Showing papers on "Structure and agency published in 1995"

Theorising class, health and lifestyles: can Bourdieu help us?

Abstract: What is the relationship between class, health and life-styles, and to what extent does health-related knowledge influence subsequent behaviour? These issues have been a source of considerable debate for medical sociologists and others concerned with promoting ‘healthier’ life-styles over the years. Yet despite a wealth of empirical material, there has been little attempt to theorise this relationship between class, health and lifestyles and the associated issues of structure and agency, accounts and action it raises. This paper attempts to rectify this lacuna through a critical discussion of the work of Pierre Bourdieu, and its relevance to the class, health and life-styles debate. In particular, attention is paid to Bourdieu's analysis of the logic of practice, his concepts of habitus and bodily hexis, and the search for social distinction in the construction of (health-related) life-styles. The paper concludes with a critical commentary on these issues and the relative merits of Bourdieu's analysis for the sociology of health and illness. It is argued that despite certain limitations regarding issues of agency and ‘choice’, Bourdieu's analysis does indeed shed important light on the health and lifestyles debate, and that further bridge-building exercises of this nature between mainstream theory and the sociology of health and illness are both necessary and fruitful.

‘They Employ Cleaners to Do that’: habitus in the primary classroom

Abstract: Pierre Bourdieu suggests that his concept of habitus should be seen as a method; a way of thinking about the social world which invites an understanding of everyday practices as constitutive of social differences. The appeal of habitus lies in its ability to uncover social inequalities in a way that keeps agency and structure simultaneously in focus. However, there are also problems in operationalising habitus, chiefly because of the indeterminacy of the concept. In order to overcome these difficulties I have outlined four key components of habitus and attempted to delineate the aspects of habitus as method that seem most relevant to primary classrooms. Finally, drawing on ethnographic data gathered over 15 months of participant observation in two primary classrooms, the article seeks to explore through the lens of habitus how differences of gender, ‘race’ and class are produced by children in primary classrooms. Although I make no claims for my own empirical work it does suggest that habitus as ...

Literacy, Emotion and Authority: Reading and Writing on a Polynesian Atoll

Abstract: Literacy continues to be a central issue in anthropology, but methods of perceiving and examining it have changed in recent years. In this 1995 study Niko Besnier analyses the transformation of Nukulaelae from a non-literate into a literate society using a contemporary perspective which emphasizes literacy as a social practice embedded in a socio-cultural context. He shows how a small and isolated Polynesian community, with no access to print technology, can become deeply steeped in literacy in little more than a century, and how literacy can take on radically divergent forms depending on the social and cultural needs and characteristics of the society in which it develops. His case study, which has implications for understanding literacy in other societies, illuminates the relationship between norm and practice, between structure and agency, and between group and individual.

Power, Trust, and Meaning: Essays in Sociological Theory and Analysis

Abstract: This collection of 12 theoretical essays explore the bases of human action and society, and trace the major developments of contemporary sociological theory and analysis. Examining themes of trust and solidarity among immigrants, youth groups and generations, in the forms of friendship, kinship, and patron-client relationships, Eisenstadt explores larger questions of social structure and agency, conflict and change, and the reconstitution of the social order. He looks also at political and religious systems, paying attention to historical empires and the major civilizations. United by what they reveal about three major dimensions of social life - power, trust and meaning - these essays offer a perspective on the relations between culture and social structure.

Resistance to Schooling and Educational Outcomes: questions of structure and agency

Abstract: Resistance theory approaches questions of structure and agency as a divide. Resistance crosses boundaries of class, race and gender, but does not point to actions likely to lead to change in present social relations. There is a need to move beyond limited resistance perspectives to focus on individuals and groups as creative agents able to effect change in social structures. A more dynamic theory of individual, social and cultural change is needed to enable an understanding of how educational settings–including curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment practices–can help bring about just social outcomes for all students. This article draws, in particular, on the work of Willis, Walker, Giddens, and Bernstein to address questions of agency and structure in accounting for educational and social change.

A Trojan Horse at the Tate: Theorizing the Museum as Agency and Structure

Abstract: It is argued that sociology lacks an adequate conceptualization of the museum/society relationship. It is further argued (1) that the museum is an agency of classification; (2) that it is a relationship of cultural interdependence and (3) that museums have an internal relationship to modernization. The institution of the museum is shown to arise out of the indeterminacies of modernization. A dispute in the early history of London's Tate Gallery is explored as it illuminates that institution's organization of the contradictions of modernization. Pace Bourdieu and Elias, a key contradiction is seen to arise from a differentiation of the field of power and the cultural field. It is argued, against essentialist accounts of museums, that the Tate produced its point of view through the medium of this contradiction.

Practical Sociology: Post-empiricism and the Reconstruction of Theory and Application

Abstract: Preface. 1. Introduction: Theory, Metatheory and Discourse. 2. Concept Formation: Contest and Reconstruction. 3. The Constitution of Society: Agency and Structure. 4. Values in Social Science: Decisions, Justifications and Communities. 5. Models of Applied Social Science: Engineering, Enlightenment, Interaction and Dialogue. 6. Conclusion: Impossible and Possible Sociology. Notes. References. Index.

Agency, structure, and jewish survival of the holocaust:

Abstract: In this article I use a life history of two brothers who survived the Holocaust to bring survivor research into the mainstream of sociological inquiry and to explore one of the central problems of general social theory: the relationship between human agency and social structure. A theory of agency and structure offers a distinctly sociological alternative in a literature that has been dominated by psychological theorizing and that has often characterized Jews in overly negative or overly heroic terms. Survivors' accounts are permeated with “epiphanies,” including “crucial moments” involving the ability to make difficult choices and quick decisions that were the difference between life and death. These situations illuminate the relationship between agency and structure in instances where the tension between them is heightened. Survivors' life histories suggest ways in which Jews' ability to exercise agency to survive structural conditions of extremity was influenced by their pre-war exposure to cultural schemas and resources that they were able to transpose to the war-occupation context. Successful agency, however, was in large part a collective accomplishment and dependent on factors beyond individuals' control.

The unity of social movements

Abstract: A coherent intellectual structure for social movement studies has recently been emerging over a range of theoretical and empirical studies. This structure counterposes ‘within social movements’ a diverse range of collective actions against the unity imposed by a collective identity. However, theorisations of this collective identity have so far failed to address the contradiction between structure and agency. A definition of collective identity for social movements that is not caught in the structure/agency divide is proposed by defining the appropriate level of abstraction for such a definition, defining why movements are unified and then how.

Structuration and Enacted Social Systems

Abstract: Giddens’ theory of structuration (1984) represents one of the most influential developments in social theory in recent years. His work focuses on the dialectic interplay between agency and structure within social systems, and has provided the basis for a number of recent empirical studies of organisational life (Walsham, 1993; Roberts, 1990; Barley, 1986). However, the use of this theory in empirical research can be fraught with difficulty. The concepts employed by Giddens are subtle and rich in insight but they are also prone to misinterpretation and distortion. In this paper we make use of the idea of enactment which, we argue, an approach to the study of social life, which is conceptually simpler and more intuitive than that of structuration theory. The enactment approach enables us to draw on the insights of structuration theory and couch them within a systems framework.

Realist social theory: The Morphogenesis of agency

Abstract: To talk about Social Agency at all means returning to the central problem presented by the ‘vexatious fact of society’ and its human constitution. That neither the structuring of society nor the social interaction responsible for it can be discussed in isolation from one another is the central tenet of the morphogenetic perspective. However in modern social theory there is nothing distinctive about endorsing this proposition which now commands near universal assent: what distinguishes between different approaches is how they conceptualize the interplay between what are generally known as ‘structure and agency’. The distinguishing feature of the morphogenetic perspective is its four-square endorsement of ‘analytical dualism’, namely, the idea that the two elements have to be teased out over time precisely in order to examine their interplay. In the preceding two chapters, discussion of the morphogenesis of structure and culture relied upon social agents and their interaction as the mechanism which explained structural and cultural stability or change. Thus, the focus was on the results of interaction, which are passed up to the Structural and Cultural systems and passed on to subsequent generations of people as new conditioning influences upon them. All of this meant taking systemic outcomes as the focal point. Although it is perfectly legitimate to focus upon the remodelling of structure and culture in this way, it is equally important to recognize that the self-same sequence by which agency brings about social and cultural transformation is simultaneously responsible for the systematic transforming of social agency itself. In other words, a ‘double morphogenesis’ is involved: agency leads to structural and cultural elaboration, but is itself elaborated in the process.