In this book I propose to embark on an exploration of one of the most difficult yet fundamental concepts of the natural and social sciences, the concept of “structure.” This will not be an easy voyage – many a tall ship has been wrecked in the course of such an enterprise. Nonetheless, the call of the open sea can be still heard and the time seems to be ripe for another daring undertaking. Let us then accept the challenge and investigate this much used and abused notion which, as Neil Smelser pointed out some time ago (1967), constitutes the chief conceptual focus of sociology and of numerous cognate fields as well.

Since the 1970s, under the stewardship of Robert K. Merton and Peter Blau, several conferences and ensuing publications have resulted in (a) increasing the visibility of the issue of “social structure,” (b) mapping many previously held positions on the matter, and (c) heightening the realization that more progressive work was needed at both the conceptual and empirical levels (Blau 1975a and b; Blau and Merton 1981; Coser 1975). This was certainly facilitated by the dynamic influence of French structuralism, which at the time still reigned supreme. In the 1980s, this progress has been relatively halted, given the later misadventures of formal structuralism and the significant change of course in the social sciences away from the consideration of large social structures and more in the direction of presumed processes of “microstructuration.”