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.

Agency in the social biographies of young people in Belgrade

Abstract: The article deals with the formation of the social biographies of young people through the interplay of structure and agency. The aim is to provide a grounded typology of patterns of young people's agency within the process of shaping social biographies. The structural context addressed in the article consists of family resources and habitus. The evidence comes from a longitudinal qualitative study with young people from families of workers and families of professionals in two urban neighbourhoods in Belgrade. The narrative analysis of young people's agency that combines longitudinal biographical data and lifelines accounts comes from case studies from the last wave of research. Several patterns of young people's agency that have emerged are explored as related to structural opportunities/constraints, and family habitus. It is argued that family resources and support are mechanisms by which social inequality in Serbian society is reproduced during transition to adulthood. On the other hand, young people a...

The Logic of Policy Change: Structure and Agency in Political Life

Abstract: Policy universes are usually characterized by stability, even when stability represents a suboptimal state. Institutions and processes channel and cajole agents along a policy path, restricting the available solution set. Herein, structure is usually to the fore. But what of agency? Do no actors choose? In fact, they do, even in policy environments of incrementalism, even amid hostility. But where agency makes for momentous change is during the punctuations of long policy equilibriums, perfect storms enabling nonincremental movement onto a new policy trajectory, departing from the old path. On both levels, the interaction effects of both structure and agency make a difference--incrementally in the first case, nonincrementally in the second. It's not just one damn thing after another, nor does just anything go.

Developing a concept of ‘refraction’: exploring educational change and oppositional practice

Abstract: Article outlining concept of 'refraction' developed as part of the RIAIPE3 study – an inter-university programme exploring equity and social cohesion policies in higher education. In much of our experiences of, and research in, educational policy we see how global and national policies are often reinterpreted and redirected at local and classroom level. In this paper, we highlight some initial thoughts relating to the development of the concept of ‘refraction’ as a lens for both theoretical development and for informing methodological approaches and empirical investigation that may provide rich and contextualised understandings of schools and practice. As an emerging concept ‘refraction’ draws on a range of existing traditions and approaches in the social sciences with several key areas for exploration and investigation. Broadly however, refraction in education may be seen as a change in direction arising from individuals’ and groups’ own beliefs, practice and trajectories that are at odds with dominant waves of reform and policies introduced into the field. This type of ‘bending’ or mediation occurs in various ways and for numerous reasons and must be viewed as crucial elements for analysis, as not only do they highlight alternative and pre-figurative antecedents, forms and models of practice, they also illustrate the interaction between ideology and structures and individual and collective practice and action. Firstly, from this perspective, we suggest that research in the field should be contextualised and analysed in relation to historical periodisation and the broader movements, cycles and waves of reform. Secondly, in researching current practice within a broader social-historical context, we can better understand and illuminate the effects of ideology and power and how these are exerted through policies. However, such analyses alone would imply a sense of determinism, with power and ideology as totalising and actors as merely passive and subject to its effects. Analyses therefore, need to account for and examine alternative discourse, movements and practice and the conditions under which they occur. Moreover, in attempting to address the dichotomy of structure and agency, there is a need to elicit qualitative accounts of practitioners in order to explore how, and to what extent, their own trajectories, life histories and professional identities influence their practice, mediate policies and negate the effects of ideology and power. Furthermore, approaches that elucidate pre-figurative practice, politics, discourse and language through narrative inquiry, and the ways in which actors make meaning of their own lives and professional practice, not only offer us detailed pictures of subjective realities but also allow us to highlight alternative practices and oppositional discourses that are often overlooked, or brushed aside, in official discourse. Set against the current period of significant social and political upheaval and uncertainty, we are witnessing threats to the prevailing and dominant perspectives and related policies that have orientated the form of education in the neo-liberal era. Whether the current financial crisis will result in the continued reassertion of more efficacious forms of neo-liberalism and privatisation, or whether competing discourses, ideologies and traditions will begin to influence the organisation and form of education remains to be seen. However, given such unprecedented changes, it is vital we develop conceptual tools that will enable us to investigate and explore changes in policy and practice and the conditions that inform acts of refraction between them, thereby placing context and history as central to explorations (Goodson & Norrie, 2005). As we shall see, the historical periodisation depends a good deal on cultural factors and these are refracted in very different ways in different continents and cultures.

Overcoming Structure and Agency: Talcott Parsons, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Theory of Social Action

Abstract: Since the 1960s, the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein has had a marked influence on the social sciences. As an important sub-field, the sociology of science has drawn extensively on Wittgenstein a...