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 of structure and agency in specific historical periods, particular societies and spheres of social life.
One example of this contextualized, empirical approach is Liao et al.’s (2019) study of gated communities and the active role of urban planners in China. In this large-scale survey of urban planners across China, the researchers found that a mix of structural factors influenced planners’ attitudes, but they were also active agents in the planning process. Most planners expressed views in favour of gated communities, in line with the policy of their local government employers, but most of those surveyed actually lived within middle-class gated communities. Structured class position and professional status were important factors in shaping planners’ attitudes. However, the negative aspects of gating were acknowledged, and urban planners were able to amend some of the schemes with this in mind. This study illustrates how the relative influence of structure and agency can be evaluated through careful empirical research.
References and Further Reading
Archer, M. (2003) Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Bourdieu, P. (1986) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).
Dawe, A. (1971) ‘The Two Sociologies’, British Journal of Sociology, 21(2): 207–18.
Elias, N. ([1939] 2000) The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell).
Giddens, A. (1984) The Constitution of Society (Cambridge: Polity).
Liao, K., Wehrhahn, W., and Breitung, W. (2019) ‘Urban Planners and the Production of Gated Communities in China: A Structure–Agency Approach’, Urban Studies, 56(13): 2635–53.
Parker, J. (2005) Structuration (Buckingham: Open University Press).
Swingewood, A. (2000) A Short History of Sociological Thought (3rd edn, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan), esp. chapter 9.
Van Krieken, R. (1998) Norbert Elias (London: Routledge), esp. chapter 3.
Wrong, D. (1961) ‘The Over-Socialized Conception of Man in Modern Sociology’, American Sociological Review, 26: 183–93.
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