Showing papers on "Structure and agency published in 1999"

Paradoxes of Participation: Questioning Participatory Approaches to Development

Abstract: This article suggests that the concepts underlying participatory approaches to development should be subject to greater critical analysis. Drawing on research on water resource management in sub-Saharan Africa, and on social theory concerning the recursive relationship between agency and structure, it illustrates the need for a more complex understanding of issues of eAciency and empowerment in participatory appro- aches. Particularly, two key concepts are examined: ideas about the nature and role of institutions; and models of individual action. The article concludes by identifying the questions such an analysis raises about the relationships between community, social capital and the state. Copyright # 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 1 PARTICIPATION IN DEVELOPMENT DISCOURSE Heroic claims are made for participatory approaches to development, these being justified in the terms of ensuring greater eAciency and eAectiveness of investment and of contributing to processes of democratization and empowerment. The conundrum of ensuring the sustainability of development interventions is assumed to be solvable by the proper involvement of beneficiaries in the supply and management of resources, services and facilities. However, despite significant claims to the contrary there is little evidence of the long-term eAectiveness of participation in materially improving the conditions of the most vulnerable people or as a strategy for social change. Whilst the evidence for eAciency receives some support on a small scale, the evidence regarding empower- ment and sustainability is more partial, tenuous and reliant on assertions of the rightness of the approach and process rather than convincing proof of outcomes. Participation has therefore become an act of faith in development; something we believe in and rarely question. This act of faith is based on three main tenets; that

Understanding Policy Transfer: A Multi-Level, Multi-Disciplinary Perspective

Abstract: At the same time that comparative and international political scientists have been confronting the problems of analysing state behaviour under conditions of uncertainty, state-centred political scientists are attempting, somewhat belatedly, to deal with the increasing complexity and uncertainty which underpins modern governance. Yet despite similar research agendas these disciplines have continued to speak past each other. This article contends that policy transfer analysis can provide a context for integrating some key concerns of these disciplines. Further, we argue that the process of policy transfer should be examined through a structure and agency approach with three dimensions: global, international and transnational levels, the macro-level and the interorganizational level. This three-dimensional model employs the notion of a policy transfer network as a middle-range level of analysis which links a particular form of policy development (policy transfer), microdecision making in organizations, macrosystems and global, transnational and international systems. It is hoped that this approach will stimulate an empirical research agenda which will illuminate important policy developments in domestic and world politics.

Institutionalist Analysis, Communicative Planning, and Shaping Places

Abstract: This article reviews the developments in the new institutionalism in social science and their relation to communicative planning theory, with emphasis on the relevance to the practcal task of responding to demands for a more place-conscious evolution in public policy. I trace the evolution of forms of governance that are more responsive to the multiple claims and social worlds of civil society and include discussion of the social-constructionist conception of institutions, the significance of actors and networks, the interrelation between structure and agency, and the cultural dimesions of social networks. The implications for developing governance capability or instittional capacity are also explored. In reviewing comnmunicative planning theory, I discuss how Habermas's approach to communicative ation may be reworked or positioned in an institutionalist perspective. Finally, I explore how these developments can be used to dvelop understanding and strategies for evoling more inclusionary approaches to int...

’I’ ll be a nothing’: structure, agency and the construction of identity through assessment

Abstract: Drawing on data from focus group and individual interviews with Year 6 pupils in the term leading up to Key Stage 2 National Curriculum tests, this article explores the extent to which children's perceptions of the tests contribute to their understandings of themselves as learners. The tension between agency and structure becomes apparent in children's differential dispositions to view the testing process as a definitive statement about the sort of learner they are. Although children's responses are varied, what most share is a sense of an event which reveals something intrinsic about them as individuals. The article also explores the emotions, in particular the anxiety and fear, which permeate such understandings of the National Curriculum assessment process.

Paradoxes of participation : questioning participatory approaches to development

Abstract: This article suggests that the concepts underlying participatory approaches to development should be subject to greater critical analysis. Drawing on research on water resource management in sub-Saharan Africa, and on social theory concerning the recursive relationship between agency and structure, it illustrates the need for a more complex understanding of issues of efficiency and empowerment in participatory appro- aches. Particularly, two key concepts are examined: ideas about the nature and role of institutions: and models of individual action. The article concludes by identifying the questions such an analysis raises about the relationships between community, social capital and the state. Copyright ',€) 1999 John Wiley & Sons. Lid.

‘the same people in the same places’? socio-spatial identities and migration in youth

Abstract: Concern is expressed about the demise of rural communities resulting from processes of out-migration of young people and in-migration of newcomers. Youth out-migration is the result of a combination of structural and motivational factors. Here the relationship between agency and structure in explaining migration behaviour is explored through the study of one factor: the development of socio-spatial identities in youth. This is of interest not only as a facet of identity construction in childhood and youth, the product of an internal-external dialectic, but also because it appears to represent, alongside structural factors such as local disadvantage, an important but under-recognised factor influencing migration or staying-on decisions among young people brought up in rural communities. Here, the construction of socio-spatial identities, the respective roles of the community and the individual in processes of inclusion and exclusion, inter-generational processes of social reproduction and, finally, the rel...

Rethinking agency and structure in the study of regime change

Abstract: The oscillation of the study of political regime change between voluntarist and structural approaches has increasingly led scholars to seek research strategies for synthesizing the two approaches. This article addresses the conceptual and practical difficulties of achieving such a synthesis by evaluating several strategies for integrating voluntarist and structural factors in the analysis of regime change. It examines competing ways of conceptualizing agency and structure and assesses the varied consequences that different conceptualizations have for explaining regime transformation. The article also analyzes three distinct strategies for integrating agency and structure: the funnel, path-dependent, and eclectic strategies. Each integrative strategy isanchored by a different conceptual base and has characteristic strengths and limitations. The conclusion explores future directions for developing integrative strategies.

Methodological Issues in Researching Migration

Abstract: Population geographers should consider a mixed methods approach to thestudy of migration. This methodological position arises in response to the challenges of contemporary social theory. It is argued that application of structuration theory favours use of a diversity of methods to investigate the recursive relationship between agency and structure. Similarly a realist stance, as advocated by Sayer (1992), leads to a mixing of methods in order to carry out the synthesising tasks expected of geographers. Postmodernism, when interpreted as method, also points the researcher to consider adopting flexible research practices in order to capture the multiplicities of meaning associated with migration and place. These points are illustrated by a case study of migration to and from Hong Kong.

Realising children's agency in research: Partners and participants?

Abstract: This paper seeks to contribute to debates within the 'new' sociology of childhood by focusing on issues of structure and agency in the research process. Drawing on a detailed qualitative study of children's paid work and employment, funded as part of the ESRC 'Children 5-16: growing into the 21st Century' initiative, the discussion examines the extent to which it is possible to design and conduct research on and for children, where children are participants in the research process. The paper suggests that despite the best intentions of researchers, the structure and organization of research inevitably reduces children to the status of at best, participants rather than partners and at worst objects of the researchers gaze. The reasons for this relate to issues of methodology rather than method in that what counts as acceptable academic knowledge is defined in relatively narrow and conservative terms by academics who are invariably adults and to children's lack of research or academic capital.

Structure, Agency and the Sociology of Education: Rescuing analytical dualism

Abstract: Theorising the interplay of structure and agency is the quintessential focus of sociological endeavour. This paper aims to be part of that continuing endeavour, arguing for a stratified social onto...

In the company of women: structure and agency in a revised power‐control theory of gender and delinquency*

Abstract: A power-control theory of the gender-delinquency relationship draws attention to differences in familial control practices. We extend the theory to address how parental agency and support for dominant attitudes or schemas influence male as well as female delinquency. This extension emphasizes that differences in structure, particularly between more and less patriarchal households, result in different family practices, especially for mothers and sons. We find that variation in mothers' agency within the home affects their sons' support of conventional views, in particular, attitudes about the gendered nature of activities, risk preferences, and beliefs about impunity, as well as their involvement in delinquent activities. Thus, the agency of mothers in less patriarchal families is an underappreciated source of reduced delinquency among sons.

Dualism, duality and the complexity of economic institutions

Abstract: Dualism ‐ the division of an object of study into separate, paired elements ‐ is widespread in economic and social theorising: key examples are the divisions between agency and structure, the individual and society, mind and body, values and facts, and knowledge and practice. In recent years, dualism has been criticised as exaggerating conceptual divisions and promoting an oversimplified, reductive outlook. A possible alternative to dualism is the notion of duality, derived from Giddens’s structuration theory, whereby the two elements are interdependent and no longer separate or opposed, although they remain conceptually distinct. This paper argues that duality, if handled carefully, can provide a superior framework to dualism for dealing with the complexity of economic and social institutions. Its main attraction is not its twofold character, which might profitably be relaxed where appropriate, but its ability to envisage a thoroughgoing interdependence of conceptually distinct elements.

Critical Realism, Managers and Information

Abstract: Many accounts of contemporary management raise the issue of the effective use of information, but little is said about how this is to be achieved. This paper sets notions of ‘information literacy’, drawn from higher education, against the reflections of a small group of managers. This indicates that there are a number of dimensions, notably the relationship of information use to organizational power, that are not adequately catered for in current conceptions of information literacy. It is argued that existing accounts focus excessively on the construction of meaning without taking into account the constraints on such construction. Drawing on resources from critical realism, these constraints are taken to relate both to the individual's embodied nature and to the structural dimensions of their practice. Exploration of these constraints is felt to require attention to the temporal dimension of social analysis and to an examination of the interrelationships between structure and agency.

You Have Dislodged a Boulder: Mothers and Prisoners in the Post Keynesian California Landscape

Abstract: The unprecedented expansion of US prisons during the final quarter of the twentieth century has produced many contradictions. Prisoners' families, stifled by sclerotic legal channels, are organizing to demand political remedies to the growing use of prisons as catch-all solutions for social problems. One such group, Mothers Reclaiming Our Children, developed in the midst of crisis-riven 1990s Los Angeles. The group has negotiated maternal, race, and class ideologies and practices — effectively tearing down the veil between reproductive and productive labor — in order to elaborate and pursue its political work. The project has not been easy: crisis is internally as well as externally central to the group's formation. In charting the group's development, the article examines, historically and ethnographically, the ways in which organizing is constrained by recognition. It concludes that non-reified recognition is produced when critical renovations of subjectivity, via collective assessments of structures, methods, and purpose, emerge as action in the discursive-material interstices of structure and agency.

The (Non)Accumulation of Capital: Explicating the Relationship of Structure and Agency in the Lives of Poor Black Men

Abstract: The concepts of habitus and capital are crucial in the research tradition of social and cultural reproduction. This article applies both terms to an analysis of aspects of the life histories of low-income African American men. In exploring how their past experiences relate to their present-day statuses as nonmobile individuals, this article also revisits and redefines the utility of habitus and capital as conceptual devices for the study of social inequality. It expands the empirical terrain covered by the concept of capital to include that which allows low-income individuals to manage their existence in socioeconomically disadvantaged communities while also hindering their mobility in the broader social world. One implication of this approach is an improved cultural analysis of low-income individuals. The improvement lies in that their behavior can be better understood as reflections of their readings of social reality, which are based upon the material and ideational resources that they have accumulated throughout their lives, and not simply as manifestations of flawed value-systems or normative orientations.

Conceptualizing Professionalism: Why Economics Needs Sociology

Abstract: MICHAEL DIETRICH [*} ABSTRACT. The main argument presented here is that economics provides a necessary but not sufficient analysis of professionalism. A sufficient analysis can only be generated by recognizing the sociological significance of professionals, and in particular the institutionalization of a professional ethic. In this way we suggest that economics needs sociology to provide an effective conceptualization of professionalism as a form of organization and as a mode of behavior. Equally, however, sociology needs economics, because while the sociological context provides an explanation of the way power is institutionalized, an economic focus is necessary to maintain a role for individual agency. These arguments are illustrated with a discussion of the historical and institutional complexities of professional organization; we look particularly at nursing and certain routinized areas of legal work and accountancy. I Introduction THE BASIC ARGUMENT presented in this paper is that economics can provide only an incomplete account of professionalism. Economics is therefore a necessary but not sufficient analysis. In the economics literature the characteristics of professional organization, involving institutionalized control of entry and policing of behavior, are traditionally viewed as a departure from free market functioning for either efficiency or rent seeking/market power reasons (Posner 1974; Stigler 1971; Friedman 1962; Arrow 1963). But equally these characteristics apply to other organizational forms, such as trade unions, the household and cartels. A sufficient analysis requires identification of the unique characteristics of professionalism. This sufficiency can only be generated by recognizing the sociological significance of professionals, and in particular the institutionalization of a professional ethic. Economics needs sociology to provide an effective conceptualization of professionalism as a form of organization and as a mode of behavior. Equally, however, sociology needs economics, because while the sociological context provides an explanation of the way power is institutionalized, an economic focus is also necessary to maintain a role for individual agency, This conceptualization follows Granovetter (1985) in avoiding both under- and over-socialized analyses. The link between structure and agency is constructed on the basis of a professional ethic that institutionalizes power. A professional ethic channels behavior by requiring social recognition to be effective. In addition, individual agency reinforces power relationships. Two implications follow from this: firstly, some "economic professions" may not be socially recognized as such, and some socially recognized professions may have no economic rationale. Secondly, an emphasis on structure and agency provides each profession with a unique historical dynamic. Therefore a process-based approach is suggested, conceptualized in terms of a professional life cycle based on structure-agency interaction. In developing this approach we depart from the usual static, ahistorical analysis that characterizes the existing economic literature on the professions. The characteristic efficiency-based economic justification for professional organization can be formulated in terms of a market failure arising from principal-agent problems in which the principal (in our case the consumer of services) has problems motivating the agent (the supplier of services) because of an information asymmetry to the latter's advantage. We pre-empt later discussion here by stating that information asymmetries on their own are not a sufficient justification for professionalism (Matthews 1991). As we will explain shortly, the economic literature suggests that appropriately structured individual and autonomous contracting can be used to overcome information disadvantages. Hence other factors must exist in combination with information asymmetry to justify professionalism even from a narrowly economic perspective. …

Advances in generative structuralism: Structured agency and multilevel dynamics

Abstract: We set out an approach to theorizing termed generative structuralism. In two stages, respectively, we address two problems in social theory ‐ agency‐structure and micro‐macro linkage ‐ in relation to a central problem in the discipline, namely, the sense of its fragmentation. The first theoretical problem is: How can we create generative models and methods that are responsive to the interpenetration of agency and structure in social practices? We show how Bourdieu's concept of habitus and Giddens's concept of structure can be articulated to generative model‐building ideas and methods. The second theoretical problem is: To what extent can we create generative multilevel models of large‐scale social system dynamics? We address this problem through a strategy illustrated by a model of emergent cultural stratification, including a study of its properties through simulation analysis. In undertaking these tasks, we both describe and illustrate the general character of generative structuralism. In doing so, we c...

Structure, Agency and School Effectiveness: Researching a 'Failing' School.

Abstract: Qualitative data of a 'failing' junior school are used to highlight the ways in which a particular Local Education Authority (LEA) responded to 'serious weaknesses' outlined by a team of Office for Standards in Education inspectors and how staff mediated such LEA intervention. Such mediation will be theorised via the employment of analytical dualism, whereby structure and agency are held to be irreducible emergent strata of social reality. The purpose of this paper is not to complement and buttress the ideological nature of school effectiveness research, but to provide a micro insight into current mediation of macro-level policy.

A Child's Growing Up with a Parent Who Has Multiple Sclerosis: Theories and experiences

Abstract: Some theorists have provided insight into the phenomenon of disability, and others have provided conceptual notions of childhood. Still others have provided theoretical expectations of what life is like for a child when mother or father has a disability or chronic illness. When children whose parents have multiple sclerosis described their own experiences, much of what theorists had postulated was a poor fit with children's responses. This paper will explore differences between children's descriptions of life with a parent who has MS, and the theoretical expectations of what their lives should be like according to previous literature. The paper concludes with the suggestions that historical sociology, with its recognition of both agency and structure interacting over time, may be an effective way to understand anyone's place on the disability/empowerment continuum, and may serve to illuminate the pathway of children with disabled parents in particular.

Lone Mothers and Gendered Moral Rationalities: Orientations to Paid Work

Abstract: The neighbourhoods and social networks we examined in the previous chapter have been described as ‘mesosystems’ — it is these that link individual agency with social structures and institutions (see Cochran et al. 1990 for the relationship between the three levels). The relationship between structure and agency also features in debates about lone motherhood. The essential question here is the extent to which lone mothers create and make sense of their own lives within constraints that they have little or no power to alter.

Boudon: agência, estrutura e individualismo metodológico

Abstract: The work of the French sociologist Raymond Boudon is analysed from the standpoint of the relationship between agency and structure. It is argued that the possibility of a synthesis between agency and structure is linked with the combination of two kinds of causality: one related to the actor and the other related to social structures. It is further argued that this combination is implicitly made in Boudon 's works, in spite of his methodological prescriptions.

The Study of Regional Inequality in Quebec and English Canada: A Comparative Analysis of Perspectives'

Abstract: The question of regional inequality has been a central concern of both Anglo-Canadian sociology and Franco-Quebecois sociology since the 1960's. Starting in the 1980s, the study of regional inequality became less popular in Anglo-Canadian sociology. In Quebec, however, the interest in regional phenomena has continued to grow. This article attempts to explain the seeming diverging sense of importance given to the region in the two main discourses of Canadian sociology. We can discern two main hypotheses that try to explain these differences. The first relates to the differing importance each group places on agency and structure. The second hypothesis concerns the definition of region. In this article we discuss the relative explanatory value of each of these hypotheses. We show that both of these explanation are useful.

Art and citizenship : governmental intersections

Abstract: The thesis argues that the relations between culture and government are best viewed through an analysis of the programmatic and institutional contexts for the use of culture as an interface in the relations between citizenship and government. Discussion takes place through an analysis of the history of art programmes which, in seeking to target a 'general' population, have attempted to equip this population with various particular capacities. We aim to provide a history of rationalities of art administration. This will provide us with an approach through which we might understand some of the seemingly irreconcilable policy discourses which characterise contemporary discussion of government arts funding. Research for this thesis aims to make a contribution to historical research on arts institutions in Australia and provide a base from which to think about the role of government in culture in contemporary Australia. In order to reflect on the relations between government and culture the thesis discusses the key rationales for the conjunction of art, citizenship and government in post-World War Two (WWII) Australia to the present day. Thus, the thesis aims to contribute an overview of the discursive origins of the main contemporary rationales framing arts subvention in post-WWII Australia. The relations involved in the government of culture in late eighteenth-century France, nineteenth-century Britain, America in the 1930s and Britain during WWII are examined by way of arguing that the discursive influences on government cultural policy in Australia have been diverse. It is suggested in relation to present day Australian cultural policy that more effective terms of engagement with policy imperatives might be found in a history of the funding of culture which emphasises the plurality of relations between governmental programmes and the self-shaping activities of citizens. During this century there has been a shift in the political rationality which organises government in modern Western liberal democracies. The historical case studies which form section two of the thesis enable us to argue that, since WWII, cultural programmes have been increasingly deployed on the basis of a governmental rationality that can be described as advanced or neo-liberal. This is both in relation to the forms these programmes have taken and in relation to the character of the forms of conduct such programmes have sought to shape in the populations they act upon. Mechanisms characteristic of such neo-liberal forms of government are those associated with the welfare state and include cultural programmes. Analysis of governmental programmes using such conceptual tools allows us to interpret problems of modern social democratic government less in terms of oppositions between structure and agency and more in terms of the strategies and techniques of government which shape the activities of citizens. Thus, the thesis will approach the field of cultural management not as a field of monolithic decision making but as a domain in which there are a multiplicity of power effects, knowledges, and tactics, which react to, or are based upon, the management of the population through culture. The thesis consists of two sections. Section one serves primarily to establish a set of historical and theoretical co-ordinates on which the more detailed historical work of the thesis in section two will be based. We conclude by emphasising the necessity for the continuation of a mix of policy frameworks in the construction of the relations between art, government and citizenship which will encompass a focus on diverse and sometimes competing policy goals.

Social Theory of International Politics: Process and structural change

Abstract: In chapter 6 I argued that the deep structure of an international system is formed by the shared understandings governing organized violence, which are a key element of its political culture. Three ideal type cultures were discussed, Hobbesian, Lockean, and Kantian, which are based on and constitute different role relationships between states: enemy, rival, and friend. The chapter focused on structure, mirroring the focus on agency in chapter 5. Little was said in either chapter about process – about how state agents and systemic cultures are sustained by foreign policy practices, and sometimes transformed. In this chapter I address these questions. Although this discussion of process comes after my discussions of structure and agency, there is a sense in which it is prior to both. Structures and agents are both effects of what people do. Social structures do not exist apart from their instantiation in practices. As structures of a particular kind this is true also of corporate agents, but even individuals are just bodies, not “agents,” except in virtue of social practices. Practices are governed by preexisting structures and entered into by preexisting agents, but the possibility of referring to either as “preexisting” presupposes a social process stable enough to constitute them as relatively enduring objects. Agents and structures are themselves processes, in other words, on-going “accomplishments of practice.” Ultimately this is the basis for the claim that “anarchy is what states make of it.” The import of this claim nevertheless depends partly on the ease and extent to which agents and structures can be changed.

Social Theory of International Politics: Structure, agency, and culture

Abstract: In chapter 3 I used the language of ideas to argue against a materialist approach to the study of structure. As I see it, however, social constructivism is not just about idealism, it is also about structuralism or holism. Structures have effects not reducible to agents. With that in mind this chapter looks at the structure of ideas in the system and asks: What does it mean to say that there is an ideational structure in a system? And what effects can such a structure have? The structure of any social system will contain three elements: material conditions, interests, and ideas. Although related these elements are also in some sense distinct and play different roles in explanation. The significance of material conditions is constituted in part by interests, but they are not the same thing. Oil does not have the same kind of causal powers as an interest in the status quo. Similarly, interests are constituted in part by ideas, but they are not the same thing. The ideas constituting an interest in revisionism do not have the same kind of causal powers as the belief that other states obey international law. These distinctions mean that it may be useful for analytical purposes to treat the distributions of the three elements as separate “structures” (material structure, structure of interests, ideational structure). If we do so, however, it is important to remember that they are always articulated and equally necessary to explain social outcomes. Without ideas there are no interests, without interests there are no meaningful material conditions, without material conditions there is no reality at all.