ABSTRACT

The material continuity of biography formation also is vital to the unbroken quality of the structuration process in place because it contributes to the continuity of local institutions. The continuity of any local institution cannot rest merely on the physical persistence of facilities under its control or on the formal rules, norms, and regulations that it perpetuates. In some measure, the continuity of a place's institutions depends upon the memory traces, practical knowledge, unformalized rules and norms, and complex skills employed by individuals when they "reconstitute the practices 'layered' into [those] institutions in deep time-space" (Giddens 1981, 165). In other words, the intergenerational perpetuation of institutions in place requires a "flow of [human] conduct" (Shotter 1983). It requires a succession of path-project intersections whereby individuals, acting within a context of largely unacknowledged power relations, unintentionally reproduce conditions or connect the momentary event with the institutional durée, while simultaneously forming their own biographies. Because individual socialization (or biography formation) and institutional (or social) reproduction are diaiectically intertwined in the process of structuration, each constantly becoming the other, the material continuity and time-space flow of the two in place cannot be rent asunder.