ABSTRACT
The fundamental problem of linking human agency and social structure stalks through the history of sociological theory. Basically it concerns how to develop an adequate theoretical account which deals simultaneously with men constituting society and the social formation of human agents. For any theorist, except the holist, social structure is ultimately a human product, but for any theorist, except advocates of psychologism, this product in turn shapes individuals and influences their interaction. However, successive theoretical developments have tilted either towards structure or towards action, a slippage which has gathered in momentum over time. Initially this meant that one element became dominant and the other subordinate:
human agency had become pale and ghostly in mid-century functionalism, whilst structure betook an evanescent fragility in the reflowering of phenomenology. Eventually certain schools of thought repressed the second element almost completely. On the one hand, structuralist Marxism and normative functionalism virtually snuffed out agency – the acting subject became increasingly lifeless whilst the structural or cultural components enjoyed a life of their own, self-propelling or self-maintaining. On the other hand, interpretative sociology busily banished the structural to the realm of objectification and facticity – human agency became sovereign whilst social structure was reduced to supine plasticity because of its constructed nature. Although proponents of these divergent views were extremely vociferous, they
were also extensively criticized and precisely on the grounds that both structure and action were indispensable in sociological explanation.2 Moreover, serious efforts to readdress the problem and to reunite structure and action had already begun from inside ‘the two Sociologies’ (Dawe 1970), when they were characterized in this manichean way. These attempts emerged after the early sixties from ‘general’ functionalists (e.g. Blau 1964; Gouldner 1976; Buckley 1967; Etzioni 1968; Eisenstadt and Curelaru 1977), ‘humanistic’ marxists (e.g. Lockwood 1964; Pizzorno 1968; Touraine 1968;Wellmer 1971; Habermas 1971 and 1972; Anderson 1976) and from interactionists confronting the existence of strongly patterned conduct (e.g. Goffman1964; Sacks et al. 1974). Furthermore, theywere joined in the same decade by a bold attempt to undercut the problem by disclosing ‘hidden structures’ which simultaneously governed overt structural organization and
observable action patterns (Levi-Strauss 1963; Sebag 1964; Piaget 1968; see also Boudon 1968; Glucksman 1974; Bottomore and Nisbet 1979). Building on these bases in a very eclectic manner, two new perspectives have
since begun to mature which directly tackle the relationship between structure and action and seek to unite them. One is the ‘morphogenetic approach’,3 advanced within general systems theory, whose best-known exponent is Walter Buckley (Buckley 1967; 1968; see alsoMaruyama 1963). Its sociological roots go back to the three kinds of theoretical revisionism mentioned in the last paragraph, but the other part of its pedigree is cybernetics. The second perspective is ‘structuration’, recently spelt out by Anthony Giddens. Whilst integrating some of the same revisionist material, this approach leans much more heavily on the newer linguistic structuralism, semiotic studies and hermeneutics. Both the ‘morphogenetic’ and ‘structuration’ approaches concur that ‘action’ and
‘structure’ presuppose one another: structural patterning is inextricably grounded in practical interaction. Simultaneously both acknowledge that social practice is ineluctably shaped by the unacknowledged conditions of action and generates unintended consequences which form the context of subsequent interaction. The two perspectives thus endorse the credo that the ‘escape of human history from human intentions, and the return of the consequences of that escape as causal influences upon human action, is a chronic feature of social life’ (Giddens 1979, 7). Where they differ profoundly is in how they conceptualize it, and how, on that basis, they theorize about the structuring (and restructuring) of social systems.
