Download Structuration Theory - Modernity and Social Theory - Lecture Notes and more Study notes Legal and Social Theory in PDF only on Docsity! Week 10 Giddens and Structuration theory. 1. This week continues the theme raised in the discussion of Habermas and Post- Modernism; has modernity run its course, are we living in ‘radically’ new times?. Whereas Habermas tried to assert the continuing relevance of the Enlightenment project of modernity and postmodernists have declared the end of modernity, a contemporary British sociologist, A. Giddens asserts that we are living in ‘high’ modernity which is different from but a continuity of modernity. As we shall see, this tendency to attempt to identify a ‘middle-way’ between opposing positions is typical of both Giddens’ social theory, his analysis of contemporary society and his political programme. 2. Thus, Giddens claims to have developed a distinctive form of sociological theory, structuration theory, that combines elements of two typically opposed theoretical traditions. These are the interpretivist approach that focuses on sociology as the study of voluntary action (Weber, Goffman, Schutz, Garfinkel etc) and the structuralist approach that focuses on sociology as the study of persisting patterns or structures of relationships that (seem to ) exist independently of the will of actors (Marx, Durkheim, Foucault, Bourdieu etc). 3. 'Structuration' refers to the claim that action and structure are not opposed but mutually dependant (re Parsons). The purpose of sociology is to show how structured settings (re Goffman's 'frames, Bourdieu’s ‘habitus?) both maintain and are maintained by particular sets of actions. However, it is important to note that Giddens rarely refers to action, preferring instead the term agency - "the continuous flow of conduct". The emphasis on "flow" indicates that agency is not to be equated with the activities of particular individuals but with the developing totality of activities over both time and space. What we call 'structure' is the "objectification", the institutionalisation, of past agency; again social reality is located in history (re Marx on the power of dead (past) labour; also Berger & Luckman on society as ‘objective reality’) 4. Giddens seems to be drawing significantly on the work of Schutz (phenonemenology), who argued that social action is, actually, interaction at one and the same time with Predecessors, Contemporaries and Successors. We 'inherit' a socially organised world from Predecessors which, together with our Contemporaries, we reproduce and modify and then hand on to our Successors as their received world ("Men make their own history but not in situations of their own choosing" - Marx). Therefore, social reality is a process; it is neither a fixed institutional structure nor a set of discrete actions but the ongoing interaction between these elements. Thus we are the agents of society; we act on its behalf, freely but within its constraints. We are not the puppets of the social structure nor is social reality whatever we wish it to be. 5. Therefore Giddens' synthesis achieves its goals insofar as it avoids a) prioritising either structure or action, b) the individualism of action theories (action is collective) and c) the determinism of structuralist theories (structure is negotiated and modified through agency). However, at one point, (I think it’s in ‘The Constitution of Society’) Giddens states that sociological research can be docsity.com
