Showing papers on "Structure and agency published in 1994"

Understanding social theory

Abstract: A Map of the Terrain PART ONE: THE VIEW FROM ON HIGH The Legacy of Talcott Parsons Varieties of Marxism PART TWO: WHERE THE ACTION IS Meanings, Situations and Experience Perceiving and Accomplishing PART THREE: BREAKING FREE AND BURNING BRIDGES Foucault and the Postmodern Turn Beyond Micro and Macro: Abandoning False Problems Gidden's Structuration Theory PART FOUR: ONLY CONNECT: FORGING LINKS Linking Agency and Structure and Macro and Micro Habermas's Lifeworld and System Varieties of Dualism New Directions: The Theory of Social Domains

From role-playing to role-using: Understanding role as resource.

Abstract: Any attempt to conceptualize social structure must ultimately confront the dilemma posed by the problem of agency. The emerging consensus among sociologists is that society consists of both powerful, determining structures and actors that possess a degree of efficacy, freedom, and creative independence. This paper is an attempt to aid in developing an approach to role theory that is more versatile and more capable of addressing the agency-structure duality. First, a definition of role as a «cultural object» is proposed. This new conceptualization views roles as resources in the production of both agency and structure. Second, two dimensions of role variance are introduced: role type and role use

Towards a New Theory of Organizations

Abstract: This collection was inspired by the idea of reassessing the importance of David Silverman's "Theory of Organizations". The 12 essays contained here explore, in varied ways, the impact and current status of Silverman's ideas and how they relate to future directions in organization theory. The volume opens with a chapter by Silverman himself. Subsequent chapters investigate key issues in the study of organizations, including structure and agency, the politics of organization theory and the meanings of post-positivist organizational analysis. Contemporary debates on postmodernism, the emotions, gender and structuration are discussed in the context of the development of organizational theory in the last 25 years. Providing insights into the continuities within orgnizational theory and provoking thought about future directions, this volume should be of interest to advanced undergraduates and academics in the sociology of organizations, organizational behaviour, management, industrial relations and social theory. The editors' other works include: "Sociology and Organisation Theory" Hassard (CUP, 1993); and "Postmodernism and Organisation".

Two stories about structure and agency

Abstract: So stark and swift was the collapse of the Cold War structure of international relations that few yet pretend to have been expecting it. The magnitude of the changes involved has forced practitioners and theorists alike into radical rethinking. For practitioners, the old certainties have gone and it is unclear what political and security structures will replace those of the Cold War: whether it will be a New World Order or a New World Disorder is still very much open to debate. But for international relations theorists the events have focused attention on the nature of international political structures. What kind of structures can international systems represent if they can be changed so fundamentally and so easily? Neo-realists especially have to rethink a dominant discourse which relies heavily on established regularities and on the stability of the bipolar system. What does it say for Waltz's conception of international structure if it can be so easily transcended by unit factors? If structural theories of international relations can say nothing about an event as momentous as the collapse of the Cold War system, what can they say anything about? Neo-realists could ignore the fact that their theories could not account for transformations of international structure precisely because these theories did explain the regularity and stability of bipolarity. Now that is gone, theorists have to look again at what they mean by a structure. Moreover, the nature of agency has to be reexamined; for neo-realists human agency was essentially irrelevant at the structural level of explanation, yet the collapse of the Cold War system seemed to depend very largely on active and calculating agents. Questions concerning the nature of agency and the meaning of structure and the relationship between them are now more relevant than ever in international relations theory.

Media Effects and Beyond: Culture, Socialization and Lifestyles

Abstract: List of figures and tables Acknowledgements Notes on contributors Part I: Introduction 1. Culture, media and society: Agency and structure, stability and change 2. Swenden and her media scene, 1945-90: A bird's-eye view 3. The Media Panel Program and related research Part II: Media use: Differentiation, change and stability 4. Media use under structural change 5. Looking for patterns in lifesyle behaviors 6. Models of change and stability in adolescents' media use Part III: Young perople and medial use: Individual, class and socialization 7. For better and for worse: Effect studies and beyond 8. Self-evaluation in an ecological perspective: Neighbourhood, family and peers, schooling and media use 9. Media and social mobility Part IV: Lifestyle and family communication 11. Seven lifestyles 12. Late modernity, consumer culture and lifestyles: Toward a cognitive-affective theory In conclusion Starting up

Legal theory and social theory

Abstract: While social theory and legal theory were once closely intertwined, contemporary American sociology pays scant attention to recent developments in legal theory. But the problems that legal theory currently wrestles with are very similar to those with which sociology is now centrally concerned. This essay reviews major schools of thought in contemporary legal theory to introduce sociologists to some potentially useful literatures on the meaning of rationality; on critical theory; on the importance of gender, race, and class in understanding social institutions; on the interpretive turn; on the relationship between structure and agency; and on the revival of pragmatism.

Structure, Agency and Social Transformation

Abstract: Revisiting the structure/agency debate, the article puts forward the broad position shared by Giddens’structuration theory and Bhaskar's transformational model. It defends Giddens’concept of structure as‘rules and resources’against charges of idealism, arguing that its strength is its focus on the interface of structure and agency. But both Giddens and Bhaskar emphasise social reproduction as an unintended consequence of social action. Taking issue with postmodern pessimism, the article goes on to consider the conditions of possibility, and requisite forms of knowledgeability, for deliberate social transformation.

Enacting inequality: Structure, agency, and gender

Abstract: Explanations for the obstacles to progress toward equality for women fall into two broad categories: (1) constraints on women are enforced by male power; (2) women are limited by their own outlook. This male power/female psychology polarity is a version of the debate over structure and agency. Reference to women's condition can illuminate this debate, which has largely been conducted in terms of ‘objective’ evidence. Evidence on subjective experience of constraint and action is provided by literature; creative writers have revealingly explored the interplay between structure and agency. A social enactment approach explores how social actors are both constrained by and can alter social structure. The enactment approach asks how constraints binding women are reinforced by structures reproduced through women's compliance and explores the scope for change, the ways in which new understanding can empower women.

Issues in the cultural analysis of organisations.

Abstract: The focus of the research is a cultural analysis of continuity and change at a heavy engineering plant of a multinational manufacturing corporation from the mid 1960's to the early 1990's. Substantively, the dissertation offers some views on the diffusion and institutionalisation of models of organisation, of managing, and of progress by exploring the genesis and impact of a particular model of organisation-making and cultural change (that of total quality) in the case-study plant. The fate of this managerial reform is explained with the help of historical and ethnographic data and by constructing an institutional model of the plant's symbolic environment. It is argued that a more complex mapping of culture and cultural change is required than is currently portrayed in the literature so that the relationship between cultural and organisational boundaries becomes part of the research problem rather than an (often implicit) input to the research design. Concerns about how to model and represent the plant and about which data and voices are to be considered valid constitute the main methodological debates. The dissertation aims to offer some methodological contribution to cultural analysis by providing accounts of three cycles of research activity. It is proposed that movement between these perspectives and their multi-method research practices is a way of juxtaposing micro and macro interpretations of organisation life and acknowledging issues of structure and agency.

The feminist message as a threatening experience: The story of a Russian urban intellectual woman*

Abstract: The questions of history, structure and agency are discussed on the basis of the life story of a Russian urban intellectual woman from the 1960s to the 1990s. It is argued that individual choices at certain junctures of life and history have a crucial significance in constructing the individual perspective of the agent in her society and culture. These perspectives then serve as structures determining the agent's practices, and at the same time as filters of the mind for the flows of experience to which the agent is exposed. These filters play an important part in maintaining the person's ontological security, sifting out the meanings that are irrelevant for one's individual habitus.