Showing papers on "Structure and agency published in 2014"

Transforming power: Social science and the politics of energy choices

Abstract: This paper addresses key implications in momentous current global energy choices – both for social science and for society. Energy can be over-used as a lens for viewing social processes. But it is nonetheless of profound importance. Understanding possible ‘sustainable energy’ transformations requires attention to many tricky issues in social theory: around agency and structure and the interplay of power, contingency and practice. These factors are as much shaping of the knowledges and normativities supposedly driving transformation, as they are shaped by them. So, ideas and hopes about possible pathways for change – as well as notions of ‘the transition’ itself – can be deeply constituted by incumbent interests. The paper addresses these dynamics by considering contending forms of transformation centring on renewable energy, nuclear power and climate geoengineering. Several challenges are identified for social science. These apply especially where there are aims to help enable more democratic exercise of social agency. They enjoin responsibilities to ‘open up’ (rather than ‘close down’), active political spaces for critical contention over alternative pathways. If due attention is to be given to marginalised interests, then a reflexive view must be taken of transformation. The paper ends with a series of concrete political lessons.

Constructing Legitimacy for Climate Change Planning: A Study of Local Government in Denmark

Abstract: Existing research on climate change planning has tended to adopt an overly simplistic approach to analyzing how agency and structure mediate local governments’ responses to climate change. This research contributes to scientific capacity to predict and explain patterns of climate change planning by focusing on the concept of legitimacy and examining its influence upon the dialectic between structure and agency. A conceptual framework foregrounding legitimacy is developed based upon new institutional theory. An initiative to institutionalize climate change planning in Aarhus Municipality, Denmark, is used as a case study to validate four propositions derived from existing research but filtered through the conceptual framework. Validation of the propositions evidences a hierarchy in the salience of different forms of legitimacy, with moral and ethical arguments for undertaking climate change planning having limited social traction in Denmark in the absence of significant extreme climatic events. The analysis also generates thicker, more nuanced explanations for real-world patterns of climate change planning. The findings thereby provide a corrective to a number of assertions made in the literature, notably in relation to the role of agency in the institutionalization of climate change planning.

In the Loop: A Realist Approach to Structure and Agency in the Practice of Strategy:

Abstract: This paper introduces and illustrates a critical realist approach to the practice of strategy, combining Archer’s stratified ontology for structure, culture and agency with her work on reflexivity, to provide strategy-as-practice with an innovative theoretical lens. By maintaining the ontic differentiation between structure and agency this approach renders the conditions of action analytically separable from the action itself, thereby facilitating the examination of their interplay, one upon the other, at variance through time, in strategy formation and strategizing. It therefore offers the field a fruitful methodological means of exploring the increasingly complex empirical implications of some practice theoretical claims.

A relational approach to health practices: towards transcending the agency‐structure divide

Abstract: Many health scholars find that Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice leaves too little room for individual agency. We contend that, by virtue of its relational, field-theoretic underpinnings, the idea of leaving room for agency in Bourdieu's theory of practice is misguided. With agency manifested in interactions and social structures consisting of relations built upon relations, the stark distinction between agency and structure inherent to substantialist thinking is undermined, even dissolved, in a relational field-theoretic context. We also contend that, when treated as relationally bound phenomena, Bourdieu's notions of habitus, doxa, capital and field illuminate creative, adaptive and future-looking practices. We conclude by discussing difficulties inherent to implementing a relational theory of practice in health promotion and public health.

Conceptualizing Transnational Engagements: A Structure and Agency Perspective on (Hometown) Transnationalism

Abstract: This paper unfolds a conceptual framework of migrants' transnational engagements. It combines three elements: a concept of social agent apprehended in its plurality of roles and social embedding; the Habermas theory of communicative action accounting for the communicative dimension of transnational engagements; a concept of social institution explaining the role of migrant organizations in framing transnational activities. This framework is applied to the analysis of cross border engagements of Moroccan, Algerian and Indian hometown organizations in the development of their respective sending areas.

The Role of the Social Imaginary in Lifestyle Migration: Employing the Ontology of Practice Theory

Abstract: Academics in recent decades are developing diverse sets of concepts as part of the endeavour to understand, illustrate and systematically account for the interaction of structure and agency in the ongoing production of social life. The concept of the social imaginary, discussed by many of the authors in this volume, is one such concept. It is an attempt to grapple with the creative, individual and ever-changing nature of the imagination, with the socially shaped ways in which a place or lifestyle can be imagined, and with the social outcomes of people acting on their imagination in terms of both their own lives and the shaping of places (and new imaginaries). We have seen in this volume how the social imaginary is of central importance to lifestyle migration — a migration seeped in imaginings and romanticism. But ‘the social imaginary’ is an ambitious concept with an ambitious project, and it has the tendency to become what Billig (2013) has termed a ‘noun phrase’: imprecise jargon that reifies complexes of things, while discounting people and actions. I argue that scholars employing the concept would benefit from thinking through its various elements (and actions) more systematically. It is useful to examine the grand ideas, distant structures, sweeping changes, discourses and significations, that pre-exist given agents, and then to relate these to an examination of the level of the daily practices of agents, their tactics and negotiations, in the context of cultural communities. In turn, the concept of the social imaginary can be employed to understand the shaping of new material and social structures and significations, through the ongoing interaction of structure and agency.

Corporate Elite Networks and US Post-Cold war Grand Strategy From Clinton to Obama

Abstract: This article seeks to explain both the continuity and the changes in US grand strategy since the end of the Cold War by adopting a critical political economy approach that focuses on the social origins of grand strategy-making. Systematically seeking to link agency and structure, we analyse how grand strategy-makers operate within given social contexts, which we define in terms of, on the one hand, elite networks within which these actors are embedded, and, on the other hand, the international structural context in which the US is positioned. After reviewing the grand strategies as pursued by the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, and relating them to the structural context in which they evolved, we proceed by offering a Social Network Analysis in which we compare the networks of key officials of the three administrations in terms of: (1) their corporate affiliations, and (2) their affiliations to so-called policy-planning institutions. On this basis we argue that the continuities of post-Cold War US grand strategy � which we interpret as reproducing America�s long-standing �Open Door� imperialism � can be explained in terms of the continuing dominance of the most transnationally oriented sections of US capital. Second, we show that, this continuity notwithstanding, there is significant variation in terms of the means by which this grand strategy is reproduced, and argue that we must explain these variations not only in terms of the continuously changing global context, but also as related to some significant differences in affiliation with the policy-planning network.

Elder-Vass on the Causal Power of Social Structures

Abstract: In this review essay, I examine the central tenets of sociologist Dave Elder-Vass’s recent contribution to social ontology, as put forth in his book The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency. Elder-Vass takes issue with ontological individualists and maintains that social structures exist and have causal powers in their own right. I argue that he fails to establish his main theses: he shows neither that social structures have causal powers “in their own right” (in any sense of this expression) nor that they exist.

For “Central Conflation”: A Critique of Archerian Dualism

Abstract: Taking a side in the debate over ontological emergentism in social theory, this article defends an outlook that Margaret S. Archer has dubbed “central conflation”: an antidualistic position appreciating the interdependency of agency and structure, individuals and society. This has been a popular outlook in recent years, advocated broadly by such theorists as Pierre Bourdieu, Randall Collins, and Anthony Giddens. However, antidualism has been challenged by those who believe the key to success in social science lies in level-ontological emergentism. Archer’s own morphogenetic theory is an explicitly dualist version of that approach. I answer Archer’s arguments for emergentism, in so doing clearing a path for the even fuller acceptance of antidualism by theorists.

Ethopolitics and the financial citizen

Abstract: While personal debt has been the subject of intense research activity over the past decade, in particular from think tanks and government bodies, it remains relatively undertheorized and neglected in general by the social sciences. This article offers a novel theoretical frame for the analysis of personal debt – and personal overindebtedness in particular – by highlighting the construction of deviance from financial behavioural normativities. Using Nikolas Rose's concept of ‘ethopolitics’ to describe the relocation of government from questions of rational administration to those of everyday morality and ethics, this article presents two characterizations of deviance from an ethopolitical imaginary of financial citizenship: irresponsibility and incapability. From this framework, the article explores the nature of the state sponsored normalization of indebtedness and the stigmatization of overindebtedness as a corollary of ‘delinquent’ dispositions and dependencies. This article suggests that UK government policy concerning financial responsibility has been shaped by an ethopolitical imaginary of financial citizenship which is based upon a skewed understanding of structure and agency which has its parallel in the attribution of unemployment to ‘worklessness’.

Reflectivity, reflexivity and situated reflective practice

Abstract: This paper describes an aspect of reflective practice referred to as situated reflective practice. The overarching theory is derived from social theories of structuration and reflexivity. In particular, from Giddens’ theory of structuration, which sees social life as an interplay of agency and structure. Discussion of the research reported here centres on the nature of such situated reflection, considers related literature and presents the data collected in a recent small-scale study. The original purpose of the research was to explore the perceptions of corporate trainers on a course for Preparing to Teach in the Lifelong Learning Sector. As a result of this research, the concept of situated reflective practice was generated. It is argued that there exist some situations where a person will find themselves in a position over which they have little control, avoidance or veto. The major conclusion of this study was that key interview themes enabled the delineation of a series of five characteristics repres...

Kinder als Akteure oder als Partizipanden von Praktiken? Zu den Herausforderungen für eine akteurszentrierte Kindheitssoziologie durch Praxistheorien

Abstract: The article deals with the question how new practice theories could provide the Social Studies of Childhood with more advanced theoretical and analytical perspectives In the first section, the theoretical references on the agency concept in Childhood Studies are taken under revision These have conceptualized agency up to now mainly oriented towards classical theories of action and the dualism of structure and agency In contrast to this classical conception, the relation between sociality, agency and actors as conceived in practice theories is presented in the main section in three consecutive steps: 1 The corporeality and material-mental structure of practices is reflected; 2 the role of artefacts in the structuration and reproduction of practices is discussed; 3 the practice-theoretical change of perspective from intentionally acting human actors to multiple participants of practice and to agency as an effect of practices is pointed out In the concluding part, the challenges of these practice theoretical reflections to Childhood Studies are elaborated: Insofar as agency is not only conceptualized as an incorporated (and to be biographically incorporated) characteristic of children as persons but also as an effect of practices, it is more understood as depending on situations and more variable, context sensitive and complex as in the Childhood Studies so far Practice theories thereby open up differentiated heuristic perspectives for Childhood Studies In return, Childhood Studies also challenge practice theory in its adult-centrism

Gaining access to agency and structure in industrial marketing theory A critical pluralist approach

Abstract: This article is concerned with gaining greater insight into the interplay between agency and structure in industrial marketing (IM) scholarship. The article’s intent is to embed Midgley’s notion of critical pluralism within this endeavour. The article commends the movement towards increased deployment of critical realism, but cautions against the dangers of creating further atomism in marketing theory by generating another paradigm of thought with strongly defended boundaries, impervious to outside influence. The article advances a case for critical pluralism within IM scholarship and offers a three-dimensional (theoretical, methodological and methodical) framework to aid this. The discussion demonstrates how critical pluralism can be deployed to gain insights into agency and structure using a number of ‘integrative’ theoretical perspectives.

An investigation into localised policy-making during a period of rapid educational reform in England

Abstract: The research reports on an ethnographic study undertaken at Kingswood, a secondary school in the North West of England, during a period of rapid reform within educational policy-making in England. The research project sets out to offer an empirical account of localised policy-making and a conceptual analysis as to how and why different social actors within and connected to the school are positioned and position-take in response to the schools? localised development trajectory. In order to do this, the study operationalises Bourdieu?s thinking tools of field, capital and habitus as a means of theorising the complex relationship between structure and agency in the processes of localised policy-making.In order to present a detailed analysis of the positioning and position-taking I develop and deploy the conceptualisation of the neoliberal policy complex. I use this to describe and understand how the political and economic fields of production penetrate localised decision-making in which the connected agendas of performativity and accountability frame much of the localised policy processes at the research site. The neoliberal policy complex is defined by an on-going and increased commitment to legislative interventions, not least through an approach to the modernisation of public service in which autonomy and diversification are hailed as hallmarks for success. Drawing on data collected in a year long embedded study, from interviews and, observations with 18 students, five parents, 21 teachers, and seven school leaders, and documentary analysis, it is argued that within this neoliberal policy complex, the field of power is located as a centralising force in structuring the policy-making development and enactments at the local level. In order to achieve distinction within the schooling field and thus be acknowledged as legitimate within the neoliberal policy complex, Kingswood?s localised development trajectory reveals how the discourses of neoliberalism have been internalised by the social actors within the study, to produce subjective positioning which reveals a commitment to the neoliberal doxa. Within this theorisation certain knowledges, capitals and ways of doing and thinking are privileged and presented as common sense. At Kingswood, the conversion to an academy in April 2012 and the attendant re-organisation of the school provision into a Multi-Academy Trust, which has on site a ?professional? and a ?studio? school, are presented as a necessary construction for the school?s future, and the employability skills that will be subsequently embedded within the curriculum are framed as a common sense development of the purposes of education.The study concludes that such position-taking ultimately reveals how the centralising and hierarchical notions of power work to produce a narrative of misrecognition with regards to how the school must develop localised policy-making in order to remain a viable and legitimate entity in the schooling field.The research makes a contribution to the field of policy scholarship by applying Bourdieu?s thinking tools to the empirical findings from a range of social actors in and connected to the school in order to construct an understanding of the relationships between power and positionality in localised policy-making in neoliberal times.

The Social Construction of Organised Political Violence: An Analytical Framework

Abstract: This article proposes a general analytical framework for how we might better understand intrastate war and related forms of organised political violence. It begins by setting out our understanding of agency and structure, before outlining the key structures and agents central to the social construction of political violence. This is followed by a discussion of some of the common discursive practices frequently observed in the lead-up to the outbreak of organised violence, such as the widespread articulation of threat and victimhood narratives, the demonisation and dehumanisation of an enemy other, the renegotiation of norms of violence and the suppression of counter-hegemonic and anti-violence voices. The article argues that organised and sustained political violence is contingent on two key facilitating conditions. First, the presence of a particular set of material and discursive structures, including the military instruments for sustained violence, an economic basis for prosecuting war and a set of soc...

Culture, Politics, and Development

Abstract: Whether in the domains of scholarship or practice, important advances have been made in recent years in our understanding of how culture, politics, and development interact. Today’s leading theorists of culture and development represent a fourth distinctive perspective vis-a-vis their predecessors, one that seeks to provide an empirically grounded, mechanisms-based account of how symbols, frames, identities, and narratives are deployed as part of a broader repertoire of cultural "tools" connecting structure and agency. A central virtue of this approach is less the broad policy prescriptions to which it gives rise -- indeed, to offer such prescriptions would be something of a contradiction in terms -- than the emphasis it places on making intensive and extensive commitments to engaging with the idiosyncrasies of local contexts. Deep knowledge of contextual realities can contribute constructively to development policy by enabling careful intra-country comparisons to be made of the conditions under which variable responses to otherwise similar problems emerge. Such knowledge is also important for discerning the generalizability (or "external validity" ) of claims regarding the efficacy of development interventions, especially those overtly engaging with social, legal, and political issues.

Journalism, Poverty, and the Marketing of Misery: News From Chile's “Largest Ghetto”

Abstract: Research on the news coverage of poverty has largely overlooked the agency of the actors involved. This study addressed this gap by combining ethnographic fieldwork in a poor neighborhood with an analysis of television news about the neighborhood and interviews with the journalists who produced this news. The analysis shows a relationship between journalists and poor people significantly more complex than the relationship described in previous research: Journalists and poor people marketed the neighborhood's misery collaboratively. They shaped news in ways that could be stigmatizing, but that served their converging interests. By acknowledging that structure and agency presuppose each other, this paper contributes to a more nuanced understanding of journalism, as well as to efforts to address poverty's symbolic injustice.

Non-Disabled Children's Ideas about Disability and Disabled People.

Abstract: This article discusses findings from an Economic and Social Research Council-funded study exploring non-disabled children’s ideas about disability. This represents the first in-depth sociological investigation of children’s ideas about disabled people as members of wider society. Data are presented from focus group discussions with children aged 6–7 and 10–11. The article draws upon William H. Sewell Jr’s theorizing of structure and agency and, in particular, employs his concept of ‘cultural schemas’. The article explores non-disabled children’s enactment of various cultural schemas relating to disability and argues that although they are capable of questioning, even transforming, schemas, they are primarily engaged in enacting a series of ‘hegemonic’ schemas that maintain their privileged position as non-disabled people. The article concludes by urging schools and educationalists to do more to encourage non-disabled children to think differently and positively about disabled people.

Toward an Analytic Sociology: Reconciling Structural and Individualistic Explanations of Social Phenomena via a Theory of Embodied Practice

Abstract: Author(s): Polyakov, Michael | Advisor(s): Bevir, Mark | Abstract: Social theory explanations commonly take one of two forms. Accounts couched in terms of macroscopic entities such as institutions, culture, class, structure and tradition tend to privilege stability and regularity. Individualistic explanations, on the other hand, take these entities to be ultimately reducible to free actions of individuals and are most adept at explaining transformation and volatility in the social realm. These two forms of explanation are rooted in radically different ontological and normative assumptions, and no attempt to connect them has garnered wide acceptance to date. This dissertation once re-examines the tension between them, which has become known as the "structure vs. agency" debate, by drawing on and extending the insights of "theories of practice", a literature that locates the junction of structure and agency in the routines of ordinary daily activities. The dissertation begins by critically examining two extant theories of practice. One originates in Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and William Sewell's responses to structuralism; the other is articulated by Theodore Schatzki, who draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein to characterize practice as a semantic lens through which social actors make sense of the world. An alternative theory of practice is then developed, inspired by Charles Taylor's Heideggerian conception of embodied agency. This theory of "embodied practice" advances a novel formulation of the structure-agent relationship. Through a fine-grained analysis of the cognitive and informational processes by which practices project a semantic dimension onto the world, embodied practice theory renders robust forms of personal agency compatible with certain forms of semantic macrostructures. The dissertation goes on to describe how embodied practices can account for both change and stability in society and how the concept of an embodied practice may be profitably employed in applied social analysis and political theory.

The Millennium Development Goals and educational justice: a critical realist analysis of capability deprivation in Kenyan education policy

Abstract: This dissertation focuses on the implementation of free and universal primary education in Kenya, policy inspired by the human development paradigm in which education is a mechanism for provision of essential educational outcomes that enable all children to develop capabilities for the good life. The central purview of this study is the tension between structure and agency in pursuit of educational justice, particularly how gendered, economic and cultural constraints interact with children’s educational aspirations. This tension is framed in the relationship between new equity regimes and continued educational inequalities and is explored it in light of the impact of free primary education on educational outcomes of children in disadvantaged regions of Kenya through analysis of the interaction of macro-processes of education at policy level with micro-processes in schooling at the family, school and individual levels. The main research problem addressed in this dissertation addresses is, “how does the intersection of pupils’, families’ and school educational aspirations and practices affect the educational outcomes of pupils in Kenyan schools?”. The Capability Approach is employed to conceptualize the global, national and local priorities of the socialization arrangements in Kenya primary schools, focusing on free primary education in Kenya as influenced by the Millennium Development Goals, while a structure-disposition-practice model originating from Bourdieu’s reproduction thesis and refined with a critical realist perspective frames deeper exploration of socialization, reproduction and transformation within schooling experiences. The study focused on three schools in an urban slum, rural agricultural and rural pastoralist setting. Data was collected through policy analysis and semi-structured interviews with teachers, pupils and families. Analysis of the data showed that parental involvement in schooling occurs as a form of social practice that only achieves meaning when located in a classed institutional context. When class locations limit parental understandings of educational standards and norms, families are unable to effectively contribute to children’s learning and outcomes. However, the high familial aspirations exhibited by parents in thi study went beyond the bounds of their social class and played a key role in enabling children overcome habitus-contingent limitations and pursue educational success through mitigation of competing socialization demands and negative cultural norms. Notwithstanding the high aspirations of the families in this study, it was evident that the disconnect between schooling and livelihoods and the lack of opportunities for transition were a major cause of disillusionment in education. This calls into question the design of schooling and curriculum and requires greater engagement with children’s realities. Pupils were caught up in the disparities between schooling and their social lives, where modern schooling was in stark contrast to the socialization processes within their community. Schooling was thus a process of becoming estranged from their cultural norms and backgrounds, and this led to tensions in children’s efforts to pursue a balance between modernity and tradition. As the families and teachers in this study have shown, the ontological reality of organizations can be altered through human agency to better handle structural flaws in institutional habitus, as familial aspirations, coupled with institutional commitment to provision of quality education enabled the pupils to successfully pursue educational success in spite of cultural, economic and political constraints. While the family habitus affected children’s aspirations and socio-economic ability to participate successfully in schooling, school habitus structured children’s opportunities to achieve instrumental, positional and intrinsic benefits of education. This affected children’s perceived chances at educational success, as children developed either positive or negative dispositions towards schooling based on their families expectations and support, their ability to match to schools expectations and cultures and their own pragmatic choices regarding the future. In particular, the compulsion to either conform to traditional norms of their community or discard them in favor of the modernity espoused by schooling posed a great challenge that in the end made or broke the children’s educational careers. From the analysis it was evident that the children’s aspirations for educational success were largely linked to the perceived instrumental function of education as a ladder towards future economic success. Children focused solely on achieving good tests scores rather than a broader notion of education as human development, underscoring the human capital orientation of Kenyan education. The adoption of the MDGs and EFAs in Kenyan developments served as an ideal starting point to consider changing global paradigms that influence how education is conceptualized as a tool for social change in developing countries. It was evident that global priorities and shifting development paradigms had considerable influence over educational reform in Kenya. However, the reality on the ground as experienced by teachers, pupils and families indicated that implementation challenges, lack of political will and policy oversights lead to lack of substantive progress towards the policy goals. In particular, it is evident that the institutional frameworks of primary school provision are still highly influenced by the regional and social inequalities that have for long prevented achievement of equity, access and relevance of education. Thus, the foremost implications of this study are that educational authorities should undertake a comprehensive situation analysis of the educational system in Kenya to develop a minimum threshold of educational provision that ensures representation of all stakeholders, redistribution of education opportunities to all children and recognition of diverse needs. Such a threshold should be evidence-based, drawing on a firm foundation of evidence from theory and empirical research and supplemented by democratic consultation and debate. This dissertation argues for a nuanced and refined conceptualization of educational outcomes that should encompass the breadth of human development rather than the focus on economic growth and employment that is prevalent in Kenyan education and development policy. Such a conceptualization is offered by the Capability Approach in its approach to development as agency and wellbeing freedom. Education as a tool for poverty reduction would be in this instance vital in enabling individuals escape the influence of inequalities arising from gender, cultural and class and thus be able to pursue lives that are of value to them.

Confronting Workplace Bullying: Agency and Structure in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police

Abstract: Organizational awareness and responses to workplace bullying is in a state of change and innovation. While employees are gaining awareness, organizations are unable or unwilling to change rapidly enough for employee needs. This paper examines the dynamic between agency (individual influence) and structure (organizational forces) as applied to workplace bullying in a public organization. A case example involving the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is included to explore the organizational impediments, particularly resulting from structure, in addressing workplace bullying.

Manager and Civil Servant: Exploring actors' taken-for-granted assumptions in public administration

Abstract: Manager and Civil Servant is an exploration of actors’ taken-for-granted assumptions that govern perceptions concerning how public administration should be undertaken within contemporary welfare states. It is argued that more than 30 years of continuous reforms directed towards public administration have caused dilemmas to arise. These dilemmas have resulted in a shifting of balances regarding the underpinning pillars of public administration. These reforms have furthermore resulted in an emergence of challenging social systems, entailing new beliefs and practices. The question posited is “how do actors engaged in public administration make sense of the dilemma(s) they face”. Theoretically, this dissertation entails institutional theory as well as Structuration Theory. These are combined in a framework, wherein agency and structure are used in order to characterise manifestations of taken-for-granted assumptions. The framework is furthermore elaborated through conceptual perspectives concerning Management as well as Civil Service in order to model a framework for public administration. Empirically, this dissertation entails a use of qualitative as well as quantitative methods. Open-ended interviews are combined with self-administered surveys, statistical analysis, and focus groups. Two important contributions are highlighted. Firstly, actors engaged in public administration reject the idea of polarisation concerning inherent public administrative activities and that the dilemma being accentuated within public administration. As such, instances of making sense are reduced due to an unconscious enactment of meanings and sanctions that reject the presence of dilemmas. Secondly, actors’ ability to reject polarisation, and thus dilemma, can be explained through compartmentalising interdependent perspectives. On the one hand actors enact an internal perspective wherein instances of Management make sense. On the other hand actors enact an external perspective wherein instances of Civil Service make sense. The separation and compartmentalisation of these perspectives not only enable actors to reject dilemma, they are enabled to enact seemingly different roles at once. They become both Managers and Civil Servants.

Challenging the field: Bourdieu and men's health

Abstract: This article considers how understandings of health promotion with men may be assisted by engagement with Bourdieu’s theoretical work. The article outlines leading concepts within Bourdieu’s work on ‘field’, ‘habitus’ and ‘capital’; considers subsequent critical debates among gender, feminist and sociological theorists around structure and agency; and links these to discussions within men’s health. A particular focus concerns structural disruption of, and movement of social actors between, ‘fields’ such as family, work and leisure settings. The article examines, through Bourdieu’s critical legacy, whether such disruption establishes conditions for transformative reflexivity among men in relation to previously held dispositions (habitus), including those inflected by masculinities, that affect men’s health practices. Recent work within Bourdieu’s heritage potentially facilitates a re-framing of understandings of men’s health practices. The article specifically explores masculine ambivalence within accounts of reflexivity, identities and practice, and considers how social and symbolic (masculine) capital are in play. Implications of Bourdieu’s leading concepts for theorising settings-focused approaches to men’s health promotion are exemplified with reference to a men’s health project in a football stadium leisure setting. The article considers the benefits and challenges of applying gendered critical insights drawing on Bourdieu’s work to men’s health promotion, and discusses emerging theoretical dilemmas.

Social production in a collectivist culture: Exploring structure and agency in the work-life balance of Indian women executives

Abstract: Purpose – This paper aims to study the relationship between structure and agency of Indian women executives in the area of work-life balance in a developing and globalized context. It examines social production in a collectivist culture. Design/methodology/approach – The approach is qualitative and interpretative. Semi-structured interviews of 105 senior women executives from major metropolitan cities in India (Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai) form the rich data for this research. It uses sociological theories of McNay and Bourdieu to discuss the narratives of women executives. Findings – The agency of women executives in India is influenced by cultural meta-narratives of marriage and motherhood. They experience conflict in the home front and less at the work place. Their negotiations with their structures reveal a nuanced agency wherein they try to fit cultural roles and also seek self fulfillment in a career. Research limitations/implications – First, it includes women executives only fr...

Improving health: structure and agency in health interventions.

Abstract: Taking debates about the roles of structure and agency in health as a lens, this essay asks how Critical Realist and Feminist Intersectional approaches might inform health interventions research. Despite recognition of multiple determinants of health, health problems are often thought of as individual and interventions, in turn, target risky individual behaviours. Such approaches are rooted in a liberal model of personhood. This paper critiques enduring individualist assumptions linked to Western liberal underpinnings embedded in health interventions. It posits the need to include a robust conception of the social world in which change depends on shifting power relations, and individual agency is shaped by power as well as individual will. We propose preliminary steps for undertaking critical realist intersectional interventions research.

Collaborative agency to support integrated care for children, young people and families: an action research study

Abstract: Introduction: Collaboration was legislated in the delivery of integrated care in the early 2000s in the UK. This research explored how the reality of practice met the rhetoric of collaboration. Theory: The paper is situated against a theoretical framework of structure, agency, identity and empowerment. Collectively and contextually these concepts inform the proposed model of ‘collaborative agency’ to sustain integrated care. The paper brings sociological theory on structure and agency to the dilemma of collaboration. Methods: Participative action research was carried out in collaborative teams that aspired to achieve integrated care for children, young people and families between 2009 and 2013. It was a part time, PhD study in collaborative practice. Results: The research established that people needed to be able to be jointly aware of their context, to make joint decisions, and jointly act in order to deliver integrated services, and proposes a model of collaborative agency derived from practitioner’s experiences and integrated action research and literature on agency. The model reflects the effects of a range of structures in shaping professional identity, empowerment, and agency in a dynamic. The author proposes that the collaborative agency model will support integrated care, although this is, as yet, an untested hypothesis.

The Relationship between Structure and Agency in Communicative Action Theory

Abstract: The relationship between structure and agency is one of the many unresolved core enigmas in social sciences and social theory. the intent of integration of structure and agency is to conceive within the same model the relation between individuation and socialization, between freewill and the principle of coexistence and, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, Antony Giddens’s structuration and Margaret Archer’s morphogenetics delimit its conceptual field. Habermas also develops communicative action theory, within which he attempts to integrate action- theoretical and systemtheoretical sociological perspectives. He divides modern society into lifeworlds (micro) and systems (macro). The lifeworld is the realm of ordinary everyday experience and intersubjective understanding but it loses power at the expense of powerful forces Habermas calls "system". Examples are the monetization of transactions, markets, law, and bureaucracy. He attempts to reconstruct the relationship between lifeworld and system (or agency and structure) but some of the critiques did not consider his attempts successful or they considered it as an incomplete project. Many Habermasian critics see the theory’s being problematic in its heavy reliance on ‘idealizing suppositions’. Yet fewer attack the non-idealized assumptions of communicative rationality. The problem here is that the lifeworld of such agents, with their equal access and use of relevant information, requires something seemingly unavailable in the modern sociopolitical context because there are, in real world, effects of an instrumentalist rationality that distorts the lifeworld through the ‘steering systems’ of capitalism and bureaucratic power. it seems that this theory implicitly do not consider the danger of domination of power structures over agency and wills of agents and hence, this way of establishing relationship between structure and agency implicitly have danger of establishing relationship between structure and structure i.e. modern society structures or systems in habermasian view in one hand and dominant power discourse structures that define or even dictate rationality and shape socio-political norms of given community in other hand.

National Minorities between Protection and Empowerment: Towards a Theory of Empowerment

Abstract: It is widely assumed that national minorities can experience a transition from protection to empowerment. This is also the assumption of most normative instruments aimed at protecting national minorities. Theoretically, however, there is no coherent notion of empowerment of minorities let alone a description of the processes that lead to empowerment on the basis of minority protection schemes. Thus, there is a gap in our knowledge of both the concept and its implementation with regard to national minorities. This article seeks to begin unpacking the notion of empowerment and its relation to protection. It provides first a brief overview of the literature on national minority issues arguing that the overwhelming use of the institutional approach has prevented a subjectivist view of national minorities as actors. Next, it examines the existing definitions of empowerment to explore the actor-oriented nature of the concept. In the main section the article begins the journey towards a theory of empowerment, drawing on the work of Elisheva Sadan and a number of other scholars. It focuses on the empowerment of communities, as the aim is to examine minority group empowerment. The second half of the article seeks to connect the theory of empowerment with the notion of rights; the capability to claim rights is of vital importance here. This brings in Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum's capability theory. Finally, the article connects the theories with reality, seeking to operationalize empowerment through an analysis of the social structure of protection (European minority rights regime) and collective agency (human and social capital). In the concluding section, it is argued that the structure and agency approach provides a good tool for analysing the transition of minority actors from protection to empowerment. This article is based on a discussion paper circulated to the participants of the workshop on "National Minorities between protection and empowerment: Contemporary minority politics in Europe" held at the European Consortium for Political Research ECPR Joint Sessions of Workshops in Mainz, Germany, 2013.1Keywords: empowerment; protection; action-oriented; capability theoryThe space between protection and empowerment of national minorities has not been defined adequately in the academic literature. This may be due to the fact that the protection paradigm holds a hegemonic position in policy-making. Legal instruments and social programmes are written in the mode of protection. Thus, agents of the protection of minorities are governments acting on behalf of the majority, and because governments have the agency to hold control of state power, protection becomes a top-down process. If empowerment is mentioned, it is often perceived as one side of the same coin, and at times the two concepts are used interchangeably. This would indicate that agents of empowerment are also governments acting top-down on behalf of the majority and holding the power to empower someone. How may we then perceive nuances in the relationship between the two concepts, if any? Since both concepts indicate top-down action initiated at the macro level, does this mean that the process does not involve micro-level action? Assuming that minorities are the beneficiaries of empowerment, and that empowerment and protection are provided by the same agents, how may we conceptualize a transition from protection to empowerment? Could one assume that protection is the means, while empowerment is the end? This would confirm the general assumption that a transition process from protection to empowerment takes place.However, if governments are the agents of both protection and empowerment, how are we to know that minorities actually become empowered, that the end of empowerment is achieved? How do we know whether the end of empowerment differs from the end of protection? The end of protection is usually measured quantitatively and qualitatively in the degrees of improvement of enjoyment of rights, i. …