ABSTRACT
I want now to continue my critique of Giddens on a different level and in a different way. The thrust of my argument so far has been that the synthesis he offers ejects ideas that are important for sociology, and that by itself, structuration theory does not embrace social reality in the way that he claims. This is not to say that it is simply wrong and to send it back with a red cross beside it; all the elements have something to aid our understanding, but they do not fi t together in the way that he claims, and the understanding that it offers is partial. The social world is more complex and varied than is imagined in the theory; we require a range of theories that might be quite incompatible to begin to make sense of it.
