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.

The role of reflective practice in educating about race, identity and difference

Abstract: This thesis sets out to examine how the supposed ‘transformative’ qualities of reflective practice that are cited largely uncritically in education and health literature, viewed as a panacea, might be applied to race and difference. Central to this is the work of Donald Schon on reflection-in-action, which elevates practice above theoretical knowledge that Schon casts as a product of ‘technical rationality, influenced by the growth of higher education. Schon’s work through its pre-eminence on action gained much greater exposure, in contrast to Boud and Mezirow who placed a greater emphasis on the role of emotion and through this to draw attention to differing types of knowledge offering more holistic ways of knowing. The study is influenced by critical lenses from institutional ethnography (Smith 1987, 1990, 2005, 2006) and critical race theory (Delgado and Stefancic 2001) that draw on intersectionality in drawing up nuanced constructions of race and difference embedded in ‘texts’ forming everyday racism and sexism in the workplace, preventing educators from actively opposing institutionally discriminatory practices. Work on race, viewed in this study as a series of moments, has most recently seen the ascendancy of post-racism, suggesting that ‘authentic’ racism is a relic of the past. This has accelerated the stripping of critical spaces to examine race in education, both for trainees and also current practitioners. Work on race and difference in particular though needs to produce critical examinations of structure and agency in work settings. Space, resources and expertise for this are being denied, replaced by simplistic calls for an uncritical ‘meritocracy’ in education underpinned by a neo-liberal managerialist approach, focusing on efficiency and achievement discourses. Both IE and CRT build data from the ground up using informant perspectives to map the flows of power rather than through a ‘sociological’ critique of policy to produce narratives examining how ‘ruling relations’ are embedded in everyday taken for granted work processes. Drawing on visual methods, as well as interviews and observations this study produced rich, deeply descriptive data to uncover ruling relations, evidenced in policy as well as everyday practice. Methodological reflexivity produced a critique of the use of NVIVO as a data processing and reducing tool. Increasingly regarded as an indispensable part of the qualitative researcher’s ‘kit’, it leads to a predilection for grounded theory and therefore misses more nuanced readings of data. ‘I-poems’ provided entry to power relations of race, gender, age, class and religion in the settings via a richer alternative hermeneutic process. Producing narratives which gave access to emotions in the workplace and in relation to race highlighted how the presence of bureaucratic systems for ‘handling’ difference and the presence of multicultural ‘performance’, a facet of post-race work have resulted in producing an illusion of ‘race work’ with little informed examination, buttressed by strong, emotional constructs. This results in reflection being used for solitary, internal contemplation as a palliative rather than being a site of collaborative, critically informed, transformative action.

Agency and Structure in Human Development.

Abstract: In this manuscript, I discuss the impact of Glen Elder's work on my own research. I pay particular attention to his perspectives on life course development and the role of agency and structure in shaping people's life decisions and life trajectories.

Commentary: Structure or agency? The importance of both for addressing social inequalities in health

Abstract: In their paper entitled ‘Rose’s population strategy of prevention need not increase social inequalities in health’, McLaren et al. offer a cogent response to our earlier paper ‘The inequality paradox: the population approach and vulnerable populations’. It is a pleasure, and was indeed our goal, to see a lively debate sparked by our initial musings. It is therefore an equal pleasure to respond to their paper as part of a further debate. McLaren et al.’s argument rests in part on the idea that not all population prevention interventions influence social inequalities in health to the same extent. They argue that their influence depends on whether the strategy is what they call structural or agentic; the former targets the conditions in which behaviours occur, the latter, behaviour change among individuals. They conclude that structural interventions are less likely to worsen social inequalities in health than agentic strategies. While this distinction is interesting it may be somewhat distracting given that social inequalities in health, we have argued in the past, arise due to the interplay of ‘both’ structure and agency. While McLaren et al. rightly cite Anthony Giddens as an important 20th century thinker with respect to the structure/agency debate, they fail to mention that among Giddens’ most important contributions to sociology has been his structuration theory. Structuration theory is based on the idea that both agency, defined as the ability to deploy a range of causal powers, and structure, objectified as the rules and resources in society, give rise to people’s social practices, which are the activities that make and transform the world we live in (referred to by people in public health as behaviours). Using the heuristic of collective lifestyles, it has been argued that an adequate tackling of inequalities in health should address all three aspects of structuration theory (agency, social structure and social practices) rather than structure or agency alone. Indeed, we thank the authors for bringing us back to some of our earlier reflections with regard to the structure/agency relationship as it plays a crucial role in our new argument regarding vulnerable populations. By using the term vulnerable populations, we sought to move away from risk factor epidemiological thought, which tends to focus largely on behaviour alone, and suggest that some groups are vulnerable with regard to their agency, their position with regard to the social structure and their social practices. It is only by focusing on all three that one would be able to reduce social inequalities in health, as all three are at the base of these inequalities. However, we agree with McLaren et al. that the use of the term vulnerable populations is not without problems, including potential stigmatization. One might consider instead the concept of exclusionary process developed by the Social Exclusion Knowledge Network of the WHO Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. Their critique of the notion of vulnerability is that it emphasizes a state without identifying causes, and that it becomes a characteristic of people and not the result of a process. On the contrary, an exclusionary process originates in the unequal distribution of four types of resources: material, cultural, social and political. It is the unequal distribution of these resources that reproduces health inequalities. This notion of exclusionary processes points to the importance of working upstream in order to address some of the original causes that led to the unequal distribution of these resources. A final note is warranted regarding our perspective on participation. The authors suggest that participatory strategies may ultimately be agentic if structural conditions are not addressed. It is true that the public health literature tends to be ideological and offers little theoretical breadth with regard to the conditions required in the participatory process. In our view participatory planning is a political process. This process Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Epidemiological Association

The Structuration Approach of Anthony Giddens

Abstract: Structuration Theory developed by Anthony Giddens, a British sociologist, in response to claims by post-structuralism, holds that the structures that humans find themselves in are determined for them, and volunteerism, that suggests that humans are completely free to create their lived environment. Structuration theory has a several unique nomenclature to explain the relationships that the human “agency” has with institutions or “structure”. This paper explains the use of the words and relates them to relevant examples. The understanding that Structuration Theory gives us can be very useful for understanding geographic phenomenon such as the idea of the time-space continuum. Urban arenas have a very complex set of relationships between humans and their environments; housing, movement within the environment, etcetera. The paper is also focused on understanding the connections between Giddens’ theory and the field of geography. The main focus of this paper is on exploring the complexities of Giddens’ Structuration Theory and understanding how it is currently being implemented in societies. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/hjsa.v5i0.7043 Himalayan Journal of Sociology & Anthropology-Vol. V (2012) 111-122