Trans-immanence, morphogenesis and régulation: new methodological avenues for applied political economy (of education) research

This article aims to illustrate an application of Knio's Morphogenetic Régulation (MR) in education policy scholarship. In doing so, I am particularly interested in revisiting and unpacking the broader reasoning that underpins this framework in order to demonstrate its analytical strength and practical value for applied research. Accordingly, I discuss the roots of MR in Archer's Morphogenetic Approach (MA) and its subsequent refinement through a Spinozian notion of immanent causality and methodological tenets from the French Régulation tradition in political economy, highlighting the implications of these analytical enhancements for the work of social researchers. Among the various ontological innovations introduced by MR, I emphasize how it reinserts the causal role of ideas - always embedded in material conditions - into morphogenetic thinking to elucidate how agents' reflexivity across moments of social interaction creates an opportunity, largely overlooked in the original MA, to address retroductive (or causal) questions in social inquiry.