INTRODUCTION

Are humans free to choose how to think and how to behave or are there wider, deeper forces which influence their thoughts and behaviour? This is the central question with regard to structure and agency. 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, gender, ethnicity which seem to limit or influence the opportunities that individuals have.

The problem of reconciling social structure and human agency

A central issue in both classical and contemporary sociological theory is the question of social ontology - what the social world is made of; or what has the status of cause and what has the status of effect. Traditionally, there are two main camps in this debate: on the one hand are hermeneutical/ethnomethodological approaches (emphasis on agency/interaction), and on the other structural/functionalist ones (emphasis on structure). Historically, the latter approach was dominant in sociology, due to the fact that early sociologists sought to establish their discipline by finding the specificity of the social. In other words, they tried to show that the social can not be reduced to the sum of individuals - that the collective has emergent properties (Durkheim) and that there is a need for a science which will 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 (i.e., economists are very prone to disregarding any kind of holism).

The central debate, therefore, is between theorists committed to the notion of methodological individualism - 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 theorists committed to a notion of methodological holism (see holism in science) - 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. Methodological individualism is a philosophical orientation toward explaining broad society-wide developments as the accumulation of decisions by individuals. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ...

More recently, there is growing convergence in attempts to reconcile notions of social structure, such as the institutions and norms that shape the actions of individuals in society, with the notion of human agency where volitional agents are seen as being capable of making a difference in and changing the social systems they inhabit. Social structure is a term frequently used in social theory - yet rarely defined or clearly conceptualised (Jary and Jary 1991, Abercrombie et al 2000). ... Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world on a collective basis, usually through democratic means. ...

Structure/agency theory as a framework resolving the debate

Structure/agency theory is a now recognised as a branch of social theory that reconciles the debate between whether social structure or social agency should be given theoretical primacy - by refusing to grant theoretical primacy to either. Structure/agency theorists suggest that social agents are inherently socialised and that the actions of agents are informed by and shaped by social structure such as norms and institutions prevalent in the society they are socialised into. On the other hand, the actions of actors may, individually or collectively, alter and shape social structure such as norms and institutions.

The situation, therefore, is somewhat like asking 'which came first - the chicken or the egg?' Either answer is incorrect. There is a continuous cycle of actors influencing structure, and structure socialising actors. This has been called methodological relationism by several structure/agency theorists.

Some key structure/agency theorists

Structure/agency viewpoints may be traced back to sociologists such as Georg Simmel, Norbert Elias and Talcott Parsons. Parsons for example was a primary figure in action theory in sociology in the 1950s, and his work reconciled both action and social structure to a certain extent. The functionalist orientation of his work has however fallen out of favor after being criticized as tautological and value-laden. Georg Simmel Georg Simmel (March 1, 1858 – September 28, 1918, Berlin, Germany) was one of the first generation of German sociologists. ... Norbert Elias (born June 22, 1897 in Breslau, Germany (now Wrocław, Poland); died August 1, 1990 in Amsterdam) was a German sociologist of Jewish descent, who later became a British citizen. ... Talcott Parsons (December 13, 1902–May 8, 1979) was for many years the best-known sociologist in the United States, and indeed one of the best-known in the world. ... Philosophical action theory is concerned with conjectures about the processes causing intentional (wilful) human bodily movements of more or less complex kind. ... Social interactions and their consequences are the subject of sociology. ... The 1950s was the decade spanning the years 1950 to 1959. ...

The key contributions to the structure/agency theory literature however might be regarded as the contributions by Berger and Luckmann in their Social Construction of Reality, Pierre Bourdieu in his Outline of a Theory of Practice and his Logic of Practice, Anthony Giddens's works on Structuration Theory such as his work on The Constitution of Society, and Critical Realist approaches to structure/agency theory such as Roy Bhaskar's work on the Transformational Model of Social Activity (TMSA) in his Reclaiming Reality or The Possibility of Naturalism. A social construction, social construct or social concept is an institutionalized entity or artifact in a social system invented or constructed by participants in a particular culture or society that exists solely because people agree to behave as if it exists, or agree to follow certain conventional rules. ... Pierre Bourdieu (August 1, 1930 – January 23, 2002) was an acclaimed French sociologist whose work employed methods drawn from a wide range of disciplines, from philosophy and literary theory to sociology and anthropology. ... Anthony Giddens in 2000. ... Structuration theory, in anthropology, maintains that a repeated cultural practice builds social structure, and that practices are dictated by the social structure. ... Roy A. Bhaskar (born 1944) is a British philosopher, most closely associated with the philosophical movement of Critical Realism. ...

Similarly, 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 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.

An example of structure/agency thinking

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 Judgment of Taste (1979), was named as one of the 20th century's 10 most important works of sociology by the International Sociological Association. Pierre Bourdieu (August 1, 1930 – January 23, 2002) was an acclaimed French sociologist whose work employed methods drawn from a wide range of disciplines, from philosophy and literary theory to sociology and anthropology. ... 1972 (MCMLXXII) was a leap year starting on Saturday. ... Habitus is a complex concept referring primarily to the non-discursive aspects of culture that bind individuals to larger groups. ... La Distinction is a sociological book by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) based on his demographic research carried out in 1963 and concluded in 1967-8. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999... International Sociological Association is a non-profit organization dedicated to scientific purposes in the field of sociology and social sciences. ...

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 reconciles 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.

Recent developments

The structure/agency approach 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.

Further considerations

While the structure/agency debate has been a central issue in social theory, and structure/agency theory is a vital and important solution to many of the methodological issues raised in the debate, 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 structure/agency theory) in greater detail in his book Modern Sociological Theory.

Additional links

• Theory of structuration
• Habitus

The Theory of Structuration, proposed by Anthony Giddens (1984) in The Constitution of Society, (mentioned also in Central Problems of Social Theory, 1977) is an attempt to reconcile theoretical dichotomies of social systems such as agency/structure, subjective/objective, and micro/macro perspectives, which consider individuals as either acted upon... Habitus is a complex concept referring primarily to the non-discursive aspects of culture that bind individuals to larger groups. ...

References

• Archer, M. (1995), Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann (1966), The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Anchor Books, Garden City, NY.
• Bhaskar, R. (1979/1998), The Possibility of Naturalism, 3rd edition, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hampstead.
• Bhaskar, R. (1989), Reclaiming Reality, Verso, London.
• Bourdieu, P. (1977), Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge University Press, London.
• Bourdieu, P. (1990), The Logic of Practice, Polity Press, Cambridge.
• Bourdieu, P. and L. J. D. Wacquant (1992), An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
• Elias, N. (1978), What is Sociology?, Hutchinson, London.
• Giddens, A. (1984), The Constitution of Society, Polity Press, Cambridge.
• Lawson, T. (1997), Economics and Reality, Routledge, London and New York.
• Mouzelis, N. (1995), Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong?, Routledge, London and New York.
• Ritzer, G. (2000), Modern Sociological Theory, 5th ed., McGraw-Hill.
• Ritzer, G. and P. Gindoff (1992). 'Methodological relationism: lessons for and from social psychology', Social Psychology Quarterly, 55 (2), pp. 128-140.
• Turner, J. H. (1991), The Structure of Sociological Theory, 5th edn., Wadsworth Publishing Company, Belmont CA.
• Wilkinson, K. (1991)., The Community in Rural America. Greenwood Press: New York, NY.