Making connections: some key issues in social theory and applied linguistics
Emergence
We observed that structural features of the contemporary social world are emergent from earlier social interaction. The term 'emergence' is gaining currency in many areas of research, in both the natural and social sciences. For the moment, it is important to clarify its relevance for the structure-agency debate which is our current concern. An 'emergent property' is generated from its constituent elements, but is not reducible to them. For example, although people are comprised of cells, and they possess the power to think, '[w]e would not try to explain the power of people to think by reference to the cells that constitute them, as if cells possessed this power too' (Sayer 1992: 119).
To take an example from the social world, let us consider the institution of marriage as an emergent property of social interaction. It is difficult to establish the primary (or 'first order' (Archer 1995)) 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. Among the constituents of marriage are the social resources which make institutions possible, such as systems of law, property and inheritance. Another constituent is the interpretive understanding of human beings: for marriage to operate as an 'institutional fact' (Searle 1995), people must understand what it signifies, whether they wish to get married, or to struggle against the institution of marriage because it is oppressive or iniquitous. These two constituents- interpretive meanings and a legally binding contract- are different kinds of things, and the institution of marriage is not reducible to either one.
The relationship between these constituents is a necessary one: without either we could not talk of marriage as a social institution. This fact illustrates a second feature of emergent properties: the relations between the constituent elements are necessary rather than contingent.
A third feature of emergent properties is their power to condition the contexts in which subsequent social interaction takes place. As an institution- legal, political, economic, cultural and conventional-marriage has proved relatively enduring and stable. (This is not to deny the enormous cultural and temporal variability in marriage practices and customs, of course.) The pressure to get married, to get married in particular sorts of ceremonies, to see marriage as an aspiration and to regard it as the most appropriate form of cohabitation, all provide conditioning influences on the power of human beings to effect choices about their lives. It should also be noted that the influence of structures on agency, their power to constrain and enable, is not an abstract property, but attains relevance only in the context of particular projects by particular people in particular situations. Thus those with no interest in getting married do not experience the institution of marriage in this way- although they may well be affected by it, nonetheless, perhaps by feeling stigmatized, on the one hand, or privileged, on the other, as a 'single person'.
Emergence is what makes the identification of structures possible, for the irreducibility, endurance and autonomous influence of emergent properties entails that they pre-date any particular set of incumbents. Marriage has the capacity to modify the powers of its constituents. People's understanding of what it is to be married often changes when they become married. They may find themselves embroiled in relations (and with relations) which frequently can come to seem oppressive, disappointing, or not at all what either (or both) of the partners had in mind. Even couples who, conversely, regard themselves as 'happily married' may still need to make considerable adjustments to their perceptions of self in relation to others. The legal system which makes marriage possible is itself altered by the institution of marriage: the legal entitlement to certain sorts of privileges becomes restricted to those who have participated in the socially recognized form of marriage. Marriage depends on people getting married, but it doesn't depend on particular individuals getting married. This means that the interplay between marriage, as an institutionally embedded and expressed form of cohabitation, and people, as socially situated actors, can be analyzed and researched.
In summary, then, the defining features of emergent properties are three-fold: relative endurance; necessary, not contingent, relations between the constituent elements; and the possession of causal powers (Archer 1995: 167).
We shall be illustrating how these social theoretical ideas relate to the concerns of applied linguistics, but let us give one further example here. When language learners seek accreditation in their capacity to write in the language they have been studying, they are involved in processes resulting from a number of emergent features of the social world. There are the linguistic resources which make up the variety in which the learners wish to be qualified; these have already been codified by groups of people who can lay convincing claim to expertise in doing so; this claim is dependent on the institutionalization of assessment practices, which generates the possibility of careers for those qualified as language testers, and the procedures for assessment are developed over time. The well-known 'washback' effect of examinations (e.g. Bachman 1990) influences teaching practices as teachers try to ensure that learners are as likely as possible to succeed in the test. At the same time, the grammar and vocabulary deemed acceptable in the language variety in question acquire prestige, while other variants become stigmatized, so that the linguistic resources themselves are to some extent modified by language testing institutions.
