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.

Between Complacency and Paternalism Ethical Controversies over Influencing Political and Consumer Choice

Abstract: Consumer culture researchers need to acknowledge theoretical problems that can arise when ethical assumptions inform social scientific claims To identify the origins of these problems, the sociologist Andrew Abbott has developed a framework to illustrate how social scientific claims are continually mapped and remapped onto rival moral perspectives These perspectives are defined by the relative emphasis that they place on freedom and determinism, agency and structure When consumer culture researchers attempt to diagnose or influence people’s political and consumer choices, they emphasize either one side of these dichotomies or the other This article adapts Abbott’s framework to show how these differing emphases lead to different conclusions about the techniques that educators, social scientists, activists, marketers, and policy-makers should use to improve people’s political and consumer choices

Theorisation In Critical Realist Is Research And Its Implications On Structure And Agency Interplay: A Morphogenetic Approach

Abstract: The paper develops a conceptual framework to advance the understanding on theorising the sociomateriality of Information technology (IT) especially with regards to a complex inverse information infrastructure (II) that depicts emergent usage behaviour. Drawing on Archer’s morphogenetic approach, derived from the critical realism (CR) philosophy, we discuss the relevance of understanding theory/theorisation from a critical realist perspective and its implications on structure and agency interplay. We also highlight the contributions of realists’ theorisation to IS research and the need to identify the mechanisms that give rise to emergent IT usage as a future research endeavour. We then propose the morphogenetic model of emergent IT usage behaviour which questions the assumption of the duality of structure and agency, instead of conceptualising them separately. We illustrate this approach with a discussion of a specific example of web personalised systems for online banking services, as an example of a complex inverse II.

Using a socio-psychological approach for understanding the influence of civil society on economic activity

Abstract: This paper proposes a socio-psychological approach for empirical research into the influence of civil society contexts on the practices of individual economic actors. This methodological approach is based on social theories that explicitly take into account the link between structure and agency, and the paper explains how such framework can be utilised in qualitative interview-based studies. To illustrate the usefulness of such socio-psychological approach, the paper reports on the findings of a research project that used this methodology as it sought to investigate the influence of Christianity on SME owner-managers’ conceptualisations of practice.

‘I always knew I would go to University’: a social realist account of student agency

Abstract: Academic development programs in higher education institutions in South Africa are often underpinned by discourses that view students as deficit. Margaret Archer’s social realist ontology offers a means of understanding reflexivities and agency of students in the higher education context. Using narrative data and drawing on Archer’s (2003) theory of mediation between structure and agency through internal conversations, this study examines the socio-economic background of one particular student and his agential journey to arrive at the academy. The analysis reveals Thando has a deliberate and determined stance towards achieving his project of obtaining a tertiary education in order to realize a better life for himself and his family. Despite what could be perceived as constraining socio-cultural conditions, Thando strategically circumvents such restrictions and acts in ways that help him pursue his project. It is argued that student agency needs to take a more central place within academic development programs in higher education.