Showing papers on "Structure and agency published in 1990"

Structure and Agency in Land and Property Development Processes : Some Ideas for Research

Abstract: This paper reviews existing approaches to, and research on, land and property development processes. It is argued that while these approaches-institutional analysis, neo-classical location theory and land economics, and Marxist economics-provide useful directions for understanding the development process, they lack the capability to address a fundamental dimension of our understanding of development processes. This is the relation between the way actors behave in deploying resources to realise specific investments, with which much of the real estate literature is concerned, and the broader processes which drive the strategies and interests of the various actors involved. The paper proposes an approach which combines an understanding of structure and agency, focusing on the resources, rules and ideology which actors acknowledge, as a way forward to a richer understanding of land and property development processes. The paper concludes with some key research questions which follow from this perspective.

Locality, Structure, and Agency: A Theoretical Analysis

Abstract: This contribution is a theoretical analysis of the concept of "locality." The argument proceeds in three stages. In the first part attention is paid to the concept of "community," which is often, erroneously, used as a synonym for locality. It is proposed that community has a particular history as a concept and meaning in everyday life which differentiates it in key ways from locality. Second, there is a discussion of the concept of "nation" that, clearly, operates at a supralocal level but contains important dimensions of social power that have implications for our understanding of the nature of locality too. Finally, using a realist epistemology, an attempt is made to derive the concept of "locality" from a consideration of the theoretical relations that the "national" and the "local" imply for each other in modem society. It is concluded that locality does have conceptual status in social science and that it is to be distinguished, in particular, from community by the active, interventionary capacity that it affords to citizens pursuing diverse social projects.

Accounting for Racial Inequality in Southern Education: A Reply to Ramirez.

Abstract: It is not unusual for different sociological theories to give different explanations for observed patterns in the data. The relative merits of different theories can be adjudicated on the basis of data analyses only if the theories make opposing claims. It appears to us that Professor Ramirez's major quarrel with our study is with our theoretical perspective; he finds no serious problem with the basic analyses nor with the empirical relationships that we can identify. The difficulty with this theoretical disagreement, however, is that the results of our study are consistent with both the theoretical claims that we proposed and with those that Professor Ramirez prefers. Thus, our defense in the following response for the theory that we prefer is based upon the theory's logical consistency and a look, once again, at the history of the early twentieth-century South. The basic difference between our perspective and Professor Ramirez's is that we propose a theory that links social structure and human agency. Professor Ramirez appears to prefer a more structural account with less consideration of the role of individual actors that shape and are shaped by key institutions. More specifically, Professor Ramirez takes issue with our work because in attempting to link agency and structure, we argue that class matters. He is bothered by the fact that we take class interests seriously as determinants of decisions conceming public school policies and that we believe that class position constrained the choices of individuals to send their children to school or not. Moreover, he is upset, it appears, because we assert that it is difficult to disentangle the effects of race and class in the early twentieth-century South and he suggests that we are silent on the effects of race. To argue that the class relations of plantation agriculture were the most important determinant of the restriction of educational opportunities in the South is not to claim that race did not matter or had no theoretical importance. Racial slavery was a class relation although racial criteria were used to impose and defend it. (Thompson [1975] called the plantation a "race-making situation.") Abolishing slavery made it impossible for the equation between race and class to be drawn as clearly and efficiently as it was in the antebellum South, but the abolition of slavery did not completely destroy the close connection between the two. Racial criteria were used to disfranchise blacks and to ensure their economic, political, and social subordination. The institutionalization of racial bias within state institutions, which we term "the racial state," made it state business to enforce racial privilege for whites and racial disadvantage for blacks. It is no longer controversial to claim that whites did not benefit equally from racial discrimination. We argue that plantation owners had a greater stake in black disfranchisement and racial segregation than did other whites. Labor-intensive agriculture based upon coercive labor control mechanisms is more stable if the state protects the authority of planters to exercise that control (James 1988; Paige 1975). The racial state of the early twentieth-century South did just that. It created a politically impotent and docile class of black workers who had little choice but to adapt to work routines imposed on them by planters. White sharecroppers had greater capacities to defend their interests, but the great supply of black sharecroppers diminished the power of white sharecroppers to bargain with'planters. To claim, as we do, that racial discrimination had an economic basis in elite southerners' need for a captive pool of low-wage labor and that elites found racism to be one useful strategy to ensure that that pool of labor was available and reproduced over time is not to deny the importance of race. It is, in fact, to emphasize the Address all correspondence to Dr. Pamela Bamhouse Walters, Department of Sociology, Indiana University, Ballantine Hall, Bloomington, IN 474040.