Giddens' Theory of Structuration

IRISH © 2008 Journal of the Institute for Research in Social Sciences and Humanities Vol. 3, No. 2, pp. 279-286 Review Article Giddens’ Theory of Structuration S. Gregory* “Theory and research that capture the contours of collectives have been fundamental objectives of social science since its inception.” (Cohen, 1989: 273). There are different traditions of thought that have adopted different perspectives and conceptualised the social reality emphasising one aspect over the other, drawing inspiration from the conceptual development of natural science. However, in the recent past, according to Giddens and Turner, a dramatic change has occurred within the philosophy of natural sciences which has inevitably influenced thinking about the social sciences. This, according to them, has resulted in the proliferation of approaches in theoretical thinking (1989: 2). Anthony Giddens stands out and enjoys a distinctive position, through the evolution of his theory of structuration, giving a major new perspective to the contemporary social thought. This paper attempts to locate the significance of Gidden’s theory in the development of sociological thought and dwells on the salient features of his theory. II Giddens and Turner in the introduction to their edited book “Social Theory Today” trace out the major streams of thought that are dominating the contemporary sociological research. (ibid: 2-4) Some traditions of thought which had previously been either little known or ignored, have become much more prominent. These include phenomenology, particularly associated with the writings of Alfred Schultz, hermeneutics, as developed in the work of such authors as Gadamer and Ricoeur, and critical theory, as represented in recent times by the works of Hebermas. There are older traditions of thought, such as symbolic interactionism in the United States and structuralism or poststructuralism in Europe which have become revitalised and examined with new interest. More recently developed types of thinking include ethno-methodology, * Reader, Department of Anthropology, Kannur University Campus, Palayad, Thalassery 670661. Email: [email protected]. 280 S Gregory structuration theory and the theory of practice, the last of which is associated in particular with Bourdieu. To this emerging diversity of traditions and schools of thought in social theory, Giddens and Turner add Parsonian structuralfunctionalism to be something of a mainstream which, even if it is navigated by fewer than before, still seems to exert a strong appeal with a considerable revival in the recent past. (ibid: 2-3) The apparent explosion of competing versions of social theory seems to conceal, according to them, more consistency and integration between rival view points than may appear at first sight. They discern frequent overlapping between different approaches than what has generally been perceived. They could see some common lines of development shared by a wide range of the theoretical perspectives which have come into prominence over the recent past. Further, they could realise some sort of progress towards resolving issues which earlier according to them, either appeared intractable or were not analysed in a direct fashion. (ibid: 3-4). III Giddens believed in the failure of social sciences especially when thought of them as a natural science of society. He recognised the basic difference between society and nature. While nature is not man-made, according to him, society is created and recreated afresh, by the participants in every social encounters. The production of society, for him, is a skilled performance, sustained and “made to happen” by human beings who are competent members of society as well as practical social theorists (1977: 14-15). Recognising the wish to establish a natural science of society remaining as one of the dominant standpoints of contemporary thinking, Giddens cautions that those who still wait for a Newton are not only waiting for a train that won’t arrive, they are in the wrong station altogether (ibid: 13). Thus, Giddens was firm in his farewell to the natural science of society before setting on his own theory of society. IV Giddens identifies the divisions which have separated functionalism including (systems theory) and structuralism on the one hand from hermeneutics and the various forms of “interpretative sociology” on the other. This provides Giddens’ Theory of Structuration 281 a backdrop for his initiation of the theory of structuration. According to him, “those schools of thought which tend towards naturalism, subjectivity has been regarded as something of a mystery, or almost a residual phenomenon, while for hermeneutics it is the world of nature which is opaque. In interpretative sociologies, according to him, action and meaning are accorded primacy in the explication of human conduct. Thus, Giddens recognises an imperialism of the subject in interpretative sociologies while that of the social object, in functionalism and structuralism. This compels him to come out with his own ambitions in the formulation of structuration theory, to put an end to each of these empire-building endeavours (1984: 1-2). According to Cohen, Giddens has chosen to develop the insights which are fundamental to structuration theory in response to theories and schools of thought that already stand at some remove from positivistic points of view. The issues of structuration theory, according to Cohen, are of a different order than those which absorb the attention of positivistic social theorists. (1989: 275) As Giddens himself expounds, in structuration theory, in the conceptualisation of human knowledgeability and its involvement in action, he seeks to appropriate some of the major contributions of interpretative sociologies while a hermeneutic standpoint is accepted in so far as it is acknowledged that the description of human activities demands a familiarity with the forms of life expressed in those activities (1984: 3). V As Cohen puts, Giddens is unwilling to shape his inquiries to conform to a predetermined set of epistemological principles (1989: 276). Giddens himself clarifies his position when he says that concentration upon epistemological issues draws attention away from the more ontological concerns of social theory upon which structuration theory primarily concentrates (1984, PXX). The objectives Giddens pursues in the formation of an ontological theory of the constitution of social life do not stand apart from the concerns of social science at large (Cohen, 1989: 276). The basic domain of study of the social sciences according to the theory of structuration, as Giddens declares, is neither the experience of the individual actor, nor the existence of any form of societal totality, but social practices ordered across space and time (1984: 2-3). Elucidating the consistency, 282 S Gregory the structuration theory has, with the post-empiricist view of nature and objectives of ontological insights, Cohen asserts that the structurationist ontology is addressed exclusively to the constitutive potentials of social life namely, the generic human capacities and fundamental conditions through which the course and outcomes of social processes and events are generated and shaped in a manifold of empirically distinguishable ways (1989: 279). VI Giddens seems to pronounce structuralism and post-structuralism “dead” arguing that they have failed to come to terms with human “agency” as well as with the process by which such agency works to produce, reproduce and change structure analysis. For him, the capacity to structure the social universe and thereby obviate the scientific laws depicting the universe resides in the notion of agency (1984: 6). According to Giddens, agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place. Here, by agency, he implies the power. Further, for him agency concerns events of which an individual is the perpetrator, in the sense that, the individual could, at any phase, in a given sequence of conduct, have acted differently. Whatever happened would not have happened if that individual had not intervened (1984: 9). Cohen identifies a distinguishing feature of social agency in that the interventions undertaken by social agents are, to some greater or lesser extent, always under their own control. According to him, structuration theory directs a great deal of attention to both social and material constraints that any individual agent may be unable to change. This is the reason why, he believes, the theory makes ample allowance for the limited options available for the exercise of agency in any given set of circumstances (1989: 284-85). Cohen, while highlighting the denial of thorough-going determinism in structuration theory, he also identifies its opposition to the unqualified freedom as no agent is sufficiently skilled to perform every type of practice that his or Giddens’ Theory of Structuration 283 her fellow actors have mastered. Thus, for Cohen, the conception of agency in structuration theory resists the polarities of both thorough-going determinism and unqualified freedom while preserving all possibility between these extremes. VII Cohen (1989: 286) understands the social practices as elaborated in the theory of structuration as skillful procedures, methods or techniques appropriately performed by social agents. Thus, the performance of social practices distinguishes social life from nature; the basis of this distinction consists of the skills and resources required to perform any given practice. Thus, human consciousness arises as a major theme in structuration theory. Giddens distinguishes two modes of consciousness namely practical consciousness and discursive consciousness though he himself does not intend the distinction to be a rigid and impermeable one. On the contrary, the division between them could be altered, according to him, by many aspects of the agent’s socialisation and learning experiences. The difference is only of what can be said and what is characteristically simply done (1984: 7). However the notion of practical consciousness is, for him fundamental to structuration theory (1987: 6). As Cohen puts it, the distinctive quality of practical consciousness is that agents need be only tacitly aware of the skills they have mastered. This allows for practices that can be performed without being directly motivated (1989: 286). Giddens also proposes unconscious mode which refers to the modes of recall to which the agent does not have direct access because there is a negative “bar” of some kind, inhibiting its unmediated incorporation within the reflexive monitoring of conduct and more particularly, within discursive consciousness. (1984: 49). VIII Giddens introduces the notion of structuration as the true explanatory locus of structural analysis. To study structuration, according to him, is to attempt to determine the conditions which govern the continuity and dissolution of structures or types of structures. Putting it differently, he says, to enquire into the process of reproduction, is for him, to specify the connections between structuration and structure (1977: 120). Thus, he recognises the duality of 284 S Gregory structure in the study of social reality and considers it fundamental to his theory of structuration. To put it in his own words, “crucial to the idea of structuration is the theorem of the duality of structure”. According to him, the constitution of agents and structures are not two independently given sets of phenomena, a dualism, but represent a duality. According to the notion of the duality of structure, Giddens identifies the structural properties of social systems as both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organise. Structure as memory traces, and as instantiated in social practices, is in a certain sense, according to Giddens, more “internal” than exterior to their activities. The duality of structure, for him, is always the main grounding of continuities in social reproduction across time space. The flow of action continually produces consequences which are unintended by actors, and these unintended consequences also may form unacknowledged conditions of action in a feed back fashion (1984: 25-27). Giddens’ most significant contribution in the duality of structure, according to Cohen, is to treat rules regarding regularities of conduct as structural properties of social collectivities. Cohen believes that it is fundamental to the duality of structure that the structural properties of collectivities which are the rules and resources not only serve as the media of social reproduction but are also reproduced as an outcome of this process (1989: 298-301). According to Giddens and Turner, for structuration theory, agents, action and interaction are constrained by, yet generative of the structural dimension of social reality (1989: 8) IX According to the theory of structuration, structure implies the rules and resources which exist as memory traces. Through the reflexive monitoring of action, which is purposive or intended character of human behaviour and reflexive self-regulation by means of the feed back effect of the homeostatic causal loops, these memory traces reproduce social system. Social system, in turn, is the patterning of social relations across time and space. The structural properties are the structured or the institutionalised features stretching across time and space while the structural principles are Giddens’ Theory of Structuration 285 those factors involved in the overall institutional alignment of a society or type of society. The structures are the rule-resource sets that are implicated in the institutional articulation of social systems. To study structures, including structural principles, is to study major aspects of the transformation/mediation relations which influence social and system integration. The social integration is the reciprocity of practices between actors in circumstances of co-presence, understood as continuities in and disjunctions of encounters while the system integration is the reciprocity between actors or collectivities across extended time-space, outside conditions of co-presence. These provide the conceptual core of the theory of structuration. (1984: 375-7). X Archer (1982: 457), examining the theory of structuration, comments that in elaborating his theory of “structuration”, Giddens completely ignores existing efforts to perform the same task of re-uniting structure and action from within general systems theory. Turner mainly includes Giddens in the group of people who believe that laws and other theoretical tools such as modelling are temporal and pertinent to a specific historical period and they are never useful since the basic nature of the social universe is constantly reshaped. If so, he charges them as violating it in their own work. He questions why Giddens would bother to develop a “theory of structuration” which posits relations among invariant properties of the universe, unless he sensed that he had penetrated beneath other surface historical changes to the core of human action, interaction and organisation (1989: 160). However, as Cohen (1989: 306) puts, what is beyond doubt is that Giddens has succeeded in bringing the production and reproduction of social life into the centre of concerns in social theory. References Archer, M.S. 1982. “Morphogenesis Versus Structuration: On combining Structure and Action”, British Journal of Sociology, 33(4): 455-83. Cohen, I. J. 1989. “Structuration Theory and Social Praxis”. In A.Giddens and J. Turner (Ed.). Social Theory Today. Delhi: Disha Publications. 286 S Gregory Giddens, A. 1977. News Rules of Sociological Method. London: Hutchinson. Giddens, A. 1984. The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. Cambridge: Polity. Giddens, A and J. Turner. 1989. “Introduction”. In A. Giddens and J. Turner (Ed). Social Theory Today. op.cit. Turner, J. 1989. “Analytical Theorising”. In A. Giddens and J. Turner (Ed.). Social Theory Today. op.cit.