STRUCTURATION THEORY
After completing his studies in 19th-century sociological theory, Giddens developed his own theory of structuration sometime in the 1980s. To introduce his theory, he says that the actions of an actor are taken in continuity with the past. But, in fresh action, he also reproduces his existing structure. The continuity of the past and the reproduction of the present structure is what he calls ‘structuration’. Giddens has defined structuration. Structuration actually describes an action: ‘to structurate’ or “to do” or “produce structure”.
The theory of structuration is a social theory of the creation and reproduction of social systems that are based on the analysis of both structure and agents, without giving primacy to either. The “duality of structure” is a synthesis of structure and agency effects that are used in structuration theory to provide insights into human behaviour. Furthermore, in structuration theory, neither micro- nor macro-focused analysis alone is sufficient. The theory was proposed by sociologist Anthony Giddens (1986), most significantly in The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration-Polity, which examines phenomenology, hermeneutics, and social practices at the inseparable intersection of structures and agents. Instead of describing the capacity of human action as being constrained by powerful stable societal structures (such as educational, religious, or political institutions) or as a function of the individual expression of will (i.e., agency), structuration theory acknowledges the interaction of meaning, standards and values, and power and posits a dynamic relationship between these different facets of society. Although, its proponents have adopted and expanded this balanced position. Though the theory has received much criticism, it remains a pillar of contemporary sociological theory.
MEANING AND MAJOR FEATURES
Giddens has placed great emphasis on individual action:
As a leading theorem of the theory of structuration, he advances the following: every social actor knows a great deal about the conditions of reproduction of the society of which he or she is a member. Action has two things: actor and social structure. Classical theorists have argued all through their works that the social structure subordinates the activities of actors. For these classical thinkers actor or individual is always given a rear seat. This problem has been raised by Giddens. It is dualism.
FEATURES OF STRUCTURATION
Human agency (Agent-structure dualism)
Sociological theory, in a broader way, is divided into two groups. One group of theories views society from the perspective of system, structure or production relations and advocates that society or social structure determines the actions of the actor or agent. In this case, the individual is a mere puppet who is constantly constrained by the social structure. The second group of theories consists of micro-theories. These theories put an emphasis on the individual or agent. The actors and the sum of their actions make up society and there are no structures or systems that are independent of the actors.
The strong emphasis on the individual and its actions in action sociological theories leads to a neglect of adequate understanding of social institutions. Giddens is very much critical of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim on one hand, and George Herbert Mead, Erving Goffman, Harold Garfinkel, Alfred Schutz and other micro-sociologists, on the other hand. Giddens raises some important questions: to what degree can we as individuals create our own lives and frames for our lives, and to what degree are we already constrained by society and its structures when we are born?
The two groups of sociological theories answer these questions differently. Obviously, there is a dualism between agent or actor and structure of society. It is this dualism that provides a logic for building the theory of structuration.
Social practice: The concept of agent
Social practice is an important part of the theory of structuration. Our society, in fact, consists of social practices. These social practices are produced and reproduced by the agent or actor. Giddens does not explain social practices in terms of the subordination or super-ordination of actors or social structure.
He has given a definition of social practice with the concept of an agent. It is the agent or the actor who is knowledgeable about most of his actions. This knowledge about social practice comes through practical consciousness. For example, in order to board the city bus, we stand in a queue at the ticket window, purchase the ticket and wait for the bus of our route. We occupy our seats and get alight when we reach our place of destination. This wealth of knowledge is the result of our practical consciousness. Giddens says that we possess enough knowledge to carry out our day-to-day activities. But, this knowledge is not based on logic or it is not formulated discursively.
For instance, we cannot explain the scarce frequency of the buses of my route, we cannot likewise give an explanation of the amount charges for our journey. All this falls within the realm of the managers who conduct the city bus journey. Discursive means proceeding on logical arguments. Normally, the agents perform their social practices in a routinized way. This performance stems from practical consciousness.
Reflexivity:
It is an unconscious self that determines the activity of a person. All other things of life are either done logically or in a practical way but some of the activities which are the inner part of the self get their reflection in the activities of the actor. The reflexivity is the inner design of the actor and in the known routine behaviour, he allows his reflexivity to come out.
Discursive consciousness or logical consciousness is different from the practical level of consciousness, which includes knowledge we cannot immediately account for. A discursive explanation implies that we explicitly express how we travel in a city bus. By highlighting the knowledge of the agent, Giddens emphasizes that systems and structures do not act ‘behind the actor’.
“Actually, the discursive reflexivity in an action gives us the opportunity to change our patterns of action. Not all motives for action are found at a ‘conscious’ level.” So, in contrast to many action sociologists, Giddens employs an unconscious level which comprises actions spurred by unconscious motives.
The unconscious comprises repressed or distorted knowledge. Giddens further provides an explanation to the three levels of knowledge: “The transition from discursive (logical) to practical knowledge may be diffuse, but there is a ‘bar’ between these two types of knowledge and unconscious motives which, for example, because of repression, cannot immediately turn into conscious knowledge.”
All the three levels – unconscious level, practical conscious level and discursive level of knowledge – are important. But, out of the three levels, practical knowledge seems to be most decisive for an understanding of social life.
STRUCTURATION THEORY: CONTEMPORARY CRITIQUE
A central reservation about structuration theory in the critique of other social theorists has centred around the ‘conflation’ of structure and agency. Conflation ‘concerns the problem of reducing the structure to action (or vice versa) and the [consequent] difficulty of documenting an institution apart from action’ (Barley and Tolbert 1997). Archer (1996) argues that conflating structure and agency weakens their analytical power and elides the distinction between Lockwood’s original conception of ‘social’ and ‘system’ integration. She maintains that, in order to account for why things are ‘so and not otherwise,’ it is necessary to maintain the analytical distinction between the ‘parts’ of society and its ‘people,’ and supplies an ontological grounding for the distinction in Realism. Structure and agency, in her view, are ‘phased over different tracts of time’ (human actions over the short term, structures enduring) which allows their analytical separation.
Giddens conceptualization of structure (‘rules and resources’ existing only in memory traces and instantiated in action) is somewhat rarefied (‘loose and abstract’ (Thompson 1989)) in comparison to the structuralist tradition of social thought, where the structure has a far more tangible function in constraining human action. This has led to criticisms of subjectivism: -that Giddens does not so much resolve the dualism of action and structure, as offer victory to the knowledgeable human actor, in a particularly modern and liberal tradition of thought (Clegg 1989). Thus Archer (1982) and Layder (1987) argue that Giddens undermines any sense of structures as pre-constituted and relatively autonomous or determinant of action.
A more telling criticism for the IS (Information System field) discipline, which must be concerned with purposeful change, is obliquely referred to by Stinchcombe (1990) when he queries how the theoretical base explains historical change. The critique is developed further by Archer (1996) as in her problematic of why things are ‘so and not otherwise.’ Giddens view of structuration offers a conceptual mechanism for explaining the reproduction of social structure; however, she asserts, this is not the crucial question that needs addressing. The question of substance is: ‘why do some forms of social reproduction succeed and become institutionalized, and others do not?’ Why, for instance, should the communist societal model in Eastern Europe give way to democratic capitalism? Why should one information system takes its place successfully in organizational life, and another not? For this question, the theory of structuration has no direct answers.
A further critique comes from feminist sociologists (Murgatroyd 1989) who point out that by omitting the consideration of gender from structuration theory, Giddens tells ‘only half the story.’ The study of ‘people producing work’ (women’s work within the family) must be a crucial element of structuration.
Most of this critique is at the ontological level of the internal logic of the theory of structuration. However, Giddens’ focus on the ontological content of social theory (Gregson 1989), and his lack of interest in wielding the ‘methodological scalpel’ (what Hekman (1990) describes as his ‘failure to present a viable epistemology’) leave the structurationist researcher with serious difficulties. The lack of concrete empirical example in his own work, together with its abstract conceptual focus similarly offers few clues as to how to proceed in the everyday world in the gathering of useful understanding and its reflection back into the world of practice. Moreover, Giddens does not provide any conceptual base for developing a ‘critical’ stance (in the sense used by Habermas) (Bernstein 1989), in other words for developing normative models of how things should be, as opposed to how they are. The theory then becomes a ‘categorization system’ (Turner 1990) for the purposes of analytical comparison with the world the mode in which it has most frequently been used. For Barley and Tolbert (1997) the difficulty at the epistemological level is - ‘unless an institution exists prior to action it is difficult to understand how it can affect behaviour............to reduce the empirical problem.........one needs a diachronic model of the structuration process as well as longitudinal data.’ Their solution to the methodological research problem is through the Shankian device of ‘scripts’ which encode features of institutional life (replacing Giddens’ modalities). The analysis of the development of scripts over time offers them the temporal perspective they are seeking.
Whittington (1992) concludes that Giddens’ influence on the field of management studies is ‘substantial but lopsided.’ In addition to focusing on Giddens theoretical writings and the duality of structure to the exclusion of his more empirical writings (for instance on class structuration), management writers, he contends, have tended to reduce Giddens sophisticated view of the structure to the ‘internal characteristics of the organization itself’ which is then conceptualized as a reified entity in an ‘environment’ which imposes impacts and pressures from outside. His criticism, then, is that the conception of managerial agency resulting from this perspective is skewed and limited. The institutionalist ‘recognition of the interplay between capitalist structures, and structures of gender, knowledge, state and ethnicity’ taken together with his study of Giddens’ empirical writings, including those on class structuration (Giddens 1973) lead him to advocate a much broader view of managerial agency. Managers are viewed as part of many social systems, not just a capitalist system of organization, with many forms of rules and resources to call upon, and many available structures which both constrain and enable their actions.
THEORIES OF STRUCTURE AND AGENCY
The nexus of structure and agency has been a central tenet in the field of sociology since its inception. Theories that argue for the preeminence of structure (also called the objectivist view in this context) resolve that the behaviour of individuals is largely determined by their socialization into that structure (such as conforming to a society’s expectations with respect to gender or social class). Structures operate at varying levels, with the research lens focused at the level appropriate to the question at hand. At its highest level, society can be thought to consist of mass socioeconomic stratifications (such as through distinct social classes). On a mid-range scale, institutions and social networks (such as religious or familial structures) might form the focus of study, and at the microscale, one might consider how community or professional norms constrain agency. Structuralists describe the effect of structure in contrasting ways. French social scientist Émile Durkheim highlighted the positive role of stability and permanence, whereas philosopher Karl Marx described structures as protecting the few, doing little to meet the needs of the many.
In contrast, proponents of agency theory (also called the subjective view in this context) consider that individuals possess the ability to exercise their own free will and make their own choices. Here, social structures are viewed as products of individual action that are sustained or discarded, rather than as incommensurable forces.
Giddens’s theory
Sociologists have questioned the polarized nature of the structure-agency debate, highlighting the synthesis of these two influences on human behaviour. A prominent scholar in this respect is British sociologist Anthony Giddens, who developed the concept of structuration. Giddens argues that just as an individual’s autonomy is influenced by structure, structures are maintained and adapted through the exercise of agency. The interface at which an actor meets a structure is termed “structuration.”
Thus, structuration theory attempts to understand human social behaviour by resolving the competing views of structure-agency and macro-micro perspectives. This is achieved by studying the processes that take place at the interface between the actor and the structure. Structuration theory takes the position that social action cannot be fully explained by the structure or agency theories alone. Instead, it recognizes that actors operate within the context of rules produced by social structures, and only by acting in a compliant manner are these structures reinforced. As a result, social structures have no inherent stability outside human action because they are socially constructed. Alternatively, through the exercise of reflexivity, agents modify social structures by acting outside the constraints the place of the structure on them.
Giddens’s framework of structure differs from that in the classic theory. He proposes three kinds of structure in a social system. The first is signification, where meaning is coded in the practice of language and discourse. The second is legitimation, consisting of the normative perspectives embedded as societal norms and values. Giddens’s final structural element is domination, concerned with how power is applied, particularly in the control of resources.
What is structure?
Giddens gives his theory of structuration with the firm argument that sociology should give either actor or structure as its point of departure. He claims that the actor-structure relationship must be seen as a duality of structure. By this, he means that a coherent relation goes a long way in establishing that structure is both a medium and an outcome of the actor’s actions.
After having redefined the concepts of agent and action, Giddens takes up the task of redefining social structure. He distinguishes between structure and system. Social systems consist of relations between actors or collectivities that are reproduced across time and space, that is, actions that are repeated and therefore extend beyond one single action. Social systems are social practices produced, thus creating a pattern of social relations.
Giddens defines structure in the context of his theory of structuration. A structure is characterized by the absence of acting subjects and exists only ‘virtually’. Accordingly, structures are present only as options that have not manifested themselves actively.
This indicates that Giddens’s concept of structure is to a large extent inspired by structuration.
Giddens further qualifies his definition of structure:
Structures exist only in practice itself and in our human memory, which we use when we act. The structure is not an external frame. Structures emerge in our memory, traces only when we reflect discursively on a previous action. In other words, the structure does not exist, it is continuously produced via agents who draw on this very structure (or rather structural properties) when they act.
Thus, the key features of structure given by Giddens are:
Structures exist only in human memory.
Structures exist only in practice. They are produced by agents, i.e., actors.
Structures enable us to do actions. They also exercise control on the actor.
Structures consist of rules and resources which agents or actors draw upon in the production and reproduction of social life.
What is dualism?
Giddens has given prime importance in this respect as a dualism that is deeply entrenched in social theory, a division between objectivism and subjectivism. Objectivism was a third -ism characterizing the orthodox consensus, together with naturalism and functionalism. Structuration theory is based on the premise that this dualism has to be reconceptualized as a duality the duality of structure.
Expressing these observations in another way, we can say that action logically involves power in the sense of transformative capacity. In this sense, the most all-embracing meaning of ‘power’, power is logically prior to subjectivity, to the constitution of the reflexive monitoring of conduct. It is worth emphasizing this because conceptions of power in the social sciences tend faithfully to reflect the dualism of subject and object referred to previously. Thus ‘power’ is very often defined in terms of intent or the will, as the capacity to achieve desired and intended outcomes. Other writers by contrast, including both Parsons and Foucault, see power as above all a property of society or the social community.
________________________________________________________
Bryan S. Turner - The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory(2009) ~ Link
Anthony Giddens (auth.) - Central Problems in Social Theory_ Action, structure and contradiction in social analysis (1979) ~ Link
Anthony Giddens - Modernity and Self-Identity_ Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (1991) ~ Link
Anthony Giddens - The Constitution of Society_ Outline of the Theory of Structuration (1986) ~ Link
Rob Stones (auth.) - Structuration Theory ~ Link
Structuration Theory_ Anthony Giddens and the Constitution of Social Life ~ Link
Post a Comment