Refusing the realism-structuration divide

In this article I will reject the idea put forward in Margaret Archer's Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Archer, 1995) that realist social theory and structuration theory, as developed by Anthony Giddens, are incompatible and mutually exclusive theoretical approaches (see Archer, 1995: 14 and passim; also Archer, 1988). I shall argue that their ontological positions are compatible; perfectly so for the most part, and redeemably so for the rest. Archer's extended critique of structuration theory, I argue, is a mistaken one. It misunderstands both the purpose and the letter of structuration theory and, in doing so, misses an opportunity to forge an alliance with an approach that could add a greater complexity and sophistication to realist social theory at several key points. On the other hand there is an array of valuable insights and conceptual innovations in Archer's realist social theory that structuration theory could equally profit from, many of them relating to a (rather extensive) domain that theorists sympathetic to structuration theory had already pinpointed as this approach's 'missing institutional link' (Cohen, 1989: 207- 10; Thrift, 1985: 618).