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.

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Abstract: The problem of linking ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’ remains unresolved – as Weber left it. This paper challenges the view that their reconciliation is impossible, as some theorists have maintained. Their case is that the entities involved – subjective meanings and objective relationships – are too ontologically different to be combined. From the stratified ontology of Social Realism, which acknowledges that different properties and powers pertain to different components and levels of social reality, this is no barrier in principle to their combination. However, in practice Realists have not given an adequate account of how ‘subjectivity’ and ‘objectivity’ are linked, which also weakens Realism’s solution to the ‘problem of structure and agency’. This paper offers a refinement: the human power of reflexivity is viewed as mediating between our subjective concerns and our objective social contexts. Refl exive deliberations account for what agents actually do – and they do not all do the same thing – under very similar social circumstances. The introduction of reflexivity enables the (socially) objective and the (personally) subjective to be combined into a single account of socially structured and structuring action.

Activist Knowledge: Interrogating the Ideational Landscape of Social Movements

Abstract: Over the past three decades, there has been a rising concern about the ability of social theories to address the idea-construction (ideational) processes in social and political movements. This article argues that in spite of the recent growing emphasis on the cognitive dimension of collective action, many theoretical attempts and the studies influenced by them evidence significant shortcomings in explaining the (trans)formation of ideas and ideologies in social movements. These shortcomings stem from a failure at the metatheoretical level, that is, their failure to hold an integrative and interdisciplinary approach to comprehending the relation between changing social structures, dynamic patterns of experience and the social consciousness of actors. In proposing a solution, the article starts with defining the ideational landscape of social movements by introducing the concept of 'activist knowledge'. Then, it will argue for the necessity of developing an integrative, interdisciplinary, metatheoretical framework through a radical reconstruction of old metaphors like agency and structure in the light of the recent global changes.

Boundaries, Work and Identity Practices: Being "'Asian" Migrant Educational Workers.

Abstract: This article draws on the concept of boundaries in understanding the identity practices of a group of Malaysian skilled migrant women working in the Australian education sector. Drawing on in-depth interviews with these women on their migration and work experiences, the author explores the concept of boundary work within an educational framework. The findings of this qualitative study indicate that these migrant women negotiate discourses of cultural binaries to explain their migration experiences and at the same time rework these discourses of cultural binaries. They draw on multiple cultural and educational resources in negotiating social and symbolic boundaries. In this process, their identities as transnational educational workers are located at the interplay of structure and agency.

Structure and agency : changes in personal agency in the life domain of young women in Malta

Abstract: This article examines changes in the degree of personal agency in young women, with post–compulsory education, in the last 50 years in a Southern European reality. It explores strategies of negotia...

Ethic and Value Considerations in the Design of Interactional Agency

Abstract: This paper continues the exploration of network society ethics and value considerations that have moved more clearly toward interactional agency. Interactional agency produces relationships between agents and structure. Agents and structure each have their own powers and capabilities that social science has considered fundamental to sociality. In a network society the interaction of the two produces new relational patterns. At a sociological level, the Internet is an exemplar of the generation of new relational patterns and can be thought of as a social structure that facilitates the enactment of relations through the free use of agency. Within such a view, it is possible to posit an enactment approach that considers relations to be a phenomenon as important as structure and agency. As the network society continues to expand, relations will more clearly be seen as both fundamental indicators and generative mechanisms in their own right. When relations are considered to be generative mechanisms, the context in which relations differentiate new forms as well as the new social forms are critical to ethical analysis. This paper introduces a contextual approach that may be useful in any future contextual analysis of this type. An initial meta-ethical framework for extending the disclosive capability assessment format to incorporate relational considerations is proposed. A case is argued here that considerations of contextualized relationships between and among human and non-human actors will be a major concern in the network society for the foreseeable future.