter 5 on realist AL) are also particularly well-suited to a
complexity perspective. At the same time, certain strands of AL scholar-
ship—notably sociolinguistics—are characterized by a need for critical
perspectives not necessarily afforded by CDST (see discussion in the
previous chapter and below).
While modeling and simulation are certainly two important method-
ological approaches in the complexity sciences, serious consideration
for their relevance to the study of human beings and social realities
is necessary. Pickering (2016: 183) sees much value in the applica-
tion of modelling strategies to the study of complex language-related
phenomena: “computer modeling can help to overcome the insuperable
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 397

difficulties of studying communal language emergence in large popula-

tions over long periods of time (and often with little or no historical
evidence).” As with corpus analysis, computer modelling can arguably
reveal traces of specific underlying mechanisms, and a similar obser-
vation was made in Chapter 2 regarding statistical analysis. However,
while computer simulations, for example, can parallel specific human
behaviours and replicate to some extent the complex structure of cases,
the very real and causally efficacious powers of both underlying causal
mechanisms and people’s reflexive powers and potentials can never be
fully captured in this way, since modeling and simulation can never
map out all contextual constraints and enablements and possible reflexive
processes. Similarly, although from a different angle, Byrne (2003:
173) explains that “simulations, while capable of generating emergent
complexity, cannot at present (so far as I understand them) generate
structure and structure must be related to agency in any adequate
account of the socially real.” One reason for this difficulty is that
simulations and modeling are fundamentally descriptive tools, and can
therefore only provide traces of potential causal links in the data. It is
with these traces, however, that conceptual work can then concentrate
on the formulation of causal claims. Again, statistical analysis as well as
computer modelling and simulation can only reveal traces of phenomena
located at the level of the real, and not the processes themselves.
Despite these shortcomings, CDST has the potential to move AL
research beyond the positivist/postmodernist divide through greater
appreciation for complexity. CDST is thus not only necessary to the
improvement of AL: it is epistemologically aligned with the type
of complexity AL scholars are concerned with. Also important to
remember: while the methodological tools and traditions listed above
can be deemed as sensitive to complexity in the social realm, they are
certainly not homologous. Because they pertain to the study of some
phenomena and not others, it is therefore important in CDST-informed
AL research to adopt methodological plurality. This point is made by
Gerrits and Verweij (2013: 167) thus:
398 J. Bouchard

Each method or analytical tool used in the complexity sciences has a

number of implicit or explicit ontological and epistemological assump-
tions, and these assumptions differ greatly across methods. Each method
brings with it different assumptions about the nature of complexity,
differing levels of access to reality, and differing explanations for observed
phenomena.

Through a CDST-informed application of such methodologies, AL

scholars can gain more sophisticated insight into how language and
language-related phenomena at both local and broader levels (e.g.,
language learning, language use, language change) emerge and unfold
over time. De Bot et al. (2005: 117) point out that while a CDST
approach

sounds like (and basically is) an ultimately mechanistic metaphor for

language and language use, it is able to make clear the link between
the social and the psychological aspects of the individual and language
through the interconnectedness of systems. It can explicate why language
development includes both growth and decline, because resources needed
to keep the system going are limited and have to be shared. It can
explain why multilingual and monolingual language systems are funda-
mentally different systems. It can also account for stages of development
and fossilization in SLA.

Although as pointed out earlier, the mere application of CDST-

sensitive methodologies does not lead directly to explanatory statements;
rather, the latter can be produced through the use of conceptual causal
models and concepts provided by realism and CDST about complex
systems.
CDST is perhaps more appropriate to the study of local language-
related phenomena. Given the necessary granularity of CDST-informed
research, it is much more feasible for researchers to unpack the
complexity of local phenomena than deal with the exponentially more
complex dynamics at play in larger populations. For this reason,
complexity-informed AL research is often presented in the literature
as prioritizing cases. Many realist thinkers and researchers also adhere
to a similar view of cases, and often advocate the development of
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 399

middle-range theories (e.g., Pawson & Tilley, 1997), or theories that are
both abstract enough to apply to a range of phenomena and concrete
enough to be testable. The main benefit of middle-range theories is
that they are specific enough to explain specific phenomena while also
containing enough elements of pertinence to a larger, more conceptually
rich analytic framework which helps us understand not only language
learning processes but also how these relate to broader social processes.
Given CDST’s characteristically local quality, it is reasonable to state that
while clear demographic patterns may be difficult to reveal from a CDST
perspective, conceptual generalizations can be drawn to some extent from
specific cases. As Byrne (2013: 217) states,

every complex social intervention has to be considered as a ‘case’. System-

atic comparison across cases allows us to generalize within limits − but
this still means we can transfer knowledge beyond the unique ideographi-
cally described instance. […] through careful comparison and exploration
of complex contingent causation, we can begin to get a handle on what
works where (in what context), when (in what temporal context), and in
what order.

Yet, as the case seems to be prioritized in both CDST and realism

(particularly social realism), the task of science in a general sense is
to provide insight into processes and realities beyond what is only
locally relevant. To recall what was suggested in previous discussions on
realism, and on this point both CDST and realism are in agreement:
what is usually generalizable from the case is an empirically grounded
understanding of underlying generative mechanisms. As Larsen-Freeman
(2015: 17) points out,

most researchers seek to generalize beyond the particulars of a given study

[…] how this is to be achieved would be pursued in different ways.
One way is to probe intraindividual variation of person-specific factors
rather than interindividual variation at the level of population […] Indi-
vidual case studies may not reveal much about the population of language
learners, but they do have a direct bearing on theory.
400 J. Bouchard

Similar arguments about generalizability being about the relation-

ship between data and theory are also made by Rosmawati (2014)
and van Geert (2012), with Rosmawati (2014: 76) adding that “the
findings from longitudinal case studies can further verify-and-validate
(or refute-and-reject) the theory and claim the generalisability of the
theory to individuals.” In short, CDST-guided AL research involves
active and preferably long-term engagement in the detailed, or gran-
ular aspects of language-relate phenomena. Such engagement is crucial
if we are concerned with mapping change not as a linear but as a
complex trajectory. However, considering the principle of non-linearity,
change must also be understood as irregular and often unpredictable.
Weideman (2009: 69) provides strong empirical justification for this type
of granularity, arguing that

teachers and language course designers can also find an explanation not
only for individual variation, but also of apparent lapses in language
learning […] individual growth may vary in terms of fluency, vocabu-
lary complexity and grammatical complexity for a number of language
learners […] in a single learner, there may be both growth and lapses.
Since these learners are seen as organisms that are free to explore new
behaviours […] and since language growth does not follow a linear path,
a complexity theory explanation can readily provide an interpretation for
a phenomenon that many teachers will attest to.

Variations, when seen from a CDST angle, thus constitute poten-

tials for change, which makes them important elements in the study of
human beings and language-related phenomena. Similarly from a realist
perspective, variations can also be understood as the necessary outcomes
of a variety of human agents drawing partly from a variety of antecedent
cultural and linguistic resources as they engage in a variety of commu-
nicative purposes. In other words, variety in situated language use can
come from (at least) three sources: people, cultural/linguistic resources,
and communicative purposes and context. Yet, as De Bot et al. (2007)
suggest, this does not seem to lead to outright chaos in the data, as we
can indeed denote patterns, for example, in the large body of data studied
in corpus analysis and developmental linguistics. Whether or not unde-
niable cultural and/or linguistic universals exist remains a contentious
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 401

issue beyond the scope of this volume. That being said, human commu-
nication in a variety of contexts and times does exhibit relatively stable
characteristics, and these also need to be explained through conceptual
and empirical analyses. Arguably, they can be understood as the results
of rather stable features of human cognition, emotionality and reflex-
ivity across linguistic and cultural contexts. Emergent and antecedent
structural forces do play important roles in the way people communi-
cate; however, I would not use this argument to then agree with claims
that certain structures act universally in a downward fashion upon active
and reflexive human agents/communicators everywhere. What we have
certainly learned from postmodernism is that scientists should avoid such
determinist and universalist conclusions.
Whether we are dealing with change or with stability, what we learn
from realism is that inquiry should remain focused on the complex
relationship between agency, structure and culture as distinct and emer-
gent layers of the social realm. This principle is certainly not foreign to
complexity science. De Bot et al. (2007) point out that the main differ-
ences between CDST and the general approach to the study of language
learning in AL scholarship is that the latter tends to see interlanguage as
a fixed system, which then leads to a search for the causes of variation. In
contrast, CDST is more concerned with the degree of variability rather
than its cause. As we saw earlier in this book, CDST rejects the clas-
sical notion of causality which stipulates that “similar conditions produce
similar effects, and consequently dissimilar results are due to dissimilar
conditions” (Buckley, 1998: 71). A realist AL scholar might point out
that (a) there are different types of causal relationships beyond the clas-
sical version, and (b) both the causes and the degrees of variation are
important to the study of interlanguage processes and language learning
and teaching in general. Indeed, the causes do need to be understood if
we want to gain a clear picture of the degree of variation and change.
In sum, CDST research is concerned with the trajectory of complex
systems and their constituting subsystems over time, whether they
change or stay the same. In methodological terms, this requires the
application of methods that allow us to record phenomena so that their
full complexity—i.e., their emergent properties and powers—and their
complex interaction with contextual forces over time can be appreciated.
402 J. Bouchard

CDST, Variables and Statistical Analysis

As stated above, CDST is not entirely committed to any specific method-
ological approach. What it rejects, however, are approaches that are
aligned with or reinforce the successionist model of causality, because
these are understood as reifying variables in abstraction from complex
systems. Instead, by prioritizing long-term system and case analysis,
CDST aims to approach variables as complex systems, and in doing so,
capture as much of the complexity involved. Byrne and Uprichard (2012:
110–111) assert that “the entities that matter in relation to causality are
not variables but systems […] cases are also taken to be complex systems
and variables are mere traces of those systems.” Furthermore, seeing vari-
ables as complex systems allows us to see variables such as age, motivation
and so forth not as closed, self-contained systems but as open, non-linear
and interacting complex systems. Hiver (2015: 25) not only sees variables
of relevance to learner motivation research as complex systems but more
specifically as attractor states:

While motivational outcomes such as apathy, flow and learned helpless-

ness could be considered variables in the traditional sense, in keeping
with recent developments in SLA research we may need to conceptualise
states like these as emergent, dynamic and context-dependent rather than
as absolute. Because they are all categorical patterns that L2 learners can
settle into (when casing one or more L2 learners as the dynamic system),
they can be considered as attractor states.

Looking at variables as complex systems and possible attractor

states opens the conceptual possibility that changes in one variable-
as-system can influence change in another variable-as-system, or how
energy from one system can flow into another system, contributing
to either greater variability/unpredictability or stability, depending on
the context and nature of the exchange. Stated differently, the complex
system view of variables allows researchers not only to organize their
research program differently—i.e., beyond the successionist or interpre-
tivist models, towards a complexity viewpoint—but also understand in
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 403

greater conceptual detail how variables, as complex systems and poten-

tial attractor states, influence each other in context and over time. As
Rosmawati (2014: 70) puts it, variables, as complex systems,

are inextricably intertwined and their interactions contribute to the

learning as a whole. The existence of and the interactions among these
highly interconnected variables further demonstrate that learning is a
dynamic process. […] development is dependent on the availability and
distribution of resources. When one type of resources is depleted—for
example, lack of motivation—the system can hardly maintain its optimal
state and may slide back to its previous state unless compromised by other
types of resources; for example, extensive exposure to the target language
and the need to communicate.

The importance of this interaction between variables as complex

systems is also underlined by Pickering (2016: 182), who notes that
“sociolinguists have discovered that the use of certain elements of speech
(sociolinguistic variations) in a language tend to correlate with age, class,
and gender. Researchers in this area have also found that sociolinguistic
variations and their social correlates correspond to social networks.” In
other words, the fact that variables mutually influencing each other
has not escaped the attention of AL scholars, regardless of whether
or not CDST principles have been considered. What CDST adds,
however, is a novel and dynamic conceptual viewpoint—i.e., a complexity
perspective—which allows researchers to formulate more detailed and
conceptually rich explanatory statements which yield insight into specific
ways variables are related, for particular reasons, with particular effects,
in specific contexts.
Unlike Lowie (2013), however, I am less enthusiastic about CDST’s
capacity for prediction. As explained in Chapter 2, the task of predic-
tion in the social sciences becomes considerably difficult when human
reflexivity is considered. In the study of human beings, while simula-
tion and modeling can provide approximate pictures, they can never
predict future behaviours and how things will unfold because the basis
upon which simulations can be designed can never factor in multiple
and unpredictable reflexive pathways. We only have to look at the
constant inaccuracies of election poll analyses, for example, which rarely
404 J. Bouchard

provide accurate predictions. One reason for this is that simulations and
modeling are more relevant to the study of restricted complexity—or a
type of complexity which arises out of the interaction of simple elements,
largely closed systems—rather than general complexity, which is the type
of complexity AL scholars must deal with, and which has so far been the
focus of discussion in this volume. As Byrne and Uprichard (2012: 125)
point out, “laws based on simplicity and simulations confined to repre-
senting restricted complexity never can cope with the general complexity
[…] of social reality.” In this sense, while Mercer (2014) is justified in
claiming that people are contradictory, dynamic and inconsistent, and
that this particular feature of people should therefore be conceptual-
ized as causally relevant in our data, she is less justified in her claim
that “from a complexity perspective, these characteristics of the self […]
could, indeed, potentially be predicted from models of system dynam-
ics” (p. 164). This is because models of system dynamics cannot be
applied uniformly to all social complex systems. At the same time, if we
consider Larsen-Freeman and Cameron’s (2008: 161) notion of language
as “emergent patterns stabilized from use”, we can also see the usefulness
of complexity theory to a study of language and discourse as complex
dynamic systems, partly distinct from situated interaction, yet embedded
within social reality—itself a complex dynamic system. However, this
should not lead CDST adherents to conclude that reflexivity can success-
fully be modelled by complex dynamic models and that this can lead
AL researchers to make predictions about how language learners will
ultimately learn.

Disentangling CDST from its Poststructuralist

Tendencies
So far in this book, I have maintained a markedly critical view towards
interpretivist AL scholarship, particularly poststructuralist AL. Admit-
tedly, such critique is rather common in contemporary social theory and
sciences, for postmodernism—as a general umbrella term for a range of
anti-realist perspectives rejecting modernist principles, prioritizing the
fluidity and discursively constructed aspects of social life—has, in my
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 405

view, successfully been critically unpacked from multiple angles in recent

decades, by social scientists of all strands. In this way, it is fair to ask
whether a critique of postmodernist/poststructuralist AL scholarship is
even necessary at this point in AL history, or whether the development
of a robust realist social ontology for AL scholarship is achievable without
a critique of anti-realism. My position is that a CDST-informed realist
approach to AL research has the potential to offer more solid concep-
tual foundations for AL research, and for this potential to materialize AL
needs to come to terms with the problems associated with interpretivism
and postmodernism.
Another important reason for extending my critique of interpretivism
within CDST at the end of this chapter is that, because our focus
in AL research is inevitably on language and, more broadly speaking
discourse as “intertwining structures – linguistic, social, and so on –
that frame a social or cultural group’s preferred habits of interpretation”
(Davis & Sumara, 2008: 66), input from postmodernism is, to a large
extent, necessary to the work we do. After all, understanding language,
its real-world uses and how it is taught and learned around the world
necessitates a clear understanding of the (partly) constructed nature of
society, the central role of both language and discourse, people’s sense-
making activities, and the poststructuralist notion of power as “social
glue” in the production of educational realities and social life. Espe-
cially since postmodernism provides much valuable insight into the
social world, an ongoing critique of anti-realism is indeed necessary.
Although I fully agree with Weideman’s (2015: 4, emphasis mine) state-
ment that, “though one may in passing imagine that [CDST] is yet
another variation of postmodernism, that thought will soon be dispelled
when its typically modernist starting points, specifically its affinities with
the natural sciences and computer modeling of language, are revealed,”
there is no doubt that anti-realist tendencies persist within CDST—as
the above discussion on the CDST view of knowledge and truth has
revealed—and that these issues must be resolved for further progress to
be made. In this section of the chapter, I focus on traces of postmod-
ernist thought in CDST, notably by honing in on problematic features in
the argumentation provided by CDST adherent Filipović (2015). I also
argue that, for CDST to gain firmer grounds within AL research in the
406 J. Bouchard

years to come, it must maintain its commitment to objective knowledge

by aligning itself to a realist ontology.
To begin with, CDST can easily be distinguished from anti-realism
simply by underlining the latter’s rejection of the very idea of system.
As Weideman (2015: 2) explains, “poststructuralist thinking ignores its
main current rival, dynamic systems theory. There remains within post-
structuralism a certain uneasiness with the notion of ‘system’, with some
proponents declaring it anathema, and others retaining an ambiguous
perspective.” This rejection of system is, by extension, a rejection of the
principle of emergence and the related idea that social structures are also
consequential social realities to account for. As such, by flattening social
ontology down to the local, poststructuralism is ill-suited to deal with
the idea of social progress or regress, thus imposing a rather unneces-
sary ontological problem for CDST-informed AL scholarship. After all,
without a view of system researchers then have limited means to deal
with the pressing issue for all social scientists: to find the “most adequate
ways of thinking about the interconnections between different features
of social life” (Layder, 2006: ix). Even if CDST—as with realist social
research—is focused on the case, local realities must also be analysed in
relation to realities beyond their situatedness. While Mercer (2011) and
Ushioda (2015) provide convincing arguments for focusing on situated
learner individuality and complexity at the local level, and while case
study research certainly offers valuable and detailed insight into lived
social realities, it is equally important for CDST adherents to main-
tain their focus on systems, both local and broader, and not succumb
to methodological individualism.
Also problematic is the related tendency among some CDST adher-
ents to conflate ontology and epistemology, a distinctly anti-realist
strategy. We can see clear signs of this in Filipović’s (2015) work,
particularly how the author links CDST to a constructivist and/or
interpretivist epistemology, notably when she explains the underlying
principle guiding constructivism (and by extension her approach to
CDST-oriented AL research) as a matter of researchers “reading” (i.e.,
interpreting) data and theoretical models in their own ways, depending
on the theoretical traditions they adhere to. For example, she describes
a constructivist approach to research, which according to her allows
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 407

researchers to be “free to shape their work in terms of necessities rather

than received ideas as to what they ought not to be doing” (Filipović,
2015: 22). Although perhaps the emancipatory potential in these state-
ments can be appealing, truth is effectively reduced by the author to
truth claims—an untenable scientific strategy. In developing her view
of CDST markedly inspired by constructivism, Filipović thus conflates
ontology within epistemology, and fails to recognize that “justifying one’s
belief in Y is not the same as explaining why Y is the case” (Ylikoski,
2012: 41). More alarmingly in my view is how Filipović’s commit-
ment to anti-realist principles undermines CDST both theoretically and
methodologically.
Anti-realist (and by extension, relationist) AL is problematic because
it is conflationary, not only because it reduces the world to people’s
understanding of it, but also because it collapses language-as-resource
within language practice, social reality within discourse, and people to
their social relations. Again, Filipović (2015) demonstrates this tendency
when discussing language standardization as representing “an outcome
of active, purposeful interventions of groups or individuals in the
process of language maintenance or language change. These interven-
tions are practically always externally motivated; they are about language
functions and domains, but much more than that, they are about socio-
political and scientific orientations of language planners” (p. 52). Rather
commonly accepted in the field of language policy and planning, the
idea expressed in this statement is, in and of itself, not particularly
problematic. Problems begin to surface, however, when this argument
is used as a basis to promote the related idea that standard languages
are “not real” or “an affront on language users’ rights” (e.g., Pennycook,
2013; Shohamy, 2006). Filipović, unfortunately, commits this concep-
tual mistake, notably in her statement that language is strictly a social
phenomenon (thus eschewing the referential function of language), and
her rejection of langue, or language as an intransitive and relatively orga-
nized system of signs independent of its users. Indeed, there is ample
evidence in Filipović’s argumentation of a lukewarm commitment by the
author to CDST’s system view of complex systems.
As I argued in Bouchard (2018), the idea that language can be
both a system of signs, have a standardized version, and be a situated
408 J. Bouchard

and constantly negotiated social phenomenon is neither paradoxical nor

contradictory: it is simply a recognition of language as a stratified and
emergent social reality. Sealey (2019: 962) makes a similar argument
thus: “one can recognize that different languages are not unitary, distinct
entities and yet acknowledge the partial success of practices that reify,
codify, and separate them.” Again, when we communicate in everyday
life, we do not create language out of nothing: we draw from linguistic
and symbolic resources as emergent CS elements with antecedent and
relatively enduring properties, existing partly beyond the realm of situ-
ated interaction, thus as partly objective phenomena. This, however, does
not mean that language-as-CS-resource dictates or determines how we
ultimately choose to communicate. It only means that, as a CS resource,
language provides us with constraining and enabling influences as we
communicate in the real world. Defining language as both a system and
as a situated practice, in my view, is not only necessary to understand the
full complexity of human communication: it is also entirely consistent
with a CDST approach to the study of language and related phenomena.
Furthermore, a stratified view of language also serves as a reminder that
the study of language is very much a matter of understanding the transi-
tive and intransitive aspects of language, or the relationship between the
ontologically distinct and emergent properties and powers of language as
a stratified social reality.
To reiterate an important point in this book, the fact that two things
are deeply and causally related to each other does not mean that they
are necessarily homologous, that they are inseparable, that they cannot
be understood outside of their relationships with other phenomena, or
that they can only make sense to researchers when studied at the local
level. If that were the case, there would not be much complexity to
account for. Failure by AL scholars to recognize these points, in my
view, is somewhat ironic if we consider, for example, how anti-realist AL
scholars view only situated language practices as meaningful on the one
hand, while constructing their arguments by drawing from antecedent
and enduring rules and standards of academic writing on the other.
Therefore, while Filipović’s critique is somewhat warranted with regards
to the relationship between standard language varieties and situated
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 409

communicative exchanges, it cannot be applied to other communica-

tive phenomena, including the production and consumption of academic
discourse. Also confusing in her argumentation is her reiteration of the
notion of emergent language behavior throughout her book. Without a
proper definition that could help us distinguish it from other notions
already available in CDST literature, one must therefore wonder: (a)
What or where do these emergent language behaviors emerge from? and
(2) Are there language behaviours which are not emergent? In short, one
cannot talk about emergence on the one hand, while rejecting a strati-
fied viewpoint, including notions such as systems, the process of language
standardization, and language as CS resource on the other. One can only
understand emergence as a fundamental mechanism in the production
of social life from a stratified, anti-conflationary viewpoint.
This conflation between ontology and epistemology is also denoted in
numerous AL studies—CDST-informed and otherwise—which consider
survey data as sufficient access to truth, or at least to the lived realities of
individual human agents. Mercer’s (2011) CDST-informed analysis of
interview data is a good example of what Mann (2011) calls a gener-
ally undertheorized approach to interview data in contemporary AL
research characterized by researchers (a) commenting liberally on short
and largely decontextualized interview quotes extracted from broader
interview transcripts, (b) claiming to use specific approaches to interview
analysis without clearly specifying what these are in comparison with
other methodologies, and (c) presenting interviews as co-construction
between interviewer and interviewee, yet failing to explain how the inter-
viewer’s voice actually influences the data and presenting and analysing
only the voice of the interviewee(s). To this, I would add that Mercer
(2011) assumes a direct relationship between interview statements and
the complex reality of self-concept and identity work—i.e., seeing
people’s understandings and descriptions of their experience as providing
direct insight into and reliable ontological statements about the experi-
ences themselves. In this sense, one has to wonder if her approach to
survey data analysis has more to do with interview discourse than with
self-concept, the core issue in her paper.
We can thus begin the task of separating CDST from its problem-
atic anti-realist penchant by honing in on instances of conflationary
410 J. Bouchard

thinking within CDST literature. Oddly, conflationary thinking, and

the related critique of dichotomous thinking, also tend to be devel-
oped inconsistently in CDST literature. Filipović (2015), for example,
dichotomizes various paradigms in social theory and the phenomena
they are trying to explain, within a broader critique of dichotomous
thinking. For example, she posits empiricism/positivism and critical
theory/constructivism/participatory research as opposites. This tendency
becomes explicitly demonstrated in a table on page 33 of her book, taken
from Bastardas-Boada (2013), showing the complexity perspective on the
right against a said “traditional” perspective on the left. This table lists
attributes of each to suggest that the perspective on the right negates
the perspective on the left. Ironically, the table includes an attribute of
the “traditional” perspective on the left as the prioritization of “either/or
dichotomies,” whereas the complexity perspective on the right is said to
advocate “and/both integration and complementarity.” In short, Filipović
employs dichotomization to advance an anti-dichotomist argument. The
problem in my view is that the author fails to distinguish differentiation
from dichotomization.
In moderate contrast, CDST adherents Kostoulas and Stelma (2016)
successfully present the psychological dimension, specifically intention-
ality, as a complex system using a stratified (and arguably realist)
ontology. In their study of learner intentionality as a complex system,
the authors maintain a stratified ontology by stating that, given their
research purposes, ontological distinctions between individual, small
group, and societal levels of activity are maintained. They also make
productive uses of the notion of system, arguing that their chapter
“looks into phenomena of language learning psychology such as the rela-
tion between agency and structure, and the emergence of spontaneous
behaviours among language learners, and it puts forward a conceptual
model, which we call a Complex System of Intentions, for the interpre-
tation of such phenomena” (p. 8). The authors’ more conceptually robust
CDST approach leads them to conclude, in part, that

intentionality motivates language learning activity, and the source of this

motivating ‘effect’ may be either more individual (i.e., agentive) or more
social, depending on the level of analysis. Intentionality, we argue, is an
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 411

emergent phenomenon, which comes to existence from the co-activity

of multiple system constituents, such as needs, beliefs, aspirations and
affordances that are present in a system. (p. 11)

Of much appeal in the work conducted by Kostoulas and Stelma is the

possibility that intentionality—as complex and stratified system—can
also be conceptualized in realist terms as a causal mechanism, presenting
constraining and enabling influences upon language learners when acti-
vated by agentive powers and potentials. Despite making reference to
the structure-agency debate as reinforcing dichotomous thinking, the
authors nevertheless ably combine insight from both CDST and realism
when arguing that CDST “provides us with insights into the reciprocal
determination between higher and lower levels of activity, such as indi-
vidual action and social values and policies, and in doing so, helps us
bridge the dichotomy between agency and structure” (p. 22). Despite
some minor conceptual problems, their statements can nevertheless be
characterized as stratified and emergentist and compatible with a realist
ontology.

CDST, Critical AL Research and Critical

Language Education
A central argument in this volume is that, as a branch of the social
sciences, AL requires a social ontology, and for reasons provided thus
far, a realist ontology arguably offers much in terms of robust conceptual
notions with which to study both social morphostasis and morphogen-
esis. Related to this argument is that CDST-oriented AL research, while
offering valuable insight into complexity, emergence and causality, also
needs to be integrated within the robust social ontology provided by
realism. Situating both AL and CDST within a realist ontology means
gaining a unique view into the structure-culture-agency relationship, not
as a battle between opposed entities, nor as to the result of upward,
downward or central conflations, but rather as a complex and neces-
sary interaction between three distinct and emergent strata of the social
realm over time in the ongoing production of social life. A robust social
412 J. Bouchard

ontology is, in a broader sense, also necessary when studying people and
their social activities to (a) avoid any form of determinism or volun-
tarism in our descriptions and explanations, (b) understand how culture
and structure both constrain and enable people on the ground, and how
people make sense of these forces and calibrate their efforts in light of
these, and (c) highlight the problems and challenges imposed by various
forms (or systems) of social inequality emerging from human activity. A
robust social ontology, in this sense, is crucial if one of our objectives
as social scientists (and as people living in the world, for that matter)
is to improve society and the lives of the people in it. These concerns
are not abstract in the pejorative sense of having limited relevance to the
situated and lived experiences of people: they are real issues with real
consequences for educators and social scientists, including AL scholars.
Understanding language learning and teaching within the larger
ethical projects of education and human emancipation makes a robust
social ontology even more important, for the relationship between struc-
ture and agency must then be conceptualized and unpacked through
description, interpretation, explanation and critical analysis. This need
is felt by both AL scholars and language teachers and learners as well,
for critical thinking and critical analysis are core to education’s central
goal of promoting rational inquiry and judgement, and the ability of
flesh-and-blood people to self-correct in light of new evidence. As Bailin
(1998: 209) points out, critical thinking

presupposes, for example, a fallibilist epistemology, that is, the view that
our knowledge can never be certain but is always open to the possibility
of revision in the light of new evidence and arguments. […] It is because
we cannot be certain that our current body of knowledge is true that
the critical assessment of this knowledge in light of new evidence and
arguments becomes central.

In sum, it is important to view much of the work we do as AL scholars,

language teachers and language practitioners as rooted in critical inquiry,
a practice that requires descriptive, explanatory and ethical engagement.
By extension, and given the inherently social nature of what we do, our
work also requires sociological knowledge. A critical perspective—both
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 413

for research and pedagogy—therefore requires a stratified viewpoint not

only as a way to understand how social structures both constrain and
enable human intentions (Sealey & Carter, 2004), but also to under-
stand social phenomena as unfolding within and across different layers,
or different domains, of society (Layder, 1997). This stratified look is
crucial to critical analysis, for the oppression of human beings must
also be understood as a specific causal relationship between people and
social phenomena, each possessing distinct and emergent properties. If
we want to understand (a) how language learning is related to broader
socio-economic and political realities, (b) how language ideologies gain
hegemonic status while others do not, (c) how people within language
learning contexts and beyond suffer or are discriminated against, (d)
why some forms of oppression seem to persist throughout history, and
perhaps more importantly (e) how systemic forms of oppression can
be dismantled, we need to ground our work in a clear and informed
understanding that phenomena such as people, institutions, laws, and
society are different, with distinct and emergent properties of their
own. Without this stratified viewpoint, it would be extremely difficult
to develop viable educational strategies helping students nurture and
apply analytical judgement, or develop effective evaluative and corrective
strategies that can help people move towards social emancipation.
While the stratified perspective in CDST remains promising, we saw
in the previous chapter that its critical angle remains weak, in large part
because of its (currently) underdeveloped accounts of human agency.
As we saw earlier in this book, a critical perspective requires a strong
version of human agency, because it is people—as reflexively endowed
powerful particulars—who have the capacity to engage in discursive
practices, critical questioning and social engagement and effectuate social
change. Consequently, if we want language learners to develop a crit-
ical viewpoint towards (a) why they should learn a particular language,
(b) standard language varieties and local varieties, and (c) constraining
ideologies within language learning contexts including native speakerism,
our focus should not be placed exclusively on systems of oppression but
also on what flesh-and-blood people can do to improve their lives. To
successfully empower language learners, educators should thus present
social inequalities as complex systems with antecedent properties and
414 J. Bouchard

powers somewhat beyond the reach of individual human beings on the

one hand, and help learners identify the causes and effects of, and the
solutions to, social inequalities within their range of experience on the
other. Unfortunately, CDST fails to provide much specific, or sociolog-
ically informed, view in this regard. In addition, given its rather marked
emphasis on the study of local realities, CDST also tends to provide an
ontologically flattened view of agency within a contingent social world.
Instead, what we often read in CDST literature is the unsatisfactory
suggestion that structure and agency are “equally important” or that they
are “complementary” (e.g., Mason, 2008a, 2008b).
The weakness of CDST’s critical angle is also due to its limited insight
into collective action for social change. An effective critical language
learning and teaching approach, for example, focuses on (a) the develop-
ment of learners’ awareness of systemic forms of oppression—the notion
that sexism or racism, for example, are not merely negative aspects
of individual personalities or faulty personal worldviews but are also
and very importantly antecedent and enduring cultural and structural
forces systematically disempowering some for the benefit of others—and
(b) the need for and strategies to effectuate collective action towards
change—i.e., the idea that sexism or racism will not be dismantled only
through a focus on the self and individual sense-making processes but
rather through long-term, consistent, structured collective mobilization.
In other words, what is missing in CDST is a critical realist view of
social oppression as a broad and consequential underlying causal mech-
anism, and a strong vision of both individual and collective agency to
counter its effects. To a large extent, these core elements in critical peda-
gogy and critical social research go against the CDST view regarding the
structure of complex systems and networks that “a decentralized network
is a more viable structure for any system that relies on the efficient
exchange of information—a category that includes all living and learning
systems” (Davis & Sumara, 2008: 88). While certainly strong justifica-
tion for student-centered education, in my view this principle also goes
against another core feature of effective critical pedagogy and inquiry: the
orientation towards collective critical discourse and action to dismantle
systemic inequality. Weideman (2015: 4, emphases mine) is also critical
of the lack of engagement with the structure-agency debate in CDST:
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 415

There is nothing close to [concerns for power inequalities] in the mani-

festations of [CDST] within applied linguistics. Moreover, the views of
those working within a [CDST] paradigm on human agency are a world
apart from the transformative human action foreseen by postmodernism,
not only in its critical, but especially in its poststructuralist conceptu-
alisation. [CDST] has little to say about the overtly political agenda of
postmodernism in applied linguistics.

While I agree with the author’s point regarding CDST to

a large extent, I disagree with his characterization of postmod-
ernism/poststructuralism—clearly relativist, anti-realist viewpoints—
providing a robust and theoretically consistent view of transformative
human action, or as providing an overtly political agenda. As Bailin
(1998: 209) argues,

the practice of critical thinking […] rests on a non-relativist epistemology.

A radical relativist account of knowledge holds that all views are merely
subjective preferences that are equally valid. The enterprise of rationally
assessing claims makes no sense in this context. Critical thinking presup-
poses the existence of criteria for judgement and hence the possibility of
justification.

And justification cannot come from relativism/anti-realism: it can

only come from commitment to objective knowledge, as I have argued
previously in this volume.
That being said, some complexity theorists have tried to open new
conceptual possibilities for a critically-informed CDST view of agency
in AL contexts. Some are even more positive about CDST’s potential
to strengthen critical social research at large through the introduction of
complexity-informed concepts. According to Alhadeff-Jones (2008: 73),
“complexity theories have substantial emancipatory potential. Concepts
like ‘control’, ‘autonomy’, ‘organisation’ or ‘self ’ may enrich our repre-
sentations of alienation and emancipation as complex processes. They
might encourage reconsideration of the meaning of social and philo-
sophical critique.” Specific to ethnographic social research, Agar (1999,
cited in Cochran-Smith et al. (2014: 108)) identifies further evidence of
CDST’s critical potential:
416 J. Bouchard

While complexity theory does not change many of the fundamentals

of ethnographic research, it adds considerably to this research by over-
coming the “bias” of an anthropological approach toward localized groups
and by emphasizing trends in larger interacting systems with a focus on
mechanisms that show how things work, not simply how they are.

Within AL scholarship, Cochran-Smith et al. (2014) see the appli-

cation of CDST to teacher training research and programs (which
contain important critical elements) as beneficial. As they argue, CDST
approaches “offer trenchant critique of problematic but persistent ideas,
such as transmission-oriented approaches to teacher training, linear
views of teaching and learning, process–product logic regarding teachers’
learning, and university-school knowledge hierarchies that separate
theory and practice” (p. 108). In sum, by offering novel ideas and
concepts with which to study complex systems and their causal inter-
actions within the social realm, CDST can arguably be posited as adding
further critical strength to existing AL research. However, this critical
perspective remains at this point more or less focused on ontological
issues rather than questions of social injustice.
Filipović (2015) is perhaps more elaborate in her attempt to develop
a critical CDST-informed AL research approach. As pointed out earlier,
however, the author adopts essentially a constructivist approach which,
according to her, is aimed at bringing to the front the centrality of the
human subject, or as she puts it, “recognition of local, specific, histor-
ically and geographically limited categories which allow for a plurality
of perspectives in analyzing a single phenomenon, depending on the
way it actualizes itself on one hand, and on experiences and ideolo-
gies of the researchers, on the other hand” (p. 15). By emphasizing
the importance of discourse—and by extension presenting the agent as
emerging through situated discursive practices—the author also commits
the mistake common among contemporary constructivist and poststruc-
turalist AL researchers of overemphasizing the importance of discourse
in the production of social life. As we saw in Chapter 3, this strategy
effectively decentres the human subject and weakens people’s reflexivity
and potential for critical engagement and change. This problem becomes
rather evident in the following statement by the author: “Human history
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 417

is history of communicative actions. Everything we do, learn, think or

believe, we perpetuate or change through discursive practices we employ
along the way” (Filipović, 2015: 116). Although human agents in this
statement seem to be identified at the engine in the production of
social life, this view is problematic on two fronts: (a) human history
is not simply a “conversation” but also—and very importantly—about
the material, non-discursive realities such as earthquakes, tsunamis,
pandemics, global warming, wars and mass murders; and (b) agency—
not discourse—is the powerful particular. In this way, the author fails
to explain why people choose to engage in particular discursive prac-
tices and not others; instead, she merely states that they do, which is
insufficient for a critical perspective.
In developing a critical angle, Filipović (2015: 16) argues for what
she calls a utopian politics of possibility aimed not only at countering
social injustices but also at imagining a radical democracy that has yet
to emerge in our world. Although these suggestions are appealing and
creative, and certainly relevant to the Japanese foreign language educa-
tion context in which I work, I cannot help but note a clear positivist
tendency (i.e., contra postmodernism) in her argumentation, specifically
the idea that society and people should aim to develop a world (which
has yet to exist) which would allow them to reach their full potential via
ongoing, constructive and (I assume) democratically rooted processes of
realization and emancipation. In retrospect, it is reasonable to observe
that Filipović’s discussion of agency and criticality is a mere “add-on” to
her core definition of CDST, rather than a successful, or conceptually
consistent and robust, alignment of agency and criticality with CDST
principles. This rather a-critical combination of somewhat conceptually
divergent ideas is rather common in Filipović’s book, notably when she
contrasts a somewhat essentialized view of language policy and planning
against a CDST-guided view of language policy and planning thus:

In complexity theory […] management is replaced by leadership, a

heterarchical structure based on “partnership, followership, empower-
ment, teams, networks, and the role of context”, which takes into
serious scientific consideration ethical and moral principles when investi-
gating human relations […] Leaders are initiators, motivators, and their
418 J. Bouchard

authority is based on their positive outlook and respect they incite among
the members of the same community, rather than on formally defined
positions of power which are the principal characteristics of managers.
(Filipović, 2015: 45–46)

Again, the principles expressed here have much value to language

policy and planning research and critical AL scholarship in general.
What transpires from this statement, however, is another example of
a fragile and precarious conceptual integration of agency and criti-
cality within existing CDST principles. A similar strategy of simply
adding agency and criticality to the mix is adopted by a surprisingly
large number of contemporary postmodernist and poststructuralist AL
scholars. As Mackenzie (1998: 61) rightfully points out with regards to
(said) postmodernist critique,

Oppression and injustice are certainly constructed and in many cases

alterable; what prevents their alteration is commonly not what the post-
modernists wish to attack, the belief that they are natural and fixed, but
the power of those who commit them. And a ‘radical struggle’ against the
repressive structures of society that culminates only in searing indictments
in academic journals is a radical struggle that even university admin-
istrators, let alone power structures in the wider society, find easy to
tolerate.

Also problematic in Filipović’s understanding of agency and criticality

is the way she develops the notion of a critical potential, which appears
to contradict the common view of CDST research as a fundamentally
bottom-up enterprise. The following statement reveals this problem:
“The fact that we live in societies based on inequality has serious impact
on the way we perceive, use and misuse language […] this is also a
valid field of linguistic research” (Filipović, 2015: 4). In other words,
although the author focuses on local realities without offering a model
for how people and social structures are related, there is nevertheless clear
acknowledgement in her work of structural forces as consequential to the
existence and endurance of social inequalities.
A more worrisome problem is that Filipović’s critical agenda, or main
approach to social emancipation, seems to be reduced to a process
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 419

of adjusting localized discursive practices, or as a process of engaging

in individually and socially appropriate communicative practices. Her
presentation of the notion of language leadership clearly reveals her
marked constructivist penchant:

I started using the concept of language leadership to describe this type

of possible interaction between the society and the language in which
interested parties use their experience and knowledge to help the others
understand things about the world which are reflected in language and
shaped/reshaped or changed by language. Language leaders in my research
are those who belong to interested speech communities/communities of
practice, and who start applying different linguistic patterns in their
everyday communication in order to make language more expressive
of their world view and their position in the world, but without pres-
suring anybody else into doing so. The working hypothesis being that by
engaging in socially and individually appropriated communicative prac-
tice, we can change the world one person at [a] time. (Filipović, 2015: 5,
emphasis original)

In other words, while there are traces of a system view of social oppres-
sion in her statement, change is not presented as involving collective
dismantlement of oppressive systems but rather as a matter of individual
responsibility, which is then reduced to a process of formulating alter-
native identity positions through novel discursive practices—one person
at a time. The same problem was noted in Chapter 3 with regards to
postmodernism and poststructuralism, and was characterized as part of a
neoliberalist ideology.
Filipović (2015: 11) also adopts a problematic constructivist viewpoint
with regards to scientific knowledge thus:

The politics of science seeks its epistemological affirmation in the notions

of ‘objectivity’, ‘reason’, ‘reliability of data’, ‘universal scientific truth’ and
the like, using positivist-science-related terminology to create the great
divide between those who ‘get to do science’ and those who are not given
access to this privileged field of human activity.
420 J. Bouchard

This statement is problematic largely because it erroneously iden-

tifies a commitment to objective knowledge as a modernist/positivist
strategy. If only modernism was committed to objective knowledge,
postmodernist ontologies would then be reduced to mere pursuits of
subjective knowledge, thus nullifying any possibility for the formula-
tion of ontological claims. It would, in other words, leave Filipović
unable to make knowledge claims about phenomena including complex
systems, language learning and teaching, language policy and planning,
and language variety (to name a few core AL issues addressed in her
volume). In short, the author mistakenly reduces objectivity to ideology
and seems to reduce all scientific endeavours to mere ideological exer-
cises. Secondly, Filipović oversimplifies the politics of science to a process
of excluding researchers and practitioners as essentialized social cate-
gories, while failing to acknowledge (a) the natural and the social sciences
as also marked by transdisciplinarity to a large extent, and (b) the impor-
tant contribution of AL and educational research to real-world, situated
language learning and teaching practices around the world.
Finally, Filipović (2015: 56) offers a considerably weakened version of
agency and of people’s critical potential in the following statement:

We need to work on establishing critical relationships and interactions

which bring us closer to other individuals who share our world views,
our understanding of knowledge and science, and who also share our
faith in the objectives we decide to accomplish. That is the only way for
the new standard language systems to emerge.

This drastic, exclusionary and deeply ideological approach fails to

acknowledge that overcoming social tensions and systemic forms of
inequalities do not depend exclusively on consensus. In many ways,
it is quite the opposite: it requires active and hopefully positive and
productive exchanges with people who do not share our world views.
Given these numerous problems, it is fair to claim that Filipović’s critical
perspective does not offer much beyond the already problematic critical
angle within social constructivism and postmodernism.
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 421

Despite these conceptual shortcomings, Filipović (2015: 5) neverthe-

less identifies important features of a critical agenda in CDST-informed
AL research:

Scientific research, among other objectives, should have the one of

helping in finding solutions to real-life problems of real people, and that
in order to achieve that, a dialogue among academic communities, policy
makers and interested non-scientific communities of practice needs to
be established in order to come up with long-term, sustainable solutions
which may ultimately lead to a more equal distribution of social power
in our societies.

At the same time, such argument by the author fits rather uncomfort-
ably with the CDST view of knowledge described earlier, for engagement
and response by students does not come without some form of presen-
tation and representation of both knowledge and truth—i.e., it does not
come without commitment to objective knowledge.
Outside CDST bastions, Bailin (1998: 204) provides a more elaborate
and concrete understanding of the core issue in this section on critical AL
research, CDST-informed or otherwise:

Critical thinking is central to the critical appraisal of information which

constitutes a part of subject matter expertise; the generation of effec-
tive solutions to problems; the abilities to evaluate competing claims,
cut through political rhetoric and emotional suasion, and to engage in
open-minded discussions that are crucial for democratic participation;
and generally to the development of autonomous responsible individ-
uals who weigh the consequences of their actions, engage in advanced
and thoughtful planning, and deal in effective and innovative ways with
personal and social problems.

This view is more elaborate because it (a) combines the descriptive

and ethical potentials of critical thinking, (b) is more specific about what
language learners and teachers can do, and (c) maintains a stratified
viewpoint and a commitment to objective knowledge necessary to the
deployment of critical thinking in both research and pedagogy.
422 J. Bouchard

To sum up, a viable critical AL scholarship requires a stratified view of

the social realm as well as a strong version of human agency. Because
of this, it is fair to argue that CDST has more conceptual work to
do. As of now, CDST facilitates the important task of describing social
phenomena as complex systems, and offers much insight into complex
and/or probabilistic causality. However, it also needs to offer an ethical
perspective crucial to educational projects, including the teaching and
learning of languages. To improve in this direction, CDST must provide
a stronger version of human agency, maintain and reinforce its systemic
viewpoint, and explicitly affirm its commitment to objective knowledge.

Conclusion
The main purpose of this chapter has been to look at CDST-informed
AL scholarship from the social realist ontology outlined in previous
chapters. As already mentioned, CDST essentially focuses on open and
learning systems, i.e., systems which interact with their environment
through the exchange of information, energy or material, and evolve
in the process largely through self-organization. As Buckley (1998: 44)
points out, “that a system is open means, not simply that it engages
in interchanges with the environment, but that this interchange is an
essential factor underlying the system’s viability, its reproductive ability or
continuity, and its ability to change.” The CDST approach to studying
open systems thus focuses not only on relationships but also on the parts
and wholes of open systems integrated within specific contexts (Cochran-
Smith et al., 2014). As it applies to language-related phenomena, CDST
is partly rooted in acknowledgement of—and engagement with—the
possibility that if biological systems can be characterized by complexity
and indeterminacy, cognitive, emotional, linguistic, educational, and
social systems should understandably also be considered as complex,
non-linear, and emergent realities.
In this sense, the importance of CDST to contemporary AL is, in my
view at least, undeniable and of consequence to a renewed AL scholar-
ship. At the same time, the current state of CDST-informed AL research
remains somewhat unsatisfactory, and while much conceptual work has
 7 Complex Dynamic System Theory … 423

already been done, very little of this work has been applied to the study
of empirical data (Dörnyei et al., 2008). Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020: 5)
explain this problem thus:

the main hurdle to empirical scholarship informed by complexity theory

has been applied linguists’ uncertainty regarding what designing and
conducting actual CDST research entails. The result is a distinct lack of
consensus regarding which phenomena or questions merit examination,
how systematic investigation should be structured and conducted (e.g..,
with regard to instrumentation and data collection) and how the results
of this research should be analyzed and interpreted.

Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008: 14) also recognize this lacuna,

as well as the limitations of current CDST theory, and recommend the
use of other theories to complement it. Larsen-Freeman (2020: viii) may
be right to some extent in pointing out that “if the value of CDST is to
be fully realized, researchers need to take the next step beyond describing
and theorizing change in dynamic systems; they need to conduct research
and adduce evidence, informed by CDST.” However, while more empir-
ically grounded and conceptually rich CDST-informed AL studies are
certainly central to a renewed AL scholarship, there still remain impor-
tant conceptual elements within CDST which need further development
and sophistication, and this chapter and the previous one have attempted
to identify some of these.

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 8
Conclusion

This book has tried to uncover and bring further sophistication to the
theoretical grounds upon which AL stands, with the hope that such work
can inspire other AL scholars to invest efforts in a renewed AL scholar-
ship, one which is (a) more sensitive to the complexity of AL phenomena,
(b) enriched by insight from social theory and (c) aligned in transdisci-
plinary fashion with other strands of the social sciences. Although there
are many ways to achieve these broad aims, I have chosen to concen-
trate principally on ontological questions and look at CDST’s recent
contribution to research in the field, from the lens provided by a realist
ontology, because I believe that this strategy holds much promise for
the future. It has been a somewhat lengthy and demanding project to
achieve, and I am sure somewhat demanding to read as well. And while
issues of methodology have not enjoyed the spotlight much, I do hope
that readers have gained a more solid understanding of the necessity
and challenges involved in developing a robust social ontology for AL
research, understanding which I believe is crucial to the formulation of
more robust and complexity-informed methodological approaches. In
this conclusion, I provide a short summary of some of the most salient
points made in the past seven chapters.
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 429
Switzerland AG 2021
J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3_8
430 J. Bouchard

Realism begins with the assumption that there is a reality indepen-

dent of people’s understanding of it, and that knowledge of that reality
also helps modulate that reality. It develops the argument that ontology
affects epistemology: the way things are influences both the way we
understand them and the extent to which it is possible for us to know
about them. As such, realism is characterized by a commitment to objec-
tive knowledge, which justifies its emphasis on ontological issues. In
other words, realism is mainly interested in knowing what entities and
phenomena exist in the world, how they exist, and the kinds of relation-
ships (causal or otherwise) unfold between phenomena. This perspective
has been justified in this book and many others as valuable to the
production and consumption of a non-conflationary social science.
More generally speaking, a social ontology has been characterized as
built upon theories and concepts related to the structure–agency relation-
ship. From the perspective of social realism, culture was also presented as
an important layer of the social realm, not to be conflated within struc-
ture or people, but rather as a distinct and emergent stratum of the social
realm with its own causal potential. Specific to the issue of causality,
agency and underlying causal mechanisms were presented as powerful
particulars in the ongoing production of social life. This sociological
insight has also been placed in relation to a range of issues relevant to
AL scholarship including, at its conceptual core, complexity, emergence
and causality, and at its theoretical and methodological levels, learning,
teaching, identity, ideology, language shift, language policy and planning,
literacy, language socialization, processing, pedagogy and assessment, to
name only a few issues covered in this book.
From a realist perspective, discussions about the structure-culture-
agency relationship are not (a) intellectual digressions, (b) remnants of
a bygone era of human knowledge, nor (c) conceptual issues to be “over-
come” or “transcended.” Rather, what we do as AL scholars is informed
and structured by our variegated understandings of that relationship, as
it unfolds in specific contexts, at specific periods of time, for specific
purposes, fulfilled by specific people as agents and reflexively endowed
powerful particulars. In light of this, the improvement of current AL
scholarship has been characterized as a reconceptualization of AL issues
 8 Conclusion 431

in descriptive and explanatory terms, in relation to, and hopefully further

elucidating, the structure-culture-agency relationship.
While both successionist and interpretivist tendencies within AL
provide incomplete accounts because they are based on conflationary
thinking, the robust social ontology provided by realism allows for
some degree of conceptual and methodological combination—not
dichotomization—of both perspectives, towards a “third way.” By logical
extension, since realism proposes that society and its various compo-
nents and phenomena should be understood as complex, emergent and
thus stratified, unfolding at multiple levels of reality (e.g., biological,
cognitive, interpersonal, cultural, social, educational and/or legal levels),
it also supports the adoption of methodological pluralism to uncover
processes located within and across levels. These are some of the strate-
gies employed by realist scholars as they attempt to provide insight into
complexity, emergence and causality.
More explicit than CDST on this point, and presenting a rather sharp
contrast from posthumanism, realism distinguishes between natural and
social entities based on their distinct and emergent properties and
powers. While the natural world also contains complex phenomena,
many of its objects and processes can be explained through formulas
and rules because they are either closed systems or marked by restricted
complexity rather than general complexity. In contrast, people are
reflexive, emotional, interested, purposeful, and causally efficacious.
Furthermore, the social world can be explained as complex, radically
open, non-linear, contingent and heterogeneous, characteristics which
help us distinguish the social from the natural. Languages such as French
or English, for example, “are not organisms, and have no genetic imper-
ative to ‘seek’ survival […] They are not natural kinds, their boundaries
are porous, their codification is indeed often a matter of politics rather
than linguistics; nevertheless languages as actualized variants do have an
existence as cultural emergent properties” (Sealey & Carter, 2004: 73).
Because of these ontological features of social phenomena, including
language, the usefulness of formulas and rules to explain them is thus
considerably limited.
In moderate contrast from CDST, realism thus retains some degree of
scepticism with regards to metaphorical uses of concepts from the natural
432 J. Bouchard

sciences in the social sciences. As Sealey and Carter (2004: 77) note, AL
scholars

are concerned with the engagement of human beings in social interaction,

and, like us, are unpersuaded by mechanistic accounts of these processes.
However, we believe that the concepts of emergence and complexity are
crucial to explaining social action, including social actors’ use of language
[…] We also believe that explanations of socially situated language use
entail a recognition of natural phenomena, such as the biological endow-
ment of human beings with particular kinds of vocal, aural and visual
apparatus and particular kinds of brains, and that speakers’ language use
is partly a product of various kinds of interaction between nature and
culture.

Realism is also developed around the notion of a “guiding naturalism

that denies that there is something special about the social world that
makes it unamenable to scientific investigation” (Kincaid, 2012: 3). In
this sense, realism sees an outright and complete rejection of naturalism
as somewhat presumptuous, in that certain naturalist principles still
retain some relevance to contemporary social science. Kincaid (2012)
lists seven important tenets of a positivist philosophy of science: (1)
theories are the main content of science: what we do as researchers is not
simply to serve practice on the ground but also, and rather importantly,
to bring further sophistication to our theoretical deliberations, in the
hope that our theoretically informed practices are consistent and have
their intended effects; (2) scientific concepts should have clear definitions
with regards to necessary and sufficient conditions: our increasingly sophis-
ticated concepts should remain testable against empirical evidence and
further conceptual deliberations; (3) scientific explanations should have
a logic: they should conform to general principles of pertinence to a
broad range of scientific inquiries, rather than limited to the study of
local, contingent realities, with merely local ramifications; (4) even if
necessarily related to each other in their developments, scientific and
philosophical inquiries remain independent enterprises with different sets
of standards and different time frames, the former usually taking place
beforehand and concerned with the task of applying robust and well-
tested methodological strategies to the study of empirical evidence, and
 8 Conclusion 433

the latter taking place after scientific inquiry, relying mostly on the logic
of inference and with reference to scientific knowledge, drawing explana-
tory generalizations about how things work; (5) the irrelevance of the social
nature of scientific investigation and institutions: although realism recog-
nize the social nature of scientific research as consequential, it does not
reduce research to a mere discursive—i.e., perspectival—practice, given
its commitment to objective knowledge; (6) the maintenance of strong
criteria for explanation and confirmation, again, in order to avoid reducing
scientific practices to a hopeless relativism imposed by perspectivism;
and finally (7) considering the at times radically different structures and
approaches in both natural and social sciences, realism is also mindful of
the debate over whether the social sciences can be considered ‘ real ’ sciences.
Although it would be difficult to present a convincing approach to social
research entirely based on these seven positivist principles, listing them
in this concluding chapter is an interesting reminder for applied linguists
and social scientists alike that outright and total rejection of positivism
tends to be overly simplistic and not necessarily mindful of the history
of ideas, concepts and principles found within both the natural and the
social sciences.
In short, while realism does not diminish the importance of relation-
ships in the shaping of social phenomena, its commitment to objective
knowledge and focus on ontological distinctions ensure to some extent
that it does not succumb to various forms of relationism, or the reduc-
tion of objects to their relationships. This realization is grounded in a
particular understanding of emergence as a process of greater complexity
happening at different and more complex levels of organization, a
sort of “growth” of a system which cannot be explained, much less
predicted, exclusively through a study of the interaction between lower-
level components. Byrne (2013) explains emergence as a condition in
which complex wholes are greater than the sum of their parts. He
rightfully warns, however, that

emergence implies more than simple holism: that we must understand

things taken as a totality and only as a totality. And plainly a recognition
of emergence means that we cannot understand things simply in terms of
their components, the essence of the reductionist approach that underpins
434 J. Bouchard

positivist science. Instead, we have to think about parts and wholes and
we must recognize that causality does not run in any one direction. So
parts have causal implications for the whole, interactions among parts
have causal implications for the whole, parts have causal implications for
each other, and the whole has causal implications for parts (p.218).

This view of emergence to causality is important because it helps us

understand why probabilistic causal explanations (Williams, 2021) are
what we are likely trying to elucidate in AL, and why these will likely
remain incomplete. It is important to add here that, instead of seeing
causal explanations as merely “incomplete,” AL researchers should also
be cognizant of the different models and approaches to causality, some
of which were discussed in this book.
It is also important to stress that, given the complexity both
resulting from and shaping emergent social processes, social inquiry
should ask “what works for whom in what circumstances and in what
respects?” (Pawson, 2006: 74). This question is parallel to Hiver and
Al-Hoorie’s (2020: 30) realist (i.e., anti-reductionist, anti-empiricist,
anti-determinist) argument that “CDST research is concerned with
determining what works, for whom, in which contexts and under what
circumstances.” Emergence, and therefore stratification, also explain to
a large extent why social phenomena are complex systems: as stratified
entities, people as complex systems both possess and generate emer-
gent properties through interaction with other complex systems, and as
human agents they attempt to achieve their goals and fulfil their ulti-
mate concerns by interacting with constraining and enabling cultural
and structural forces. Emergent from this structure-culture-agency inter-
action are underlying causal mechanisms which, together with the causal
potential of agency, constitute two important areas of interest in the
formulation of causal explanations within AL worlds.
Many of these principles, or perhaps variations of them, are also
found in CDST, and in this book I have tried to identify some of these
conceptual affinities between the two perspectives. Indeed, realization
that “the concepts of complexity and emergence are indispensable to
a realist conception of language and social action” (Sealey & Carter,
2004: 84) has been a motivating force in the creation of this book.
 8 Conclusion 435

Sealey and Carter (2004: 79) also discuss the importance of complexity
to explaining social action, including AL phenomena, pointing out
that “language in the individual may be the emergent outcome of the
engagement of the embodied human being with physical and cultural
resources operating within particular constraints, including temporal
ones.” From this perspective, the authors underline Larsen-Freeman’s
crucial contribution to AL scholarship, and explain—as Larsen-Freeman
herself does—that the complex process of language development is the
emergent outcome of the interaction between its various components
(e.g., L1 influence, learner characteristics and so forth), which means
that it cannot be reduced to any one of these components, nor to the
relationship between these components alone. To understand emergent
outcomes in their complexity, AL research must do more than focus on
any single factor at one time, in one context, in isolation from broader
social realities, as do successionist and interpretivist AL.
The study of each level via the application of multiple research
approaches would, in principle, reveal much of the complexity discussed
by CDST adherents. In practice, however, this sort of study is difficult
to accomplish due to theoretical, methodological, financial and logistical
challenges. Even if CDST-informed realist AL is difficult to conduct
in practice, however, researchers can nevertheless identify the different
layers or levels involved, reveal as much insight about each as possible,
develop research methods applicable to each level, and look at possible
trans-level mechanisms involved. They can do so while keeping the core
principles of complexity, emergence and causality in mind, and the idea
that most of the phenomena under investigation are complex systems
composed of complex parts which interact in complex ways to produce,
at a higher level of organization, the complex and irreducible systems
under scrutiny.
Part of the work necessary in developing CDST-informed realist AL
is explaining where and how language education—one of the central
foci in AL scholarship—is situated in broader educational realities. In
itself, this task is not particularly novel to AL scholarship. However, what
CDST-informed realist AL can provide is additional contextualization of
AL concerns in relation to the structure-culture-agency relationship, a
436 J. Bouchard

task which requires not only relating AL and educational issues theoret-
ically and methodologically, but rather more specifically unpacking the
type of struggle for ideas and knowledge within educational contexts.
After all, language development is not a purely mental process taking
place within the minds of individual learners: it is a complex and
layered process necessitating biological, cognitive, emotional, reflexive,
pedagogical, critical and social involvement.
While realism has not gained much prominence in AL thus far, CDST
clearly has, and many reasons can explain this development. As a theory
of complex systems providing a novel way to understand the social world
and its components, CDST is thus amenable to empirical testing: we can
gather data about complex systems (e.g., language, learners, classrooms,
policy processes, etc.) and unpack them using CDST principles, which
allow for a deeper appreciation of their complexity. In moderate contrast,
realism is not a theory per se, but rather represents a way to conceptualize
and understand the ontological properties of the social world and how
they relate in causal terms. As an ontology of the social world, it provides
much needed ontological depth, and allows researchers to transcend the
confines of empirical knowledge. In a sense, realist principles cannot be
“verified” exactly in the same way CDST principles can, one reason being
that realism’s broad scope makes it very difficult to test some of its prin-
ciples through empirical means alone (Layder, 1993). That being said,
realism is not a fantasy or a mere story of the social world created by
scholars: it is built on a stratified understanding of social “facts” situated
at the empirical , the actual and the real . Indeed, and as Layder (1993:
27) argues, “there is no reason to assume that ‘grand’ or general ques-
tions of social development are inherently speculative and unconnected
with the details of empirical research,” a point which also justifies the
position adopted in this book that social theory, notably realist social
theory, provides firmer conceptual grounds upon which a renewed AL
scholarship can indeed emerge.
In previous chapters I have identified a few conceptual parallels
between CDST and realism. In these final pages of the book, I reiterate
a few of them and bring attention to other important parallels. There
are indeed numerous concepts and notions central to CDST and social
realism which converge quite comfortably: emergence, non-linearity,
 8 Conclusion 437

time asymmetry and irreversibility, and rejection of reductionism. Other

conceptual points of convergence include the need to combine inductive
and deductive analyses, and a shared interest in revealing the contingent
nature of social phenomena. There is also the notion of attractor state in
CDST which has been related to the realist notion of underlying genera-
tive mechanism, with learner motivation serving as a good example. This
conceptual parallel is rather valuable to AL research, for as Hiver (2015:
20, emphases original) explains, “it is the norm rather than the exception
to see stable patterns in human behaviour. These stable tendencies, solu-
tions or outcomes for dynamic systems are called attractor states, and they
are essential in understanding most physical and human phenomena.”
Alternatively, the notion of system/control parameter in CDST—which
refers to “the specific principles, constraints or rules which govern the
interactions between system components and the patterns of change that
take place” (Bak, 1996, cited in Hiver, 2015: 24)”, or to “principles that
guide the way a system can move in its state space from one attractor
state to the next” (Hiver, 2015: 24)—might serve as another appropriate
parallel to the realist notion of generative mechanism.
Although perhaps not explicitly, CDST can facilitate accounts of
some of the important features and powers of human reflexivity as
complex system. Juarrero (1999) for example, makes a clear reference
to reflexivity when arguing that “the flaws of both causal and behav-
iorist accounts of action [highlight] the importance of and need for a
casually efficacious cognitive source that doesn’t disengage once it trig-
gers behavior, but rather guides and directs (in-forms) by flowing into
behavior” (p.77, emphasis mine). Furthermore, if we consider Mercer’s
(2014) statement that “the self emerges from a series of concurrent
processes as the self mediates external influences by selecting, evaluating,
assessing and interpreting their relevance and significance for the self ”
(p.165), and Semetsky’s (2008) notion of a selective mechanism within
complex systems which ensures that contextual forces do not deter-
mine the internal structure of complex systems, we can reasonably argue
that CDST’s view of human reflexivity is novel and a welcome addi-
tion to the realist notion of reflexivity, as developed mainly by Margaret
Archer and summarized in Chapter 4. Byrne (2009: 1–2) also makes
explicit references to reflexivity in his work, notably in this statement:
438 J. Bouchard

“In social systems we have to take into account the reflexive agency of
the human actors in the system […] people can understand their world
and act on the basis of that understanding in order to change it.” As a
complexity theorist, Byrne (2011) can be said to demonstrate the greatest
affinity with realism. As the author points out, the notion of underlying
generative mechanism is also an integral part of a CDST perspective:

We explore causality by working backwards from specific different

effects—retrodiction. In other words we should engage with processes
of retroduction to explain what has happened and in terms of applied
social science develop a retrodictive approach to guiding actions towards
the achievement of desired outcomes. This is very much in accord with
the general critical realist programme of explanation. We are dealing with
effects understood as system states and understand these system states to
be the product of complex and multiple generative mechanisms. (p.89;
cited in Byrne & Uprichard, 2012: 120).

Byrne and Uprichard (2012) also make an important distinction

between the empirical, the actual and the real by placing generative
mechanisms within the real, outcomes within the actual, and the activa-
tion of causal powers in contexts within the empirical. Previous attempts
to bridge realism with CDST have been made, notably by Williams
(2021) and by Gerrits and Verweij (2013: 178) who suggest that

Critical realism appears to have much in common with the ontolog-

ical statements about complexity. Its focus is on contingency, i.e. how
particular configurations activate certain mechanisms and how these
configurations shift in time and place. This focus on contingency has
implications for the extent to which patterns are said to reoccur over
time. As such, it addresses the issue of time-asymmetry. Its position on
reality aligns with complexity’s properties of non-decomposability and
non-compressibility. It implies that both complexity and critical realism
offer an anti-reductionist take on social reality.

Specifically, Gerrits and Verweij (2013) identify Bhaskar’s brand

of critical realism as a useful framework for understanding social
complexity. They also identify strong conceptual links between CDST
 8 Conclusion 439

and critical realism by arguing that complex reality is contingent, irre-

ducible to parts, and time asymmetric. The authors reinforce these links
by arguing that “any effort to research social complexity is implicitly or
explicitly informed by Roy Bhaskar’s critical realism” (Gerrits & Verweij,
2013: 167). The authors view CDST as a non-Newtonian worldview
which holds that “reality is characterized by wholes rather than discrete
entities and events; non-linear causality instead of linear causality; uncer-
tainty about the future instead of total predictability; and partial truths
rather than final truths” (Gerrits & Verweij, 2013: 168). Cochran-Smith
et al. (2014) also provide interesting avenues for linking realism with
CDST in research on teacher education. As the authors argue, “when
critical realism is integrated conceptually with complexity theory […]
it offers a way to explore complex and contingent causality in teacher
education, in part because it accounts for both beliefs and larger contexts
and structures” (p.110). In parallel, Byrne and Callaghan (2014) draw
from Reed and Harvey (1992) to suggest that synthesizing complexity
theory with critical realism is a productive strategy for (a) dealing with
important issues in sociological theory, (b) relating macro- and micro-
level realities in non-reductionist fashion and (c) taking part in the
agency-structure debate equipped with a strong view of human agency
which acknowledges humans’ capacity to exhibit causal efficacy within
the social realm. As the multiple quotes above clearly demonstrate, paral-
lels between realism and CDST abound, thus giving further conceptual
justification for the emergence of, and the need for, a complex realist AL
scholarship.
In their realist approach to conceptualizing AL, Sealey and Carter
(2004) refer on multiple occasions to CDST, stating that it provides
a reliable means of “seeing” how language use and language change
unfold over time, or as they put it, a means of visualizing the process of
language change. They also present core tenets of CDST as analogous to
a realist view of language, and are clear in their position that emergence
and complexity are crucial to understanding social phenomena such as
language and its real-world use. Indeed, and perhaps more importantly,
Larsen-Freeman’s (2019: 67) states that “the dimensions of the structure
constrain the actions that can be performed, and the actions that can be
performed produce changes in the structure” finds a parallel in the realist
440 J. Bouchard

argument regarding the stratified nature of social objects and processes

and their causal interaction. Emergence not only posits these systems as
complex, it also brings attention to their “edges,” or as the CDST thinker
Cilliers (1998) puts it, the boundaries between complex systems. This
can easily be phrased within realist terms thus: once we have identified
the distinct and emergent properties of complex systems, we can then
begin the task of exploring the causal links between them.
CDST and social realism clearly share multiple conceptual elements
and epistemological avenues. First and foremost, they are both invested
in the study of the real/empirical, while valuing theory as an impor-
tant tool in achieving this goal—i.e., making theory a practical element
in research. Both perspectives also view social phenomena as relational,
and reject accounts of causality as unmediated and binary. Further-
more, CDST and realism conceptualize time as crucial to accounting
for causality and complexity (although they do so in different ways),
and view emergence as an important mechanism which helps explain
the complexity observable in the social realm. They also do not concep-
tualize increasing complexity as increasing messiness and disorder, for the
social order remains an important social “fact” which can be explained
(partly) by the existence of cyclical dynamics and the iteration of system
components and their interaction. Both perspectives are also aligned
with regards to the idea that complex open systems move in non-
linear fashion, which means that causality cannot be explained simply
by moving back in time, or reversing the system back to its constituent
parts. Irreversibility and non-linearity are essential conditions for self-
organization. Finally, CDST and realism share the view that social mech-
anisms are not mechanistic but rather open and dynamic, interacting
with other mechanisms to produce often unexpected outcomes.
Perhaps the most explicit “bridging” of realism and CDST to date
is provided by Byrne (1998), who draws extensively from the work of
the critical realist thinker Roy Bhaskar. In much of his work, Byrne
stresses the important collaboration between complexity theory and crit-
ical realism, not only with regards to the development of theoretical
understanding but more specifically the development of complexity-
informed methodological frameworks in the social and natural sciences.
 8 Conclusion 441

He identifies three important features of this collaboration: “a rejec-

tion of any notion of a hierarchy of methods in the description of
social reality, a commitment to multiple qualitative and quantitative
descriptions of complex system as they are, and an engagement through
action research with active processes of change in complex systems”
(Byrne, 2009: 2). His call for balancing both qualitative and quantitative
descriptions in the social sciences comes with a further recommenda-
tion to use qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) (Ragin, 1987), which
combines a comparative approach with the study of case. According
to the author, these methodological choices are essentially aimed at
revealing the centrality of path dependency in any account of causation in
the social world. Byrne also provides constructive arguments regarding
the need in social research to refrain from getting stuck in particularities,
and to understand complex non-linear social realities through classifica-
tions. Arguably, Byrne’s complexity view offers a very clear link between
CDST and Archer’s realist morphogenetic model: both bring attention
to causality, consider reflexivity as central to accounts of causality, and
explain a great deal how complex systems within the social realm evolve
over time.
There are, of course, important differences between realism and
CDST, with perhaps the main one being that while realism offers
a robust social ontology, CDST instead provides a way of thinking
about social phenomena as complex. Slightly diverging understandings
of emergence also point to important differences between the two. Emer-
gence, from a CDST angle, is generally seen as a property of complex
systems which exists only when systems are related to other systems.
Arguably, this marked penchant towards interactionism renders the other
often cited argument in CDST literature that complex systems evolve
through self-organization rather problematic. A social realist view of
emergence, on the other hand, adds that complex phenomena also
possess properties which cannot be reduced to their relations with other
phenomena. For example, a language learner can certainly be under-
stood as a complex system from a realist standpoint, but can also be
conceptualized as a person independent from the learning situation, for
example, as a biological entity, as a friend, a stranger, an individual
with complex psychological realities separate from his/her experience
442 J. Bouchard

as a learner. All these aspects, however, are important to the making

of that language learner, even if they may not necessarily depend on
the complex network of relationships involved in any specific language
learning situation. It is therefore conceptually reductive to present the
language learner as a complex system which cannot exist on his/her own
except only in relation to other language learners or outside the language
learning situation. In this sense, realism is perhaps more explicit with
regards to the centrality of emergence in accounts of causality, whereas
within CDST emergence tends to be discussed mainly with reference
to self-organization. Consequently, the integration of CDST within a
realist ontology would involve greater emphasis on the notion that, while
phenomena in the social realm are deeply related to other phenomena,
they nevertheless retain distinct properties which cannot be explained
exclusively as outcomes of those relations. This more refined perspective
on emergence, which realism provides, is not burdened by the conceptual
problems associated with relationism.
Despite these occasional discrepancies, the theoretical and method-
ological possibilities resulting from the inclusion of CDST within a
realist ontology are certainly worth careful consideration in the creation
of a renewed AL scholarship. Fortunately, realism and CDST can also
be understood not as finite and self-contained visions of the world but
rather as open systems undergoing ongoing change. Indeed, another
important link between realism and CDST is that they both favour
transdisciplinarity. Reed and Harvey’s (1992) point regarding transdis-
ciplinary interaction as potentially yielding fundamental metatheoretical
ideas provides a strong impetus for concentrating future efforts in that
direction. Lang et al., (2012: 25) see important practical ramifications
for adopting this principle in contemporary social research, arguing that
transdisciplinary research approaches “are often suggested as appropriate
means to meet both the requirements posed by real-world problems as
well as the goals of sustainability science as a transformational scien-
tific field.” In their view, achieving social equality and sustainability, for
example, necessitates the combination of essential knowledge from all
disciplines related to specific problems under scrutiny, a complex process
of negotiation which should, in principle, lead to the improvement of
overall scientific knowledge and the development of emancipatory social
 8 Conclusion 443

practices. Greater engagement with transdisciplinarity by AL scholars is

not, however, the only—or even the most important—improvement we
can bring. As Weideman (2009: 63) argues, “the foundational framework
that applied linguistics needs is not necessarily of an interdisciplinary
[…] or multidisciplinary kind, however, but is philosophical in nature.”
Although in the Introduction I stated my preference for the term “social
ontology” instead of “philosophy,” my view remains essentially aligned
with Weideman’s.
In closing, the integration of CDST within a realist social ontology in
AL research necessitates a clear, complexity-informed, model for causality
which places human reflexivity as a powerful force not only in the study
of language-related phenomena but also in the study of social stability
and change. Language learners live in a world where institutional educa-
tion can be a force for emancipation and de-ideologization, while at the
same time serving the purpose of ideological and social reproduction
and the maintenance of the status quo (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990).
Understanding why one manifestation of language education becomes
more predominant in one context and not in another—or even why
some learners manage to learn a language and develop communicative
competence effectively while others do not—require analysis of under-
lying generative mechanisms, of structural and cultural constraints and
enablements, and how they influence agentive movements on the ground
(i.e., what teachers, learners, school administrators and policymakers
actually say and do). More importantly, it also requires analysis of the
different kinds of reflexive engagement demonstrated by individual and
collective actors, influenced by different concerns and objectives, all
within a contingent educational realm. These issues are, as I have argued
throughout this book, best addressed from a realist ontology, enriched by
CDST, to embrace the full complexity and contingent nature of social
life.
Of course, one can make the point that the existence of multiple theo-
retical paradigms—social interactionism, historical materialism, post-
structuralism, structuration theory, realism, etc.—is beneficial to debate
and progress in AL. Two arguments often made to justify this viewpoint
is that different research questions often call for the use of different theo-
retical tools, and that we should remain critical of attempts at unifying
444 J. Bouchard

all available theories into one single “grand narrative” which claims to
explain all AL-related concerns. But as I have argued earlier in the book,
while methodological pluralism is needed, this cannot be successfully
achieved without verifying if their ontological bases are solid and aligned
with each other. It is in part precisely because of this that conflationary
viewpoints emerge. Although I am somewhat sceptical that a unified
and comprehensive theory of AL can ever be produced, there is still
in my view a particular direction the field needs to follow: that of a
stratified, emergentist social ontology. For that, contemporary and future
AL scholars should first move beyond successionism and interpretivism,
towards a more organic system view of people, institutions, ideologies
and of course language and language-related problems and projects. Part
of the danger I am identifying here is that, given the transdisciplinary
nature of AL research and the related practice of borrowing theories and
concepts across fields, there is the possibility for an ongoing proliferation
in AL of lower- and middle-range theories, or theories which deal with
very specific issues while not informing our understanding of how these
issues “come together” to reveal a broader and more complexity-sensitive
picture of AL problems and phenomena in general, across ethnographic
contexts.
Given the sheer complexity of the task ahead, the present volume
clearly provides an incomplete argument, in large part because of its
rather conceptual quality and limited range of methodological recom-
mendations for practitioners. Although I believe that a CDST-informed
realist AL—as developed in this book, for example—has great potential,
additional emphasis on the methodological ramifications of such change
is indeed necessary, a challenge which I intend to approach in subsequent
publications. This, however, does not diminish the value of AL the value
of an AL scholarship “heavy with theory”, nor does it remove the need
for greater conceptual and transdisciplinary engagement by AL scholars.
Part of this shift should certainly involve questioning the reduction of AL
to a mere practical matter, as is too often done in our field. Weideman
(2007: 589) discusses the dangers of failing to engage with theory in AL
research, warning that if
 8 Conclusion 445

new entrants into the discipline remain unaware of what has preceded
their work, they may either uncritically accept current (usually postmod-
ernist) definitions of the field, or, equally uncritically, fall victim to some
of the ideological baggage that has historically come with the use of the
term ’applied linguistics’. Both situations are undesirable, and restrict
rather than open up and liberate any attempts at responsibly developing
the discipline of applied linguistics.

Similar views have also been expressed by CDST adherents, including

Hiver and Al-Hoorie (2020), Larsen-Freeman and Cameron (2008) and
Lowie (2013: 1811), who notes that many AL scholars working from a
CDST perspective

have argued that a new start must be made after a century of theory
formation about language and language development. Even though both
theory formation and empirical work can be expected to develop rapidly
in this field, dynamic models of language cannot be developed overnight.
Not only is theorizing needed, but also new research paradigms must
be developed to investigate language perception and production within a
continuity-of-mind framework.

Also of crucial importance in this endeavour is the task of determining

which elements of AL research projects call for a CDST approach and
which ones do not (Hiver & Al-Hoorie, 2020). Related is the task of
defining what—or more accurately who and what mechanism—lead to
the emergence of the phenomena we study. Indeed, and as was pointed
out on a few occasions in previous chapters, developing causal claims
requires researchers to determine the distinct and emergent properties
and powers of social entities/phenomena as complex systems, and this
brings direct attention to the centrality of human reflexivity and the
important role of underlying generative mechanisms in the production
of AL phenomena. The possible—and I would argue necessary and even-
tual—integration of CDST within realism is a worthy project to engage
in, that is, if our aim as AL scholars remains to produce novel and useful
understandings of language and language-related phenomena as stratified
and emergent social realities. Fulfilment of this goal would certainly go
446 J. Bouchard

a long way towards securing a more robust position for AL within the
social sciences.

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 Index

A C
actual 187–189, 264, 348, 436
agency 3, 34, 41, 48, 55, 56, 61, 71,
73, 81, 101, 104, 105, 121,
129, 133, 135, 137, 147, 150,
153, 180, 225, 230, 231, 235,
236, 253, 263, 264, 289, 303,
312, 320, 322, 325, 328, 357,
358, 390, 413, 418, 434
applied linguistics (AL) 1, 2, 4, 5, 9,
16, 19, 20, 27–30, 38, 42, 53,
54, 81, 85, 129, 162, 256,
262, 273, 278, 286, 297, 299,
344, 346, 373, 377, 405, 429,
430, 435
attractor state 308, 309, 325, 394,
402, 437
causality 33, 40, 43, 47, 48, 50, 54,
159, 182, 200, 203, 205, 210,
219, 220, 262, 268, 270, 271,
297, 304, 312, 347, 359, 396,
402, 430, 431, 434, 435, 438,
439
complex dynamic system theory
(CDST) 20, 297–299, 312,
320, 329, 336, 373, 375, 376,
378, 385, 395, 402, 404, 406,
411
complexity vs. complicatedness 10,
305
conflation
central 153, 160, 194, 257, 357,
364, 380, 411
downward 194, 257, 411
upward 69, 257, 385

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 449
licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
J. Bouchard, Complexity, Emergence, and Causality in Applied Linguistics,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-88032-3
450 Index

constant conjunction 44, 47, 200, temporal and synchronic 198,

205, 316 199
control parameter 309, 333, 437 empirical 31, 43, 51, 62, 68, 132,
corpus analysis 279, 290, 396, 400 187–189, 219, 255, 330, 388,
correspondence theory of truth 19, 432, 436
21, 139, 261, 274, 276, 380, empiricism 65, 66, 121, 190, 255,
383 318, 327, 410
covering law model 53, 312, 316 ethnomethodology 123, 124, 126,
critical discourse analysis (CDA) 55, 128
62, 118, 290–292
cultural system 73, 181, 185, 220,
226 F
culture 112, 162, 180, 221, 224, feedback loop 196, 206, 228, 303,
226, 263, 430 304, 308
free will 78, 104, 105, 230, 234,
323, 324
D
deductive-nomological model 54,
200 G
democratic peace 52, 204, 320 general complexity 305, 356, 404,
descriptive-causal generalizations 50, 431
52–54
dichotomization 16, 358, 360, 364,
410, 431
H
differentiation 358, 360, 364, 410
habitus 108, 157, 237, 240, 241
discourse 21, 32, 33, 55, 56, 58, 59,
historical materialism 114, 118
63, 68, 76, 130, 132, 134,
homo economicus 230
185, 282, 291, 382, 416
homo sociologicus 145, 152, 230, 244
double morphogenesis 206, 231,
237, 303

I
E interpretivism 31, 32, 55, 57, 58,
education 7, 33, 43, 49, 80, 101, 60, 62, 65, 66, 405
161, 215, 264, 273, 276, 285, intersectionality 134, 332, 333
329, 334, 353, 374, 379, 389, interview data 29, 43, 58, 61, 62,
411, 412, 435 64, 409
emergence
relational 307

K ontologically flattened view 58, 63,
knowledge 5, 20, 50, 85, 86, 97,
124, 125, 134, 136, 148, 158,
184, 226, 273, 274, 276, 277,
378, 379, 430
L phenomenology 123
language 5, 10, 12, 17, 18, 29, 30,
32, 33, 45, 53, 55, 59–61, 72,
76, 79, 83, 109, 111, 118,
124, 132, 133, 138, 140, 141,
161, 164, 186, 187, 197, 226,
264, 265, 267, 275, 278–280,
282–285, 290, 301, 341, 376,
377, 385, 394, 407, 409, 419,
431, 435
langue 109–111, 282, 283, 407
lifeworld/system distinction 163,
164
M critical 80, 115, 182, 191, 266,
morphogenesis 177, 229, 263, 304,
353, 393, 411
morphogenetic cycle 206, 228, 312,
315
morphostasis 177, 229, 263, 304,
309, 353, 411
motivation 6, 11, 18, 35–37, 213,
215, 259, 390, 392, 437
multiple determination 192
O
objective knowledge 12, 18, 58, 74,
76, 179, 183, 190, 209, 261,
282, 340, 349, 378, 380, 381,
415, 420, 430, 433
Index 451
68, 125, 281, 327, 391, 414
P
parole 109–111, 282, 283
phase shift 302, 311, 325
posthumanism 77, 78, 80, 81, 431
postmodernism 54, 57, 71, 129,
133, 382, 404, 415, 419
poststructuralism 32, 54, 57, 71, 77,
129, 133, 406, 415, 419
R
real 5, 33, 86, 125, 156, 185,
187–189, 193, 205, 219, 220,
290, 331, 388, 394, 397, 433,
436
realism
complex 346, 359
318, 439
social 20, 21, 32, 205, 232, 288
reflexivity 28, 32, 34, 63, 82, 165,
181, 182, 230, 232, 233, 237,
244, 263, 270, 324, 325, 345,
416, 437
relationism 78, 321, 357, 391, 433
relativism 58, 67, 134, 147, 275,
382, 415, 433
restricted complexity 305, 404, 431
S
self-organization 297, 301, 307,
308, 313, 314, 317, 322, 328,
333, 351, 355, 386, 440
452 Index
social categories 34, 39, 40, 134,
420
social constructionism 32, 143, 147
social ontology 14, 48, 77, 99, 179,
319, 341, 405, 406, 429–431,
443, 444
social theory 9, 15, 19, 97, 99, 167,
168, 178, 322, 353, 404, 429,
436
Socio-Cultural Domain 226
sociolinguistics 3, 8, 11, 15, 18, 19,
28, 30, 48, 112, 148, 273,
283, 396
statistical analysis 45, 47, 49, 200,
262, 341, 349, 397, 402
stratified view 76, 88, 111, 148,
192, 206, 230, 278, 291, 327,
378, 408, 422
structural functionalism 105
structuration theory 149, 151
subjective knowledge 78, 127, 179,
381, 420
successionism 31, 32, 50, 65, 315
symbolic interactionism 119, 121,
122, 225
T
transdisciplinarity 3, 15, 21, 298,
336, 339, 420, 442
truth 50, 116, 121, 129, 142, 183,
185, 261, 273–276, 379, 380,
407, 439
U
underlying generative mechanism
238, 243, 350, 437
V
variable-based research 315
vexatious fact of society 95