Structure and agency

About: Structure and agency is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1265 publications have been published within this topic receiving 63660 citations.

Critical Realism's Potential Contribution to Critical Pedagogy and Youth and Community Work: Human Nature, Agency and Praxis Revisited

Abstract: In the light of late modern, postmodern and post-critical debates the difficulty of establishing a coherent theoretical framework for both critical pedagogy and youth and community work has been noted by several authors. In this article I will make the claim that critical realism, as a stance within the ontological, epistemological and aetiological paradigms, offers a way to ameliorate a number of tensions in critical pedagogy and youth and community work. Margaret Archer's theories around morphogenesis are particularly useful in re-examining the tensions between essentialist and anti-essentialist views of human nature, identity and community, and structure and agency. In terms of praxis, her method allows us to wish to influence others, without descending into positivity or being satisfied with just uncovering highly individualized accounts of temporary meaning making. She also offers a way of performing critical pedagogy that does not instil a ‘knowing hopelessness’ in people, whereby they are aware of ...

Investigating the pedagogical process in physical education teacher education

Abstract: The study explored student teachers' engagement with a socially critical pedagogy. It found engagement to be contingent upon idiosyncratic dialectics of agency and structure; influenced by structural factors which in turn are constituted by actions of student teachers; linked to knowledgeability; and connected to the reflexivity of self and social knowledge.

Psychic wounds and the social structure: An empirical investigation

Abstract: Empirical linkages between structure and agency, or system and life world, have traditionally not been overabundant in sociology, though work emerging in the field of the sociology of emotions does offer some illumination on this topic. This article uses data obtained in a project which investigated the impact of the Howard government's dual reforms in the industrial relations and welfare policy arenas. In this article, we seek to explore in some depth how a system that is underpinned by the notion of dignity and rights produces shame in its supposed beneficiaries, based on the evidence in the data collected. As well, we attempt to expose the processes by which shame is produced and how it manifests among the participants in the study. The first part of the article focuses upon the broader structural context, while the second proceeds to examine how this impinges upon agents at the microsocial level. Workfare recipients are constructed as dependants, in a society that privileges independence and ignores the crucial fact of our mutual interdependency. The transcripts reveal that the denial of autonomy and respect are key mechanisms by which dignity is injured. In exploring these phenomena, the purpose of the article is to demonstrate the usually veiled connections between individuals and their larger social context.

Cleavage Politics in Old and New Democracies: A Review of the Literature and Avenues for Future Research

Abstract: Stein Rokkan’s comparative historical account of party system formation in Western Europe has proved enormously influential due to the appeal of tying individual political behaviour to large-scale historical transformations. This article reviews the literature that has studied the genesis of cleavagebased party systems, as well as theoretical and empirical assessments of the degree to which they have remained “frozen”. If it is adapted to allow for a more dynamic perspective, the cleavage approach also helps us to make sense of recent transformations of Western European party systems by pointing to new “critical junctures” that are likely to have a lasting impact on party competition and on individual political behaviour. In the second part of this review, I discuss applications of the approach outside Western Europe, focusing above all on Latin America and Central and Eastern Europe. If it is modified according to the specific historical trajectories of these countries, the cleavage concept helps us understand both how party systems become institutionalized in new democracies, as well as the type of conflicts they are likely to reflect. Furthermore, criticisms of social structural determinism have resulted in a new generation of scholarship that insists on paying more attention to the interplay of structure and agency in forging long-term bonds between parties and voters.