Goode, E., and Ben-Yehuda, N. (2009) Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance (2nd edn, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell).
Hannigan, J. (2014) Environmental Sociology (3rd edn, London: Routledge), esp. chapter 5.
Motyl, A. J. (2010) ‘The Social Construction of Social Construction: Implications for Theories of Nationalism and Identity Formation’, Nationalities Papers, 38(1): 59–71.
Structure/Agency
Working Definition
A conceptual dichotomy rooted in sociology’s attempts to understand the relative balance between society’s influence on the individual (structure) and the individual’s freedom to act and shape society (agency).
Origins of the Concept
Although questions of human free will have been part of philosophical debates for centuries, in sociology this issue translated into the ‘problem’ of agency and structure. The problem itself is a direct result of the early sociologists’ insistence that there were indeed such things as society and social forces limiting individual choice and freedom. Herbert Spencer and August Comte saw social structures as groups, collectivities and aggregates of individuals, but it was Durkheim’s idea of social facts and of society as an entity in its own right that laid out the subject matter of the new discipline. The type of sociology which emerged focused on how individuals are moulded and shaped by social structures that are, to all intents and purposes, external to themselves and beyond their control. In twentieth-century functionalism, Talcott Parsons devised a theory of action which took social structures to be less ‘thing-like’ and closer to patterns of normative expectations and guidelines governing acceptable behaviour.
By the 1960s, the pendulum had swung against structure-led theories. Dennis Wrong (1961) and others argued that structuralist ideas left too little room for the creative actions of individuals, and many sociologists turned to more agencyfocused perspectives, such as symbolic interactionism, phenomenology and ethnomethodology. This shift towards the actor’s perspective was part of an emerging theoretical pluralism that students of sociology now experience as the normal state of affairs. However, since the 1980s there have been attempts to integrate structure and agency theoretically, such as the work of Archer (2003), Elias ([1939] 2000), Giddens (1984) and Bourdieu (1986).
Meaning and Interpretation
Structure/agency is one of several related conceptual dichotomies in sociology, including macro/micro and society/individual. The structure/agency distinction is perhaps the most enduring division, and it led Alan Dawe (1971) to argue that there were in fact ‘two sociologies’, with contrasting subjects, research methods and standards of evidence. Even those who would not go quite that far see grappling with agency/structure as fundamental to the practice of doing sociology.
It may appear that those studying social structures would look at large-scale phenomena at the macro level, ignoring individual action, while those studying agency would focus only on individual actions at the micro level. This is not a bad rule of thumb, but there are structured interactions and relationships at the micro level that involve the study of individual actions, and, conversely, it is possible to argue that not only individuals but also collective entities such as trade unions, social movements and corporations can be said to ‘act’ and therefore to exercise creative agency in shaping social life. Thus, the structure/agency dichotomy does not map neatly onto the macro/micro distinction.
Social structures such as the class system, the family or the economy are built from social interactions, which endure and change over time. For instance, the class system has changed significantly as a result of generally rising income levels, competing forms of identity (such as gender and ethnicity) and the creation of new types of occupation and employment. However, there is still a class system into which people are born and which has a major effect on their life chances. Similarly, family life today is far more diverse than it was even fifty years ago, as societies have become multicultural, more married women enter the workplace and divorce rates have risen sharply, but all families continue to perform important functions such as socialization, which provides the necessary training for life in society. At a general level, then, social structures create order and organize the various spheres within society.
For some the concept of social structure can be hard to accept. At best, social structures are seen as heuristic concepts, constructive fictions created by sociologists to assist their studies, and, at worst, reifications, the illegitimate concretizing as ‘things’ of what are really fluid sets of social relationships. A key element of interactionism is the interpretation of situations which are influenced by others and involve a certain reflexivity. Hence, the kinds of fixed, organizing structures proposed by structural theorists are much more malleable, impermanent and open to change than is supposed. The relatively peaceful 1989 gentle or ‘velvet’ revolution in Czechoslovakia shows how quickly apparently solid social structures and institutions can crumble under the creative action of individual and collective agency.
The separation of the ‘two sociologies’ has been seen as a problem for the discipline, because studying structure without agency and agency without structure would seem to limit the sociological imagination to partial accounts of social reality. The solution would seem to be finding a productive way of combining agency/structure which keeps the best insights of both while moving beyond the dichotomy.
Critical Points
Marx offered one way of reframing the problem, arguing that it is indeed people who make history (agency), but that they do not do so under circumstances they have freely chosen (structure). Giddens’s (1984) structuration theory owes something to this idea. For Giddens, structure and agency imply each other. Structure is enabling, not just constraining, and makes creative action possible, but the repeated actions of many individuals work to reproduce and change the social structure. The focus of Giddens’s theory is social practices that are ‘ordered across space and time’, and it is through these that social structures are reproduced. However, Giddens sees ‘structure’ as the rules and resources that enable social practices to be reproduced over time, not as abstract, dominating, external forces. This ‘duality of structure’ is a way of rethinking the previous dichotomy.
Pierre Bourdieu’s theorizing is also explicitly aimed at bridging the structure–agency divide. Bourdieu uses the concept of practice to do this. People have embedded, internalized mental structures – their ‘habitus’ – enabling them to handle and understand the social world. Habitus is the product of a long period spent inhabiting the social world from a specific position (such as class location), and individual habitus therefore varies considerably. Like Giddens, Bourdieu sees many practices developing from this, but for Bourdieu practice always takes place within a ‘field’ – a sphere of life or realm of society such as the arts, the economy, politics, education, and so on. Fields are arenas for competitive struggle in which a variety of resources (types of capital) are used. So, in this model, structure and agency are again seen as intimately related, not opposed.
Continuing Relevance
It seems likely that issues of social structure and individual agency will continue to be debated in sociology. In recent theorizing aimed at overcoming this divide, it is noticeable that Giddens seems to work from an underlying agency perspective while Bourdieu’s theory remains closer to a structural position. Whether either has achieved a genuinely integrated theoretical perspective remains a matter of debate. In the future, what we may see are more empirical and historical studies that are able to throw light on the relative balance