Giddens, Anthony

Anthony Giddens (b. 1938), internationally famous British sociologist, innovative publisher, public intellectual, and, until recently, Director of the London School of Economics, has, since the early 1970s, been the author of a remarkable succession of seminal contributions to social theory. In founding the tradition of structuration theory during the 1970s, and developing it in the 1980s, he provided an original and systematic means to combine the central sociological concepts of structure and agency. Structuration theory synthesises a rich array of philosophical and sociological approaches to create a theory of social life that places socially situated practices at its core in order to avoid an exaggeration of either the subjectivism of an overly agency-based approach or the objectivism of an overly structure-based approach. Giddens used this ...