The aim of this article is twofold: first, to present an accessible way of introducing students to the key generic terms of social science research. There is an obvious need for clarifying the gene...

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Introducing Students to the Generic Terminology of Social Research

1: Introduction 2: Comparing sport policies in economically developed countries 3: Political and historical context 4: The structure of sport and the role of the voluntary sector 5: Sport policy: Structures and values 6: High performance sport 7: Sport for all 8: Sport policies compared

Sport Policy: A comparative analysis of stability and change

Power and tourism policy relations in transition

This paper identifies the need to develop a conceptual approach that moves away from dichotomous thinking about pro-environmental behaviour by considering the meso level of reality, through which m...

Theorizing the meso level: the household as a crucible of pro-environmental behaviour

Agency has been central to modern conceptions of politics but it is a complicated and contested idea that seems to have fallen into both theoretical and historical crisis. I explore the underlying ideas that have grounded it, as well as some recent historical and theoretical challenges. I respond by advocating an ontological agnosticism regarding who or what exercises agency and suggest a spectrum of agentic capacities instead. Commending a phenomenological approach, I then suggest that agentic capacities emerge and interact across this spectrum. At one pole I envisage pre- personal, corporeal processes and at the other, a transpersonal, intersubjective interworld that requires a novel social ontology. I locate individual or collective agents in the middle of the spectrum where they emerge as contingent singularities. My aim here is to retain agency as a necessary ingredient of politics while eliminating the Cartesian presuppositions that have, for example, rendered the agency-structure debate irresolvable and supported a subjectivist account of agents that is no longer tenable. I show how all three dimensions of the spectrum have political significance and discuss examples to illustrate this.

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Rethinking Agency: A Phenomenological Approach to Embodiment and Agentic Capacities

It is appropriate that social scientists should develop explicit conceptualisations of agency, structure and social chance, these being three major dimensions of social and political life. The agency–structure debate, which refers to theoretical and ontological issues that tend not to be explicitly discussed by political scientists, is an important interdisciplinary starting point for conceptual and empirical work involving collaboration between political scientists and sociologists. Following a theoretical review of agency, structure and chance, it is argued that empirical research concerned with the study of politics and policy – indeed, social scientific research on any topic – should employ an ontology and methodology that focuses on the dynamics of interaction between agency, structure and social chance.

Agency, Structure, and Social Chance as Cross-Disciplinary Concepts

The purpose of this paper is to describe an integrated (meta) theoretical framework that I call anti-reductionist sociology: this entails a focus on agency, structure (the `conditions-of-action'), ...

Roger Sibeon

Papers

Agency, Structure, and Social Chance as Cross-Disciplinary Concepts

Anti-Reductionist Sociology: