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In the social sciences there is a standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behaviour. Structure is the recurrent patterned arrangements which influence or limit the choices and opportunities available. [1] Agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. [1] The structure versus agency debate may be understood as an issue of socialization against autonomy in determining whether an individual acts as a free agent or in a manner dictated by social structure.
The debate over the primacy of structure or of 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 of the social world, and what is an effect?" "Do social structures determine an individual's behaviour or does human agency?"
Structural functionalists such as Émile Durkheim see structure and hierarchy as essential in establishing the very existence of society. Theorists such as Karl Marx, by contrast, emphasize that the social structure can act to the detriment of the majority of individuals in a society. In both these instances "structure" may refer to something both material (or "economic") and cultural (i.e. related to norms, customs, traditions and ideologies).
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:
All of these schools in this context can be seen as forms of holism – the notion that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts".
On the other hand, other theorists stress the capacity of individual "agents" to construct and reconstruct their worlds. In this sense the individual can be viewed as more influential than the system. Theoretical systems aligned with this view include:
Lastly, a third option, taken by many modern social theorists, [2] attempts 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. Structuration issue one prominent example of this view.
The first approach (emphasizing the importance of societal structure) dominated in classical sociology.[ citation needed ] Theorists saw unique aspects of the social world that could not be explained simply by the sum of the individuals present. Durkheim strongly believed that the collective had emergent properties of its own and saw the need for a science which would deal with this emergence. The second approach (methodological individualism, etc.), however, also has a well-established position in social science. Many theorists still follow this course (economists, for example, tend to disregard any kind of holism).
The central debate, therefore, pits theorists committed to the notions of methodological holism against those committed to methodological individualism. The first notion, methodological holism, is the idea that actors are socialized and embedded into social structures and institutions that constrain, or enable, and generally shape the individuals' dispositions towards, and capacities for, action, and that this social structure should be taken as primary and most significant. The second 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.
Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was one of the first generation of German nonpositivist sociologists. His studies pioneered the concepts of social structure and agency. His most famous works today include The Metropolis and Mental Life and The Philosophy of Money .
Norbert Elias (1897–1990) was a German sociologist whose work focused on the relationship between power, behaviour, emotion, and knowledge over time. He significantly shaped what is called process sociology or figurational sociology .
Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) was an American sociologist and the main theorist of action theory (misleadingly called "structural functionalism") in sociology from the 1930s in the United States. His works analyze social structure but in terms of voluntary action and through patterns of normative institutionalization by codifying its theoretical gestalt into a system-theoretical framework based on the idea of living systems and cybernetic hierarchy. For Parsons there is no structure–agency problem. It is a pseudo-problem. His development of Max Weber's means-end action structure is summarized in Instrumental and value-rational action
Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was a French theorist who presented his theory of practice on the dichotomic understanding of the relation between agency and structure in a great number of publications, beginning with An Outline of the Theory of Practice in 1972, where he presented the concept of habitus.[ citation needed ] 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. [3]
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 their roles and relationships in the context of their position in the field, they internalize relationships and expectations for operating in that domain. These internalized relationships and habitual expectations and relationships form, over time, the habitus.
Bourdieu's work attempts to reconcile structure and agency, as external structures are internalized into the habitus while the actions of the agent externalize interactions between actors into the social relationships in the field. Bourdieu's theory, therefore, is a dialectic between "externalizing the internal", and "internalizing the external".
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their Social Construction of Reality (1966) [4] saw the relationship between structure and agency as dialectical. Society forms the individuals who create society – forming a continuous loop. [5] [ verification needed ]
The sociologist James Samuel Coleman famously diagramed the link between macrosociological phenomena and individual behaviour in what is commonly referred to as Coleman's Boat. [6] A macro-level phenomenon is described as instigating particular actions by individuals, which results in a subsequent macro-level phenomenon. In this way, individual action is taken in reference to a macro-sociological structure, and that action (by many individuals) results in change to that macro-structure.
Contemporary sociology has generally aimed toward a reconciliation of structure and agency as concepts. Anthony Giddens has developed structuration theory in such works as The Constitution of Society (1984). [7] 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, and agents and structures as mutually constitutive entities with "equal ontological status". [5] For Giddens, an agent's common interaction with structure, as a system of norms, is described as structuration. The term reflexivity is used to refer to the ability of an agent to consciously alter his or her place in the social structure; thus globalization and the emergence of the 'post-traditional' society might be said to allow for "greater social reflexivity". Social and political sciences are therefore important because social knowledge, as self-knowledge, is potentially emancipatory. [8] [ verification needed ]
His access to research on structure and agency is characterized by socialization theory. Central to the theory is the life-long interaction between the individual and his/her longing for freedom and autonomy, and society with its pressure of order and structure. As he states in his "Model of Productive Processing of Reality (PPR)", personality "does not form independently from society any of its functions or dimensions but is continuously being shaped, in a concrete, historically conveyed life world, throughout the entire space of the life span". [9] The PPR model places the human subject in a social and ecological context that must be absorbed and processed subjectively. The human being as an autonomous subject has the lifelong task to harmonize the processes of social integration and personal individualization. This task is mastered in specific steps that are typical for the respective age and the achieved developmental stage ("developmental tasks"). [10]
The social theorist and legal philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger developed the thesis of negative capability to address this problem of agency in relation to structure. In his work on false necessity – or anti-necessitarian social theory – Unger recognizes the constraints of structure and its molding influence upon the individual, but at the same time finds the individual able to resist, deny, and transcend their context. The varieties of this resistance are negative capability. Unlike other theories of structure and agency, negative capability does not reduce the individual to a simple actor possessing only the dual capacity of compliance or rebellion, but rather sees him or her as able to partake in a variety of activities of self empowerment. [11]
A recent development in the debate is the critical realist structure/agency perspective embodied in Roy Bhaskar's transformational model of social action (TMSA) [12] which he later expanded into his concept of four-planar social being. [13] A major difference between Giddens' structuration theory and the TMSA is that the TMSA includes a temporal element (time). 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. In 2005, the Journal of Management Studies debated the merits of critical realism. [14]
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. [15]
With critical psychology as a framework, the Danish psychologist Ole Dreier proposes in his book Psychotherapy in Everyday Life that we may best conceptualize persons as participants in social practices (that constitute social structures) who can either reproduce or change these social practices. This indicates that neither participants, nor social practices can be understood when looked at in isolation (in fact, this undermines the very idea of trying to do so), since practice and structure is co-created by participants and since the participants can only be called so, if they participate in a social practice. [16]
The structure/agency debate continues to evolve, with contributions such as Nicos Mouzelis's Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? [17] and Margaret Archer's Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach [18] continuing to push the ongoing development of structure/agency theory. Work in information systems by Mutch (2010) has emphasized Archer's Realist Social Theory [19] as well as Robert Archer's (2018) application in the field of education policy [20] and organization theory. [21] In entrepreneurship a discussion between Sarason et al. and Mole & Mole (2010) used Archer's theory to critique structuration by arguing that starting a new business organization needs to be understood in the context of social structure and agency. However, this depends upon one's view of structure, which differs between Giddens and Archer. Hence if strata in social reality have different ontologies, then they must be viewed as a dualism. Moreover, agents have causal power, and ultimate concerns which they try to fallibly put into practice. Mole and Mole propose entrepreneurship as the study of the interplay between the structures of a society and the agents within it. [22]
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While the structure–agency debate has been a central issue in social theory, and recent theoretical reconciliation attempts have been made, structure–agency theory has tended to develop more in European countries by European theorists, while social theorists from the United States 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). [23]
In sociology, habitus is the way that people perceive and respond to the social world they inhabit, by way of their personal habits, skills, and disposition of character.
Rational choice theory refers to a set of guidelines that help understand economic and social behaviour. The theory originated in the eighteenth century and can be traced back to the political economist and philosopher Adam Smith. The theory postulates that an individual will perform a cost–benefit analysis to determine whether an option is right for them. Rational choice theory looks at three concepts: rational actors, self interest and the invisible hand.
Pierre Bourdieu was a French sociologist and public intellectual. Bourdieu's contributions to the sociology of education, the theory of sociology, and sociology of aesthetics have achieved wide influence in several related academic fields. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris and the Collège de France.
Social theories are analytical frameworks, or paradigms, that are used to study and interpret social phenomena. A tool used by social scientists, social theories relate to historical debates over the validity and reliability of different methodologies, the primacy of either structure or agency, as well as the relationship between contingency and necessity. Social theory in an informal nature, or authorship based outside of academic social and political science, may be referred to as "social criticism" or "social commentary", or "cultural criticism" and may be associated both with formal cultural and literary scholarship, as well as other non-academic or journalistic forms of writing.
Structural functionalism, or simply functionalism, is "a framework for building theory that sees society as a complex system whose parts work together to promote solidarity and stability".
Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens is an English sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists and is the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year. In 2007, Giddens was listed as the fifth most-referenced author of books in the humanities. He has academic appointments in approximately twenty different universities throughout the world and has received numerous honorary degrees.
The theory of structuration is a social theory of the creation and reproduction of social systems that is based on the analysis of both structure and agents, without giving primacy to either. Furthermore, in structuration theory, neither micro- nor macro-focused analysis alone is sufficient. The theory was proposed by sociologist Anthony Giddens, most significantly in The Constitution of Society, which examines phenomenology, hermeneutics, and social practices at the inseparable intersection of structures and agents. Its proponents have adopted and expanded this balanced position. Though the theory has received much criticism, it remains a pillar of contemporary sociological theory.
In the social sciences, social structure is the aggregate of patterned social arrangements in society that are both emergent from and determinant of the actions of individuals. Likewise, society is believed to be grouped into structurally related groups or sets of roles, with different functions, meanings, or purposes. Examples of social structure include family, religion, law, economy, and class. It contrasts with "social system", which refers to the parent structure in which these various structures are embedded. Thus, social structures significantly influence larger systems, such as economic systems, legal systems, political systems, cultural systems, etc. Social structure can also be said to be the framework upon which a society is established. It determines the norms and patterns of relations between the various institutions of the society.
Ram Roy Bhaskar was an English philosopher of science who is best known as the initiator of the philosophical movement of critical realism (CR). Bhaskar argued that the task of science is "the production of the knowledge of those enduring and continually active mechanisms of nature that produce the phenomena of the world", rather than the discovery of quantitative laws, and that experimental science makes sense only if such mechanisms exist and operate outside the lab as well as inside it.
Microsociology is one of the main levels of analysis of sociology, concerning the nature of everyday human social interactions and agency on a small scale: face to face. Microsociology is based on subjective interpretative analysis rather than statistical or empirical observation, and shares close association with the philosophy of phenomenology. Methods include symbolic interactionism and ethnomethodology; ethnomethodology in particular has led to many academic sub-divisions and studies such as micro-linguistical research and other related aspects of human social behaviour. Macrosociology, by contrast, concerns the social structure and broader systems.
In sociology, social action, also known as Weberian social action, is an act which takes into account the actions and reactions of individuals. According to Max Weber, "Action is 'social' insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behavior of others and is thereby oriented in its course."
Margaret Scotford Archer was an English sociologist, who spent most of her academic career at the University of Warwick where she was for many years Professor of Sociology. She was also a professor at l'Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland. She is best known for coining the term elisionism in her 1995 book Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach. On 14 April 2014, Archer was named by Pope Francis to succeed former Harvard law professor and US Ambassador to the Holy See Mary Ann Glendon as President of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, and served in this position until her retirement on 27 March 2019.
Reflectivism is an umbrella label used in International Relations theory for a range of theoretical approaches which oppose rational-choice accounts of social phenomena and positivism generally. The label was popularised by Robert Keohane in his presidential address to the International Studies Association in 1988. The address was entitled "International Institutions: Two Approaches", and contrasted two broad approaches to the study of international institutions. One was "rationalism", the other what Keohane referred to as "reflectivism". Rationalists — including realists, neo-realists, liberals, neo-liberals, and scholars using game-theoretic or expected-utility models — are theorists who adopt the broad theoretical and ontological commitments of rational-choice theory.
A sociological theory is a supposition that intends to consider, analyze, and/or explain objects of social reality from a sociological perspective, drawing connections between individual concepts in order to organize and substantiate sociological knowledge. Hence, such knowledge is composed of complex theoretical frameworks and methodology.
In epistemology, and more specifically, the sociology of knowledge, reflexivity refers to circular relationships between cause and effect, especially as embedded in human belief structures. A reflexive relationship is multi-directional when the causes and the effects affect the reflexive agent in a layered or complex sociological relationship. The complexity of this relationship can be furthered when epistemology includes religion.
The sociology of education is the study of how public institutions and individual experiences affect education and its outcomes. It is mostly concerned with the public schooling systems of modern industrial societies, including the expansion of higher, further, adult, and continuing education.
Sociology is the scientific study of human society that focuses on society, human social behavior, patterns of social relationships, social interaction, and aspects of culture associated with everyday life. Regarded as a part of both the social sciences and humanities, sociology uses various methods of empirical investigation and critical analysis to develop a body of knowledge about social order and social change. Sociological subject matter ranges from micro-level analyses of individual interaction and agency to macro-level analyses of social systems and social structure. Applied sociological research may be applied directly to social policy and welfare, whereas theoretical approaches may focus on the understanding of social processes and phenomenological method.
Practice theory is a body of social theory within anthropology and sociology that explains society and culture as the result of structure and individual agency. Practice theory emerged in the late 20th century and was first outlined in the work of the French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu.
In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential. For instance, structure consists of those factors of influence that determine or limit agents and their decisions. The influences from structure and agency are debated—it is unclear to what extent a person's actions are constrained by social systems.
Critical realism is a philosophical approach to understanding science, and in particular social science, initially developed by Roy Bhaskar (1944–2014). It specifically opposes forms of empiricism and positivism by viewing science as concerned with identifying causal mechanisms. In the last decades of the twentieth century it also stood against various forms of postmodernism and poststructuralism by insisting on the reality of objective existence. In contrast to positivism's methodological foundation, and poststructuralism's epistemological foundation, critical realism insists that (social) science should be built from an explicit ontology. Critical realism is one of a range of types of philosophical realism, as well as forms of realism advocated within social science such as analytic realism and subtle realism.