"Structure" is one of the most important, elusive, and undertheorized concepts in the social sciences. Setting out from a critique and reformulation of Anthony Giddens's notion of the duality of structure and Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus, this article attempts to develop a theory of structure that restores human agency to social actors, builds the possibility of change into the concept of structure, and overcomes the divide between semiotic and materialist visions of structure. "Structure" is one of the most important and most elusive terms in the vocabulary of current social science. The concept is central not only in such eponymous schools as structural functionalism, structuralism, and poststructuralism, but in virtually all tendencies of social scientific thought. But if social scientists find it impossible to do without the term "structure," we also find it nearly impossible to define it adequately. Many of us have surely had the experience of being asked by a "naive" student what we mean by structure, and then finding it embarrassingly difficult to define the term without using the word "structure" or one of its variants in its own definition. Sometimes we find what seems to be an acceptable synonym-for example, "pattern"-but all such synonyms lack the original's rhetorical force. When it comes to indicating

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2781191.pdf

A Theory of Structure: Duality, Agency, and Transformation

This paper develops a critique of a number of highly influential theoretical interventions in contemporary organizational analysis that have collapsed structure into agency. It suggests that these approaches, which draw, in various ways, on the 'postmodern turn' in organizational analysis, have seriously weakened the explanatory power and political imagination of the latter. In direct contrast to theoretical approaches based on flat or compacted social onto logies, the paper supports a critical realist position as providing a layered or stratified social ontology on which a more structurally robust and inclusive explanations of organizational phenomena can be constructed. By adopting a realist ontology and methodology, organizational analysis will be much better placed to understand and explain the interplay between structure and agency, and its 'fateful' consequences for social actors.

In praise of duality and dualism: rethinking agency and structure in organisational analysis

This paper underlines the importance of the distinction between `social' and `system' integration (agency and structure) introduced by David Lockwood in 1964. Its four sections (i) examine the original difficulty of maintaining any distinction between the `parts' of society and its `people' against the social ontology of Individualism whose proponents argued that the former must always be reduced to the latter as individuals were the ultimate constituents of society, (ii) shows how collectivist opposition held `systemic factors' to be indispensable in sociological explanations, but could not substantiate their ontological status against the charge of reification whilst empiricism held sway, (iii) explores how once the individualist/collectivist debate was superseded, Lockwood's distinction was redefined in structuration theory, where insistence on treating structure and agency as mutually constitutive effectively denied their independent variation and thus reduced the `social' and the `systemic' to differ...

Social Integration and System Integration: Developing the Distinction:

The debate as to the effects of globalization on organizational forms and management practices is well known. Our paper focuses on two institutionalist traditions in organization theory which make a significant contribution to this discussion: new institutionalism and the business-systems approach. Both emphasize the adaptation of organizations to their institutional environments but come to very different conclusions as to the global standardization of organizational forms and management practices. Our paper aims to move them beyond the convergence-divergence dichotomy to account for signs of both global standardization and continued persistence of national differences. We do so by systematically comparing the two traditions, suggesting how they can be cross-fertilized and developing an agenda for future empirical research. We also highlight that they cannot learn from each other on the issue of agency and point to structuration theory as a way in which they can integrate agency into their accounts of the global standardization debate.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/joms_644.pdf?abstractid=955568&mirid=2

Global Standardization of Organizational Forms and Management Practices? What New Institutionalism and the Business‐Systems Approach Can Learn from Each Other*

John B. Thompson

Papers

Social theory of modern societies: The theory of structuration