Rob Archer

My key publications include Education Policy and Realist Social Theory: Primary Teachers, Child-Centred Philosophy and the New Managerialism (which defends and applies Margaret Archer’s morphogenetic approach), and Education Management in Managerialist Times: Beyond the Textual Apologists (co-authored with the late Professor Martin Thrupp).

Recently published in the New Zealand Journal of Educational Studies, “Back to the Future: Critical Realism, Education Policy, and the Contextual Legacy of Martin Thrupp”, which extends Thrupp’s realist analysis of school contexts through critical realism’s morphogenetic approach. It argues that this approach offers a metatheoretical toolkit for a more nuanced understanding of educational policy by integrating structure, agency, and culture (SAC). By exploring how emergent socio-cultural configurations shape agency and change, the article refines Thrupp’s conceptualisation of constraints and opportunities for school leaders. It also highlights the potential of the morphogenetic approach for analysing the impact of global neoliberalism and managerialism on education, providing strategies to resist managerialism and promote social justice while sharpening Thrupp’s realist contextualism.

My recent article, “Retiring Popper: Critical Realism, Falsificationism, and the Crisis of Replication”, published in Theory and Psychology, applies a critical realist stratified ontology to psychology, arguing against Popper's falsificationism and the use of his philosophy of science to legitimate replication.  It revindicates the indispensability of context and the subtlety of psychological phenomena in arguing for the intrinsic limits of replication and experimentalism in general.

Response to commentaries, “Critical Realism, Psychology, and the Crisis of Replication: a reply to Haig; Derksen & Morawski; Trafimow”,  published in Theory and Psychology in October 2024.  It reaffirms the need for a critical realist psychology underpinned by an exploratory stratified contextualism that incorporates the temporal interplay of individual open-systemic psychic embodiment and wider social-cultural causal conditioning.

I have previously lectured at the Universities of Birmingham and Bath, UK.
Supervisors: Margaret Archer