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.

Reflexivity, structure and agency: using reflexivity to understand Further Education students’ Higher Education decision-making and choices

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate Archer’s reflexive modalities in relation to Further Education (FE) students’ higher education (HE) decision-making and choices. To do this, it d...

Choosing a career in Saudi Arabia: the role of structure and agency in young people's perceptions of technical and vocational education

Abstract: Although the Saudi education system has provided an opportunity to pursue varying pathways for young people, there is a limited understanding of young people’s post-secondary education and employment trajectories in Saudi Arabia. Challenges to implementing educational strategies and reforms include a large youth population, diverse stakeholders, economic diversification and limited education and employment opportunities. With the launch of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030, education and labour policy efforts included an expansion to the vocational education and training (TVET) sector to stimulate economic growth and increase the employment of young Saudi citizens in place of foreign employees. However, the relatively low enrolment in vocational education and training (TVET) and its weak status can provide insight into the way young people make decisions about their education to work transitions and highlights a variety of individual and structural challenges young people continuously negotiate in the rapidly changing country. Quantitative empirical research studies fall short in explaining the motivations behind young people’s choices and the extent to which choice is available. This research addresses this gap, employing a qualitative constructivist methodology. Through 18 focus groups and 16 individual interviews, this thesis shares the sentiments of 152 young men and women in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia who were enrolled in initial TVET as well as secondary students at a transition point where TVET became an option. The findings indicate that ‘choice’ is often illusionary, as youth aspirations are not always in line with opportunities and are influenced by the dominant characteristics of the education pathways and the labour market. Young people are influenced by embedded cultural factors such as social networks, family and gender. In making choices that are socially acceptable, young people minimise potential risks and social sanctions by ‘colouring within the lines’ of social acceptability rather than re-drawing them.

Narrating political opportunities: explaining strategic adaptation in the climate movement

Abstract: This article advances theory on social movements’ strategic adaptation to political opportunity structures by incorporating a narrative perspective. Our theory explains how people acquire and use knowledge about political opportunity structures through storytelling about the movement’s past, present, and imagined future. The discussion applies the theory in an ethnographic case study of the climate movement’s mobilization around the UN Climate Summit in Paris, 2015. This analysis demonstrates how a dominant narrative of defeat about the prior protest campaign in Copenhagen, 2009 shaped the strategizing process. While those who experienced Copenhagen as a success preferred strategic continuity, those who experienced defeat developed a “Copenhagen narrative” to advance strategic adaptation by projecting previously experienced threats and opportunities onto the Paris campaign. Yet by relying on a retrospective narrative, movement actors tended to overlook emerging political opportunities. We demonstrate that narrative analysis is a useful tool for understanding the link between structure and agency in social movements and other actors affected by (political) opportunity structures.

Pierre Bourdieu y las Relaciones Internacionales: El poder de las prácticas, las prácticas del poder

Abstract: This article demonstrates how the work of Pierre Bourdieu offers a pro­ductive way to practice research in international relations. It especially explores the alternatives opened by Bourdieu in terms of a logic of practice and practical sense that refuses an opposition between general theory and empirical research. Bourdieu’s preference for a relational approach, which destabilizes the different versions of the opposition between structure and agency, avoids some of the traps commonly found in political science in general and theorizations of international relations in particular: essentialization and ahistoricism; a false dualism between constructivism and empirical research; and an absolute opposi­tion between the collective and the individual. The “thinking tools”of field and habitus, which are both collective and individualized, are examined in order to see how they resist such traps. The article also engages with the question of whether the international itself challenges some of Bourdieu’s assumptions, especially when some authors identify a global field of power while others deny that such a field of power could be different from a system of different national fields of power. In this context, the analysis of transversal fields of power must be untied from state centrism in order to discuss the social transformations of power relations in ways that do not oppose a global?international level to a series of national and subnational levels.

Agency and Structure

Abstract: The status of the individual or of the accountable human agent today is rather precarious: not only in the political arena (in the face of technocratic and totalitarian dangers), but also in the context of social and sociological theory. Several factors have contributed to this condition. At least since the turn of the century, strong positivist trends in sociology have tended to deemphasize if not efface the individual in favour of larger collectivities or of quasi-organic, functional imperatives. During subsequent decades, philosophically more ambitious efforts-predicated on non-positivst premisses-were undertaken, seeking to explore the ontological underpinnings and the historical genesis of individual consciousness and autonomy. No doubt, efforts of this kind provided a valuable antidote to the modern infatuation with ‘subjectivity’ and egotentrism. an infatuation permeating in large measure both rationalist and empiricist perspectives in recent centuries. Nevertheless, if rashly or thoughtlessly pursued, the endeavour to ‘decentre the subject’ and to dislodge modem ‘egological’ metaphysics is prone to entail detrimental or noxious effects: practically/politically by lending implicit support to collectivist designs, and theoretically by obfuscating important themes of social analysis. For clearly, as long as the modem aspiration of human autonomy is still alive, ‘social action’-no matter how closely interwoven with non-intentional forces-is bound to remain a crucial sociological topic. Contemporary social theory offers few if any guideposts for tackling the topic in a manner congruent with its intrinsic complexity. Against this background, Anthony Giddens’ study must be seen as a rare exception and indeed as a major contribution to the task of formulating a post-metaphysical theory of human agency. Giddens, known as the author of a series of important and justly acclaimed texts on sociological theory,’ places his new study squarely in the context of the malaise or ‘state of disarray’ characterizing the social sciences today (pp. 2343 7 t t h e disarray resulting from the disintegration of the ‘orthodox consensus’ which prevailed in English-speaking countries during the post-war period and which was marked by the widespread endorsement of the ‘theory of industrial society’ (a society devoid of class conflicts and ideological fervour) and by the intellectual commitment t o various brands of positivism, especially ‘functionalism’ (associated with ‘the idea that biology provides the proximate model for sociology’) and ‘naturalism’ (understood to refer to ‘the thesis that the logical frameworks of natural and social science are in essential respects the same’). Surveying the ‘Babel of theoretical voices’ that ‘clamour for attention’ following the collapse of this consensus, Giddens (pp. 238-40) distinguishes