ABSTRACT
The concept of a social structure is a continuous, yet often implicit, resource for sociological explanations. Indeed, we might go as far as to suggest that ‘social structures’ are that peculiar realm of phenomena, utterly intangible yet real, towardswhich sociology dedicates its practice. WhenDurkheim produced the manifesto for the discipline he marked out its territory, named and defined its facticity, and legislated for its most appropriate ‘scientific’ method. This facticity Durkheim called ‘social facts’, which are, themselves, no more than instances or icons of social structures at work. They make reference to orderly, patterned and enduring relationships that hold between elements of a society. These orderly formations exist in their own right, sui generis, so they are objective; they are external, thus not available for change at the will or caprice of particular individuals; and they are constraining or coercive in
their impact on individual conduct. It is not possible to choose or think your way out of the pressures that social structures apply to social action. The supposed regularities, functional interrelations and equilibrium of such structures have led to the sustained application of ‘organismic’ analogies, as with Durkheim and the school of structural-functionalism; or to ‘mechanistic’ analogies, as with Parsons’s cybernetic ‘social system’, being employed in sociological explanations.
