Everything about Structure And Agency totally explained
The debate surrounding the influence of
structure and agency on human thought and behaviour is one of the central issues in
sociology and other
social sciences. In this context "
agency" refers to the capacity of individual humans to act independently and to make their own free choices. "
Structure" refers to those factors such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, customs etc. which seem to limit or influence the opportunities that individuals have.
The debate
The debate over the primacy of structure or agency relates to an issue at the heart of both classical and contemporary sociological theory - the question of social
ontology. What is the social world made of? What is a cause and what is an effect? Do social structures determine an individual's behaviour or does human agency rule supreme?
There are three possible theoretical positions in the response to this line of questioning:
- Some theorists put forward that what we know as our social existence is largely determined by the overall structure of society. The perceived agency of individuals can also mostly be explained by the operation of this structure. Theoretical systems aligned with this view include: structuralism, and some forms of functionalism and Marxism.
- In the reverse of the first position, other theorists stress the capacity of individual "agents" to construct and reconstruct their worlds. Theoretical systems aligned with this view include: methodological individualism, social phenomenology, interactionism and ethnomethodology.
- A third option, taken by many modern social theorists, is to attempt to find a point of balance between the two previous positions. They see structure and agency as complementary forces - structure influences human behaviour, and humans are capable of changing the social structures they inhabit.
The first approach was dominant in classical sociology. Theorists approached society from a position which saw unique aspects extant in the social world which couldn't be explained simply by the sum of the individuals present.
Emile Durkheim strongly believed that the collective had emergent properties of its own and that there was a need for a science which would deal with this emergence.
This doesn't mean that methodological individualism is a new notion in social science (a very good early example is the theory of
Gabriel Tarde). Many theorists still follow this divide (for example, economists are very prone to disregarding any kind of
holism).
The central debate, therefore, is between theorists committed to the notions of
methodological individualism and
methodological holism. The first notion,
methodological individualism is the idea that actors are the central theoretical and ontological elements in social systems and social structure is an epiphenomenon, a result and consequence of the actions and activities of interacting individuals, and the second notion,
methodological holism is the idea that actors are socialised and embedded into social structure and institutions that may constrain or enable and generally shape the individuals' dispositions towards and capacities for action, and this social structure should be taken as the primary and most significant theoretical element.
Major theorists
Georg Simmel
Georg Simmel(March 1, 1858 – September 28, 1918, Berlin, Germany) was one of the first generation of German sociologists. His studies pioneered the concept of social structure. His most famous work today is probably "The Philosophy of Money".
Norbert Elias
Norbert Elias (June 22, 1897 — August 1, 1990) was a German sociologist of Jewish descent, who later became a British citizen. His work focused on the relationship between power, behavior, emotion, and knowledge over time. He significantly shaped what is called process or figurational sociology.
Talcott Parsons
Talcott Parsons was a primary figure in
structural functionalism in
sociology in the
1950s in
America. His work attempted to reconcile both volitional action and social structure.
Pierre Bourdieu
Pierre Bourdieu presented his
theory of practice on the superation of the dichotomical understanding of the relation between agency and structure in a great number of published articles, beginning with
An Outline of the Theory of Practice in
1972, where he presented the concept of
habitus. His book
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), was named as one of the
20th century's 10 most important works of sociology by the
International Sociological Association.
The key concepts in Bourdieu's work are habitus, field, and capital. The agent is socialized in a "field" (an evolving set of roles and relationships in a social domain, where various forms of "capital" such as prestige or financial resources are at stake). As the agent accommodates to his or her roles and relationships in the context of his or her position in the field, the agent internalises relationships and expectations for operating in that domain. These internalised relationships and habitual expectations and relationships form, over time, the
habitus.
Bourdieu's work attempts to reconcile structure and agency, as external structures are internalised into the habitus while the actions of the agent externalise interactions between actors into the social relationships in the field. Bourdieu's theory, therefore, is a dialectic between "externalising the internal", and "internalising the external."
Berger and Luckmann
Peter L. Berger and
Thomas Luckmann in their
Social Construction of Reality (1966) saw the relationships between structure and agency as a
dialectical one. Society forms the individuals who create society - forming a continuous loop.
Roy Bhaskar
Roy Bhaskar developed the "Transformational Model of Social Activity (TMSA)" in his
The Possibility of Naturalism (1979) and
Reclaiming Reality (1989). He put forward a
critical realist approach. Going further than Berger and Luckmann he focused on the "relational" and "transformational" view of the individual and society: "society is both the ever present
condition and the continually reproduced
outcome of human agency."
Anthony Giddens
Anthony Giddens's developed
"Structuration Theory" in such works as
The Constitution of Society (1984). He presents a developed attempt to move beyond the
dualism of structure and agency and argues for the "duality of structure" - where social structure is both the medium and the outcome of social action.
Recent developments
The critical realist structure/agency perspective embodied in the TMSA has been further advocated and applied in other social science fields by additional authors, for example in
economics by
Tony Lawson and in
sociology by
Margaret Archer.
Kenneth Wilkinson in the
Community in Rural America took an interactional/field theoretical perspective focusing on the role of community agency in contributing to the emergence of community.
The structure/agency debate continues to evolve, with contributions such as
Nicos Mouzelis's
Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? and Margaret Archer's
Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach continuing to push the ongoing development of structure/agency theory.
A European problem?
While the structure/agency debate has been a central issue in social theory, and recent theoretical reconciliation attempts have been made, it should be noted that structure/agency theory has tended to develop more in European countries by European theorists, while American social theorists have tended to focus instead on the issue of integration between
macrosociological and
microsociological perspectives.
George Ritzer examines these issues (and surveys the structure agency debate) in greater detail in his book
Modern Sociological Theory (2000).
Further Information
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