Chapter Summary

The agency-structure perspective is the European alternative to the micro-macro perspective in America. Agency generally refers to micro-level, individual human actors, but it can also refer to collectivities of that act. Structure usually refers to large-scale social structures, but it can also refer to micro structures, such as those involved in human interaction.

Structuration Theory

Structuration theory focuses on the mutual constitution of structure and agency. Anthony Giddens (1938- ) argues that structure and agency are a duality that cannot be conceived of apart from one another. Human practices are recursive—that is, through their activities, individuals create both their consciousness and the structural conditions that make their activities possible. Because social actors are reflexive and monitor the ongoing flow of activities and structural conditions, they adapt their actions to their evolving understandings. As a result, social scientific knowledge of society will actually change human activities. Giddens calls this dialectical relationship between social scientific knowledge and human practices the double hermeneutic.

Actors continually develop routines that give them a sense of security and that enable them to deal efficiently with their social lives. While their motives provide the overall plan of action, it is these routine practices that determine what shape the action will take. Giddens emphasizes that actors have power to shape their own actions but that the consequences of actions are often unintended. Structure is the rules and resources that give similar social practices a systemic form. Only through the activities of human actors can structure exist. While Giddens acknowledges that structure can be constraining to actors, he thinks that sociologists have exaggerated the importance of structural constraints. Structures can also enable actors to do things they would not otherwise be able to do. For Giddens, a social system is a set of reproduced social practices and relations between actors.

The concept of structuration underscores the duality of structure and agency. There can be no agency without structures that shape motives into practices, but there can be no structures independent of the routine practices that create them.

Culture and Agency

Margaret Archer (1943- ) has criticized the concept of structuration as analytically insufficient. She thinks it is useful for social scientists to understand structure and agency as independent, because it makes it possible to analyze the interrelations between the two sides. Archer also thinks that Giddens gives short shrift to the relative autonomy of culture from both structure and agency.

Archer's focus is on morphogenesis, the process by which complex interchanges lead not only to changes in the structure of the system but also to an end product—structural elaboration. The theory emphasizes that there are emergent properties of social interaction that are separable from the actions and interactions that produce them. Once these structures have emerged, they react upon and alter action and interaction.

Archer reserves the term "structure" for material phenomena and interests. Morphogenetic theory focuses on how structural conditioning affects social interaction and how this interaction, in turn, leads to structural elaboration. Archer sees culture—nonmaterial phenomena and ideas—as autonomous from structure. In the cultural domain, morphogenetic theory focuses on how cultural conditioning affects socio-cultural interaction and how this interaction leads to cultural elaboration. Compared to structure and agency, Archer asserts that the nexus between culture and agency has been neglected. She suggests that in order to understand agency, one must understand the context of innumerable interrelated theories, beliefs, and ideas that have had an influence over it. Agents have the ability either to reinforce or resist the influence of the cultural system.

Habitus and Field

Another major approach to the agency-structure linkage is Pierre Bourdieu's (1930-2002) theory of habitus and field. Bourdieu sought to bridge subjectivism (the individual) and objectivism (society) with a perspective called constructivist structuralism. Structuralism focuses on the objective structures of language and culture that give shape to human action. Constructivism looks at the social genesis of schemes of perception, thought, and action. Bourdieu wants to examine the social construction of objective structures with an emphasis on how people perceive and construct their own social world, but without neglecting how perception and construction are constrained by structures. An important dynamic in this relationship is the ability of individual actors to invent and improvise within the structure of their routines.

The habitus is the mental structure through which people deal with the social world. It can be thought of as a set of internalized schemes through which the world is perceived, understood, appreciated, and evaluated. A habitus is acquired as the result of the long-term occupation of a position in the social world. Depending on the position occupied, people will have a different habitus. The habitus operates as a structure, but people do not simply respond to it mechanically. When people change positions, sometimes their habitus is no longer appropriate, a condition called hysteresis. Bourdieu argues that the habitus both produces and is produced by the social world. People internalize external structures, and they externalize things they have internalized through practices.

The concept of field is the objective complement to the idea of habitus. A field is a network of social relations among the objective positions within it. It is not a set of interactions or intersubjective ties among individuals. The social world has a great variety of semi-autonomous fields, such as art, religion, and higher education. The field is a type of competitive marketplace in which economic, cultural, social, and symbolic power are used. The preeminent field is the field of politics, from which a hierarchy of power relationships serves to structure all other fields. To analyze a field, one must first understand its relationship to the political field. The next step is to map the objective positions within a field and, finally, the nature of the habitus of the agents who occupy particular positions can be understood. These agents act strategically, depending on their habitus, in order to enhance their capital. Bourdieu is particularly concerned with how powerful positions within a field can perpetrate symbolic violence on less powerful actors. Cultural mechanisms such as education impose a dominant perspective on the rest of the population in order to legitimate their power.

Bourdieu's analysis of the aesthetic preferences of different groups can be found in Distinction. The cultural preferences of the various groups within society constitute coherent systems that serve to unify those with similar tastes and differentiate them from others with divergent tastes. Through the practical application of preferences, people classify objects and, in the process, classify themselves. Bourdieu thinks the field of taste involves the intersection of social-class relationships and cultural relationships. He argues that taste represents an opportunity to both experience and assert one's position in the class hierarchy. These tastes are engendered in the deep-rooted dispositions of the habitus. Changes in tastes result from struggles for dominance within both cultural and social-class fields as different factions struggle to define high culture and taste.

Bourdieu also applies his concepts to French academia in Homo Academicus. This work is concerned with the relationship between the objective positions of different academic fields, their corresponding habitus, and the struggle between them. Bourdieu also wants to link the academic field to a larger field of power. He finds that French academia is divided into dominant fields of law and medicine and lesser fields of science and the arts. He suggests that faculty members within each field use their social and cultural capital to compete for esteem. As a result, aspiring academics attach themselves to established professors who control their intellectual production. Bourdieu is critical of this system because it encourages conformity rather than innovation.

Colonization of the Life-World

Jurgen Habermas's (1929- ) theory of the colonization of the life-world can be characterized as an agency-structure issue because his ideas draw on both action theory and systems theory. The main premise of Habermas's theory is that the free and open communication of the life-world is being impinged on by the formal rationality of the system. The colonization of the life-world involves a restatement of the Weberian thesis that, in the modern world, formal rationality is triumphing over substantive rationality.

The life-world is an internal perspective on society conceived from the perspective of the acting subject. Drawing on phenomenology and symbolic interactionism, Habermas asserts that when communicative action takes place in the life-world, it involves a range of unspoken presuppositions and mutual understandings that must be present for it to take place. He thinks that free and open communication in the life-world, with the force of the best argument winning the day, is our best chance at achieving substantive rational solutions to collective dilemmas.

While the life-world represents the viewpoint of the acting subject in society, the system involves an external perspective that views society from the observer's perspective. The analysis of systems is attuned to the interconnections of actions and their functional significance. The system includes structures such as the family, the judiciary, the state, and the economy. As these structures evolve, they become more distanced from the life-world, progressively differentiated, and increasingly complex. But they also gain greater capacity to steer the life-world by exerting external control over communicative action.

Habermas asserts that the fundamental problem for social theory is how to connect these two conceptual strategies. On the one hand, a social integration strategy focuses on the way in which the life-world is integrated through communicatively achieved and normatively guaranteed consensus. On the other hand, a system-integration strategy focuses on the external control exercised over individual decisions that are not subjectively coordinated. Habermas concludes that each of these two strategies has serious limitations. The social integration strategy has a limited ability to comprehend the reproductive processes at the system level, while the systems-integration perspective cannot understand the normative patterns that govern the internal perspectives of the life-world.

Habermas argues that the both the system and the life-world are becoming increasingly rationalized. The rationalization of the life-world involves growth in the rationality of communicative action. Social integration is increasingly achieved through the process of consensus formation. The rationalization of the system involves the coordination of activities by monetarization and bureaucratization. Habermas believes that these instrumental system imperatives threaten substantive rationality by impinging on the life-world and restricting communication.

Agency-Structure and Micro-Macro Linkages

One of the key differences between micro-macro and agency-structure theory is their respective images of the actor. Micro-macro theory tends to have a behaviorist orientation, whereas agency-structure theory places an emphasis on conscious, creative action. A second major difference is that micro-macro theory tends to depict issues in static, hierarchical, and ahistorical terms, whereas agency-structure theory is more firmly embedded in a historical, dynamic framework.