Giddens (b. 1938) grew up in a lower-middle-class suburb of London, and attended Hull University as an undergraduate in sociology. His rising prominence was marked in 1970 by a move to Cambridge and visiting positions in North America. He was the director of the London School of Economics and maintained an active public life beyond the academy. He is the cofounder of Polity Press and helped promote the “third way” in politics aimed at transcending traditional political divisions of left and right. In 2004, he was given a life peerage, and as Lord Giddens he has a direct voice in politics.
Giddens’s early work involved outlining a theoretical and methodological understanding of the field of sociology based on a critical rereading of the classics. The major works here are Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971) and New Rules of Sociological Method (1976), excerpted in the following text. The second stage in his work was devoted to articulating his own theory of “structuration.” His most well-known books on this are Central Problems in Social Theory (1979) and The Constitution of Society (1984). His most recent work concerns modernity and politics. Giddens has examined the impact of modernity on social and personal life (The Consequences of Modernity [1990], Modernity and Self-Identity [1991], and The Transformation of Intimacy [1992]) and politics (Beyond Left and Right [1994] and The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy [1998]).
Giddens’s first book, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory, re-examined the works of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber to wrestle the field away from the dominance of Parsonian functionalism. He argues that the main focus of sociology should be “the study of social institutions brought into being by the industrial transformations of the past two or three centuries” (1987) with an emphasis on power, modernity, and institution. He starts to provide a set of conceptual tools for doing this work in New Rules of Sociological Method, contrasting the collective realities of “structures” with the interpretive (or “hermeneutic”) tradition’s core focus on understanding agency and motives of individuals.
Giddens rejected the idea that society is an autonomous collective reality, but does not entirely accept the hermeneutic tradition either; he particularly disagrees with the emphasis on the individual as the central unit of analysis. Rather, Giddens uses the hermeneutic tradition as a basis to argue for the importance of agency in sociological theory. Giddens claims that human actors are always to some degree knowledgeable about what they are doing. Social order is therefore a “skilled accomplishment” rather than an automatic response to functional needs or structural context. Since actors are knowledgeable, sociologists have to interpret a social world that is already interpreted by the actors that inhabit it. Giddens calls this two-tiered interpretive task the “double hermeneutic.” An added difficulty is that once sociological concepts are formed, they often filter back into the everyday world and change the way people think.
Giddens spells out the implications of this point of view in his later work on “structuration,” where the connection between structure and action is the central concern; summed up by his phrase “duality of structure.” His point is that although action and structure are usually seen as opposing concepts, they are actually two sides of the same coin and cannot be analyzed separately. On the one side, agency is given meaningful form only through the “generative schemes” of structure. On the other side, we can say that structures are maintained and transformed only through action. As agents, we are at least partly reflexive – that is, we monitor our actions and orient them to the behavior of others. But, much of the time we are engaged in routine practices, and we are not guided by conscious, rational motive. In such cases, we are guided by what Giddens calls “practical consciousness.” This means that reflexive monitoring of action is a “background” task that we habitually rely upon. It is only when we are doing something non-routine that we are called upon to supply a motive. In either case, Giddens argues, we simply cannot act in any meaningful way without drawing upon collective interpretive schemes.
This brings us to the notion of structure. Many sociologists tend to conflate two meanings when they use the word structure. Giddens distinguishes between “structure” and “system” to separate these meanings. By “system,” Giddens means the stable patterns that give some order to interactions. Systems exist in “time and space,” meaning that we can actually observe them in particular locations and times. Giddens defines “structure” as the “rules and resources” that act as common interpretive schemes in a particular social system and that structures are related to practices in roughly the same way that language is related to speech. Structures organize practices, but at the same time, structures are enacted and reproduced by practices. Although we experience structures as forces external to us, they have only a “virtual” existence; they cannot be directly observed except through their effects on practices. This notion of structure is important because it emphasizes that structures are not just constraining, they are also enabling. Most sociological traditions deal with structural constraints by showing how they limit possible courses of action. Structures do act as constraints, but Giddens points out that as generative rules, they also enable action by providing common frames of meaning. Structures provide the rules that allow new actions to occur. Again, language provides a good example. A language has rules of syntax that rule out certain combinations of words. But in so doing, the rules enable us to create new, meaningful sentences.
Summary and Conclusion
The theoretical tension between structure and agency runs deep through the discipline, though in many respects sociologists have a penchant for emphasizing structure over action (an old joke notes that economics is a field devoted to how people make choices, while sociology is a field devoted to showing how you have no choices). While much contemporary work, particularly that on inequality (see Part VII), tends to emphasize stability and historical determinants, the work mentioned in the earlier text clarifies that any historical or situational feature of social life is simultaneously a resource that actors can draw on for action. Many times, these actions are inconsequential and in line with structural expectations (definitionally), but sometimes they cascade into radical shifts in society (Arendt, 1958). This dual nature of structures as constraints on and resources for action opens new research opportunities away from documenting structural differences and toward identifying structural opportunities for action.
Action models based on deliberate purposive action are well developed in economics and political science, which have traditionally been more comfortable with the individualistic nature of decision-making often implied in these models (voting, after all, is done privately in booth alone). Sociologists have taken the action challenge here to be largely at the point of social interaction – that action becomes interesting (and social-consequential) when connected to others. The work of Coleman and White on networks and the work of Hechter on multi-person games are the first pass on this work. The clear advantage of this approach is tractability – by simplifying individual action, researchers gain a degree of freedom for building complex models of interaction. What is less well developed thus far (but see Mohr 2000 and cites therein) is a way to build substantive models of linked preferences and subjective understanding into purposive-action models of social interaction. This was, in part, the ultimate goal of White’s (1992) final project in Identity and Control, though the translation of that work to practical empirical investigation is challenging.
At the same time, it should be noted that critics of rational-choice perspectives are many. First, some argue that the basic behavioral assumptions of rational-choice theory are simply incorrect – people do not optimize for their own self-interest, but instead act habitually, normatively, or irrationally. While some rational-choice theorists respond by changing what is being maximized (a seemingly irrational act – such as throwing oneself on a grenade – is made rational by referencing one’s perceived reputation as a dead hero), such maneuvers quickly lead to tautology. Second, critics point out that the complex interdependencies implicit in interaction make predicting future outcomes impossible. As such, simple rational-choice models that depend on people making judgments about future returns are unrealistic. Eric Leifer (1988), for example, argues that so long as the meaning of a social event is not determined until it is long past, actors cannot base action