Structure/Agency

Structure/Agency

The contents of this chapter are, in many senses, foundational to a lot of the arguments that follow within this book, as are many of the authors referred to.

Of all the concepts which sociology has developed to understand and investigate society, social structure is the most important and absolutely central to the discipline. The reason is simple. In order to conceive of society at all as a phenomenon which does exist objectively as a reality it is necessary to see that there is some definite form of organization to the way in which the persons who live in it relate to one another that shapes the nature of these relationships in particular ways. Society is these various patterns of social relationships that emerge and develop between its members, and social structure is the term (i.e. concept) that sociology uses to capture and describe the organization of these patterns and the shapes which they take.

It is not possible for sociology to think of society as simply an aggregate or collection of individuals per se because society consists of the ways in which they are collected together into a community of people. But it is at this point that the nature of what comprises social structure comes to constitute a problem for sociology and the issue of structure versus agency emerges as a central topic for the investigation of social life. Is the community which is society a collection of individuals who, as individuals, actively forge their relationships with one another and create society in the process of doing so? Or do the social relationships which make up society achieve an autonomous identity that establishes them as external conditions which determine the activities of the members of society as they enter into [Page 9]them? In both cases, society is seen to consist of relationships between its members which are structured, or organized, in particular ways and so has an objective existence. However, the first argument treats society and its structures as composed out of the actions of its individual members who are agents of their own actions and produce their relationships with one another in terms of this agency; whilst the second argument treats society and its structures as a system of relationships that determines the activities of the members of society through the ways in which it works as a system that conditions how people are able to behave within it. This is our dichotomy.

Both positions have been taken up in sociological theory, usually in opposition to one another, and the dispute between the two arguments continues to be an issue of contemporary debate. We may loosely refer to the two positions as individualistic, voluntaristic or action sociology as opposed to holistic, deterministic or structuralist sociology. However, what I want to suggest is that the assertion of one position rather than the other leads to irresolvable problems in both cases when one is attempting to deal with the actual nature of social relationships. Moreover, the effort to reconcile the two positions by arguing that social relationships are a product of human agency and also condition social activity within society often only restates the problem that social relationships are relationships between active individuals and an objectively existent society, without necessarily resolving it by showing how social action both produces and is a product of society at one and the same time. Let us outline first, then, the general features of the two positions as they argue about the nature of society, before moving into a more detailed investigation of the ideas of major sociological theorists who take up one or the other of these two positions or attempt to reconcile them as they seek to investigate and explain the nature of society and the bases of its organization (Cuff and Payne 1979).

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