and sometimes appears more useful to political and social movements than to scientific sociology. Demonstrating how relatively powerful social groups are able to shape and dominate political debates is a useful function, but constructionism very often seems to take the side of the underdog. In that sense it has been argued that the perspective is politically biased. For example, women’s movements used constructionist arguments to show that there was no ‘natural place’ for women in the private, domestic sphere, and that child-bearing and child-rearing did not present ‘natural’ barriers to gender equality. The criticism here is not that such arguments are illegitimate, but that constructionism is closer to political strategy than scientific research methods.
Given that all social phenomena are potentially amenable to a social constructionist analysis, it perhaps inevitable that social constructionism was itself seen as socially constructed – hence, Motyl’s (2010) caustic discussion and dismissal of strong versions of constructionism. This paper is concerned with nationalism and identity-formation but should be read for its separation of mainstream social constructionism, which the author sees as quite ‘run-of-the-mill’, and strong constructionism, which is ‘unusual, exciting and wrong’.
Continuing Relevance
Social constructionism has been enormously successful in sociology and probably plays a part in the majority of research studies today. There is no doubt that it has produced many insights into social life. Social constructionism points to the inexorably social nature of all known phenomena, which puts human societies at the heart of the analysis, giving sociologists a central place. It can be extremely valuable as it lays bare processes of social construction and thus facilitates a better informed and wider public debate about major issues rather than leaving these to ‘experts’.
One particularly contentious issue, both historically and in contemporary societies, is that of migration and attitudes towards migrants and refugees. In our globalizing age, migration has become significant in political, economic and cultural debates in many countries. Flores and Schachter (2018) explored the specific issue of illegal immigration into the USA, asking the question ‘who are the illegals?’ It may appear that this question is irrelevant, as legality and illegality are matters of law, and definitions of who counts as ‘illegal’ are therefore fixed. However, this piece of survey research looked into perceptions of illegality among 1,515 non-Hispanic, white American adults. The authors found that social class, national origin and criminal background were key factors in the creation of shared stereotypes and a form of ‘social illegality’ that influences the decisions of employers, teachers, landlords and members of the public. In short, ‘illegality’ in society is not merely that defined in law but is powerfully socially constructed, with serious consequences for ethnic-based inequality.
References and Further Reading
Flores, R. D., and Schlachter, A. (2018) ‘Who Are the “Illegals”? The Social Construction of Illegality in the United States’, American Sociological Review, 83(5): 839–68.
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
