Introduction: how does structure influence agency?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
Summary
How does structure influence agents? To ask the question invites social theorists to advance a process, that is a causal mechanism linking the two. On the whole, they have reached a negative consensus about what this process is not. It is not social determinism. Structural and cultural influences cannot be modelled on hydraulic pressures. If they cannot, then something else is involved in the process. That something could be the properties and powers of agents themselves, which is the thesis of this book.
How structures are variously held to influence agents is dependent upon what ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ are held to be. There is no ontological consensus whatsoever about what they are within social theory. The sole and slim agreement is that in some sense ‘structure’ is objective, whilst in some sense ‘agency’ entails subjectivity. Both logically and traditionally, this minimal accord was compatible with accounts of the process by which one influenced the other that are diametrically opposed. Either structure or agency could be held to be dominant, and the other element to be correspondingly weak, so weak that it was deprived of causal powers – such that structure melted into ‘constructs’ or agents faded into träger.
More recently, it has become popular to suggest that we abandon the quest for a causal mechanism linking structure and agency, in favour of ‘transcending’ the divide between objectivity and subjectivity altogether.
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- Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation , pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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