Showing papers on "Structure and agency published in 1993"

Code and Habitus: comparing the accounts of Bernstein and Bourdieu

Abstract: This paper compares Bourdieu's notion of habitus with Bernstein's concept of code in an attempt to show how the apparent similarities mask more deeply seated differences in the way the concepts are conceived and used. We argue that Bernstein is following an essentially structuralist agenda of the kind that Bourdieu has set himself against. To this end, Bourdieu seeks to overcome the rigidities of ‘rules’ (which lie at the heart of the idea of Bernstein's code), with the more flexible notion of ‘strategy’ which incorporates the idea that structure and agency are implicit in each other rather than being dichotomous entities.

Code and Habitus: comparing the accounts of Bernstein and

Abstract: This paper compares Bourdieu's notion of habitus with Bernstein's concept of code in an attempt to show how the apparent similarities mask more deeply seated differences in the way the concepts are conceived and used. We argue that Bernstein is following an essentially structuralist agenda of the kind that Bourdieu has set himself against. To this end, Bourdieu seeks to overcome the rigidities of 'rules' (which lie at the heart of the idea of Bernstein's code), with the more flexible notion of 'strategy' which incorporates the idea that structure and agency are implicit in each other rather than being dichotomous entities.

Human agency and human geography revisited: a critique of new models' of the self

Abstract: In this paper, I argue that 'new models' of human geography have produced a one-sided account of society and space; and that this is because of their conceptual splitting of 'the social' into structure and agency. The essay begins with a discussion of the search for the self conducted by humanistic geographers, then describes the marginalization of this search in the early 1980s and the subsequent development of humanistic and historical materialist geography. I show that each has developed its own variant of the same understanding of the relationship between structure and agency. I suggest that it is inconceivable that the self can be understood, and therefore that a truly human geography can be imagined, without drawing on the insights of psychoanalysis because it offers a theory of the self which neither denies, nor relies on, a structure-agency dichotomy. Finally, I demonstrate psychoanalysis's deeper understanding of the self by returning to themes already raised by geographers, but concentrating on two aspects of the (fragmented) self: the 'unknowing' subject, and subject formation.

Masculinity and Women Teachers at Christian Brothers College

Abstract: In this paper I attempt to fill partially a gap identified by Mills (1988) who claims that, despite the emergence of a strong body of literature on organizational culture, gender has remained 'at best' a marginal theme in this literature. Draw ing upon notions of agency and structure, I report a case study of aspects of the construction of masculine subjectivities in a Catholic boys' school, and of the encounter of women teachers with its organizational culture. Such a focus is particularly revealing of the institution's gender regime. I examine gender as an aspect of background rules and hegemonic culture as they are mediated within the institutional context of the school. Finally, I consider the responses of the women to their encounter with the institution in terms of feminist possibilities for organizational reform.

Globalization And Sport, Structure And Agency: The Need For Greater Clarity

Abstract: Globalization is most simply understood as the internationalization of the market economy. The argument that has been advanced in various fields of academia asserts that as the marketplace becomes more technologically and industrially developed, the actions of those who operate within this marketplace become undifferentiated. Uniqueness is abandoned in favour of the rationalized world, in which the relentness drive to maximize production in the most efficient manner reigns supreme. In this paper we wish to continue the debate that has been put forward concerning globalization and latterly, globalization and sport. We attempt to tie together diverse and often contradictory interpretations concerning globalization in sport. While cognizant of the power that a global marketplace has upon culture, we argue that it is not only the structural global properties or characteristics that help define the sports experience. Equally important, are the local and particular meanings that are attached to the glo...

Power, agency and structure: An examination of Steven Lukes

Abstract: (1993). Power, agency and structure: An examination of Steven Lukes. New Political Science: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 31-46.

Mapping the Social: Notes from Jacob Keefer's Educational Tours, 1845

Abstract: Guided by Abrams's methodological program for sociology, this article places a fragmentary historical text in its social, political and personal contexts. The article locates a seemingly trivial event at the intersection of a set of historical "contingencies," a process which enables one to attribute a wider meaning to it.A l'exemple du modele methodologique pour la sociologie de Abrams, cet article replace un texte historique a l'etat fragmentaire dans son propre contexte social et politique. Cet article situe un evenement insignifiant en apparence, a l'intersection d'un ensemble d'eventualites historiques, permettant, par ce procede, d'en elargir la signification.From Oct. 14 - 24 and again from Nov. 25 to Dec. 5, 1845, Jacob Keefer of Thorold toured parts of the Niagara District of Canada West in his capacity as District Superintendent of Education. To aid himself in drawing up the annual report required by the Common School Act of 1843, he kept brief notes in a small notebook, of which some 37 pages have survived.(f.1)Keefer's notebook seems innocuous at first glance, a haphazard collection of scribbled indications of schools visited or missed, people seen and places passed by, accompanied with one - or two - word evaluations of teachers and their schools. Government archives, local history libraries, and private manuscript collections contain innumerable such fragments: travel notes, diaries, exercise books and so forth, kept by people in the most diverse social circumstances and from the most diverse motives. However, historical sociologists often draw upon such texts for the illumination of social processes. Following a brief review of Philip Abrams's methodological program for historical sociology, this article examines Jacob Keefer's tour notes as the representation of a political event and process.In an insightful analysis of the common project of history and sociology completed just before his death, Philip Abrams points to social development as a process of "structuring," the logic of which contains a dialectic of human agency and social structure. Since Marx at least, Abrams observes, sociologists have been reminding one another that people are made by society, as much as society is made by people. Yet many of us have remained trapped within seemingly antithetical sociologies of action and structure. Abrams insists on the necessity of a sociology that moves beyond this false dichotomy to understand human existence as process in time. "Society must be understood," he argues "as a process constructed historically by individuals who are constructed historically from society."(f.2) In Historical Sociology, Abrams attempts to articulate a concrete methodological program for historical sociology.Abrams points to historical development as a product of structured human agency. People both individually and as members of social groups and collectivities make history. But our making of history is itself formed and informed not only by the social conditions we inherit from the past, but also by the prior formation of our own identities and capacities, which are shaped both by broad social structural forces and by "contingencies," intelligible accidents over which we have more or less control. "Generational" and "biographical contingencies" involve such things as the social conditions under which we come of age; the order of our birth and the condition of the household economy in which we find ourselves; the idioms, discourses or social ideologies available for us to make sense of our situation, as well as accidental forces. The particular modalities through which large - scale social forces impinge upon our individual and group biographies create a structure of such contingencies, forces which are neither entirely random nor the simple product of supra - human structures.In Abrams's analysis, historical events are to be understood as particular configurations in an incessant dialectic of agency and structure. …

Structural Inquiry, Human Agency and the Contribution of Harre and Bhaskar: A Case Study of Wright's “Classes”

Abstract: This paper examines the contribution of aspects of critical and referential realism to the “logic” of structural explanation through an analysis of Erik Olin Wright’s Classes and the debate surrounding this work. Wright’s Classes has been selected as a case study because it offers an opportunity to examine issues pertaining to “objective” and “subjective” determinations of class and related questions of agency and structure at the level of actual methodological strategies. A close examination of the structure of Wright’s inquiry reveals a number of places where Harre’s and Bhaskar’s approaches may contribute to the prescription of methodological strategies which could overcome some of the antinomies on which the debate on Classes is based. As a case study, the paper underlines the important “underlabourer” role of critical and referential realism and their contribution to questions of agency and structure in the context of actual stages involved in structural explanation