In this study the subject of addiction/recovery is used to ‘test’ the conceptual ideas of Margaret Archer (1996) and Thomas Smith (1995). Both are systems theorists’ and both engage in cause and effect analysis. As they hold contrasting views on how personal and cultural change takes place this study is an attempt to establish the direction of causal influence on social change as it applies to the history of addiction/recovery from each author’s perspective. By firstly examining the history of ideas (cultural system) from a critical realist perspective followed by an exploration of how the recovering community came to believe these ideas in the first place we are given a glimpse of the external (Archer,1996) and internal (Smith, 1995) constraints that the recovering community has confronted over time.

Archer is keen to address the varying degrees of freedom and constraint agency confronts at both the cultural system and socio-cultural systems level over time. From her perspective these external constraints (causal factors) have a direct input into “the nature of, and conditions for, autonomy (and its relation to social determination)” (Lukes quoted in Archer, 1996:93) and have a conditioning effect on “the degrees of freedom within which power can be exercised” (Archer, 1996: 93-94). However in this study by applying Smith’s reformulation of Parsons’ work (non equilibrium functionalism) to the study of addiction/recovery we are also alerted to the varying degrees of freedom and constraint that are experienced at the level of the human being over time which also has implications for agentic possibility over time.