Structuration Theory

Fundamentals

The notions of structure and agency were deeply reformulated by Giddens, who emphasizes that although action has strongly routinized aspects, not only is it conditioned by existing cultural structures but it also creates and re-creates those structures through the enactment process. To position his examination of the dualism between agency and structure, Giddens departed from the conceptualization of structure as a particular given or external form. Structure is that which gives form and shape to social life but is not itself the form and shape: It exists solely in and through the activities of human agents. Giddens also departed from the idea of agency as something merely “contained” within the individual; he posited it as referring to the flow or pattern of people’s actions rather than to people’s intentions in doing things. Although structural properties of societies and social systems are real, they have no physical existence. Rather, they depend on regularities of social reproduction. Consequently, the basic area of study in the social sciences consists of social practices ordered across time and space.

Therefore, besides the agency-structure duality, the notions of time and space are central to structuration theory. How people conceptualize time and space and how they manage to organize themselves across time and space are key issues in understanding the properties of social systems. The importance of studying the contextualities of institutionalized patterns of interactions across time and space is stressed by Giddens, whose views invest them with an inherent role in the investigation of social reproduction. He argues that cultural, ethnographic, or anthropological dimensions, which necessarily exist in all social research, are nonetheless frequently neglected in social studies. An analogous claim could easily be made with regard to organization studies: although the analysis of time/space is inseparable from the study of organizational change, context, history, and process were given only limited attention in literature on organizational change until quite recently. Although there have been considerable advances made in these areas, the field of management studies is still far from a mature understanding of the dynamics and effects of time, process, discontinuity, and context.

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