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.

“Girls Just Aren't Interested”: The Social Construction of Interest in Girls' Sport

Abstract: Given the significant increase in the number of women and girls participating in sport, it is now a commonly held belief that girls have ample opportunities to participate in sport and, consequently, that girls who do not participate choose to do so because they simply lack interest in sport. Using qualitative methodologies and the sociology of accounts, the author examines a recreational sport program for low-income minority girls in the metropolitan Los Angeles area. Applying Giddens's theory of structuration to emergent themes from participant observations and interviews, the findings illustrate how structures, as they are embodied through the everyday interactions of their participants, simultaneously constrain certain forms of agency while enabling other forms. This study advances sociology's disciplinary understanding of social construction by illustrating how social structure and cultural discourses interact in shaping everyday social interactions.

Code and Habitus: comparing the accounts of Bernstein and Bourdieu

Abstract: This paper compares Bourdieu's notion of habitus with Bernstein's concept of code in an attempt to show how the apparent similarities mask more deeply seated differences in the way the concepts are conceived and used. We argue that Bernstein is following an essentially structuralist agenda of the kind that Bourdieu has set himself against. To this end, Bourdieu seeks to overcome the rigidities of ‘rules’ (which lie at the heart of the idea of Bernstein's code), with the more flexible notion of ‘strategy’ which incorporates the idea that structure and agency are implicit in each other rather than being dichotomous entities.

Between Individual Agency and Structure in HIV Prevention: Understanding the Middle Ground of Social Practice

Abstract: When HIV prevention targets risk and vulnerability, it focuses on individual agency and social structures, ignoring the centrality of community in effective HIV prevention. The neoliberal concept of risk assumes individuals are rational agents who act on information provided to them regarding HIV transmission. This individualistic framework does not recognize the communities in which people act and connect. The concept of vulnerability on the other hand acknowledges the social world, but mainly as social barriers that make it difficult for individuals to act. Neither approach to HIV prevention offers understanding of community practices or collective agency, both central to success in HIV prevention to date. Drawing on examples of the social transformation achieved by community action in Australia and Brazil, this article focuses on this middle ground and its role in effective HIV prevention.

What sort of a practice is eating

Abstract: The close of the 20th century witnessed a renewal of interest in theories of prac­ tice, an interest sufficient to make possible the rhetorical announcement of the birth of The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory (Schatzki et al. 2001). The move has had some considerable significance, even if Omar Lizardo (2009: 714) may have overstated the case when proclaiming that ‘It can be said without much danger of exaggeration that practices now play as central a role in socio­ logical thinking as values and normative patterns did during the functionalist period.’ Some foundations had been laid three decades earlier. In a widely cited article about trends in theory in anthropology, published in 1984, Sherry Ortner (1984: 127) observed that ‘a new key symbol of theoretical orientation is emerging, which may be labelled “practice”’ (or ‘action’ or ‘praxis’). She described its emergence from the intersection of theoretical schools in anthropology formed in the 1960s, and inter-disciplinary Marxism and political economy in the 1970s. The principal authors credited with the development were two sociologists, Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, the anthropologist, Marshall Sahlins and the social theorist, Michel Foucault. A primary common objective was to account for action in a manner that was complementary to the study of systems and structures (Ortner 1984: 147-8). In European sociology, the legacy of struc­ turalism figured strongly in the intellectual context in which the problem of con­ ceptualizing the relation between structure and agency was given proirity. The concept of Praxis played a central role, and was conceived as a bridging device between equally flawed holist and individualist explanations. Nevertheless, holism was more comprehensively attacked than was individualism; discomfit­ ure with a previously rampant structuralism always threatened that agency might be allowed to dissolve into personal autonomy, a temptation to which many suc­ cumbed. In the process, despite the positions adumbrated in works like Outline of a Theory of Practice (Bourdieu 1972) and The Constitution of Society (Giddens 1984) being seminal for social theory and inspiring empirical studies, the orientation towards the analysis of practice per se palled. It was left to a second generation of advocates to re-centre the concept of practices.

“I Didn't Want to Die So I Joined Them”: Structuration and the Process of Becoming Boy Soldiers in Sierra Leone

Abstract: Child soldiers are generally portrayed either as victims of structural forces that are beyond their control and comprehension or as knowing agents of mayhem in search of revolutionary change or personal gain. Yet these singular perspectives are bedevilled by their dialectical limitations, the one overlooking capacities of individual will, the other prone to discounting historical and socioeconomic contexts. In this paper, through the lens of structuration theory that postulates the interconnectedness of structure and agency, we examine how boys were transformed into armed and organized combatants in Sierra Leone's recent civil war. Drawing from a series of interviews with a cohort of boys who fought with the rebel Revolutionary United Front (RUF), we map out their experiences and perspectives in a way that highlights the juxtaposition of profound social forces and the capacity for personal agency that underlay the process of becoming child soldiers. We conclude by ruminating on the challenges of ...