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Structuration Theory

Structuration theory has been a popular conceptual framework for studying social and spatial behavior since the 1980s, when it was initiated by the famed British sociologist Anthony Giddens. Geographers and planners with their own substantive theories about human behaviors have been able to think of the structures enabling or constraining those behaviors and, correspondingly, the behaviors that manifest those structures. This entry reviews the geographical and planning applications of the theory, after introducing structurationist thinking with an example.

Essentials

Structuration theory essentially surmounted the long-standing division in the social sciences between “micro” approaches, which focused on the behavior of individual human beings (e.g., the humanistic schools of thought), and “macro” approaches, which emphasized social structures and relations at the expense of an understanding of the human subject (e.g., structural Marxism). Structuration recognizes that human beings are sentient, knowledgeable agents; that is, they always possess consciousness about themselves and their world, however limited. This view depicts culture as the bodies of knowledge that people take for granted—that is, common sense, which allows them to negotiate their way through everyday life. Structures consist of the rules and resources that are drawn on in everyday life, simultaneously enabling and constraining human actions. In everyday life, actors draw on structural rules and resources, and in so doing, they reproduce those structures. Therefore, the socialization of the individual and the reproduction of society and place are two sides of the same coin. In everyday life, people reproduce the world, largely unintentionally, and in turn, their social structures reproduce them through socialization. In forming their individual biographies, people re-create and transform their social worlds. Thus, human beings are both produced by and producers of their worlds in time and space. History and geography are therefore continually produced through the dynamics of everyday life, the routine interactions and transient encounters through which societies are reproduced. For Giddens, the stretching of human activities across time and space is fundamental to the exertion of power. This process Giddens calls time-space distanciation, which geographers have called time-space convergence or time-space compression.

Structurationist Thinking About a School Closure

An example involving closure of a school can be helpful in explaining structuration theory. Begin thinking as a structurationist would by imagining how you would react to an announcement that your neighborhood school is closing, something that has now happened so often in Western societies that most people have had this experience or know someone who has. Core structuration concepts sensitize a researcher to how people could or did act in general, that is, on an ontological level. In this example, application of structuration theory can help us interpret the effectiveness of residents who attempt to prevent school closures. Note therefore that structuration theory is a “second-order” theory and does not prescribe a specific course(s) of action in this particular situation. Consequently, with this and similar research applications, a supplementary “first-order” substantive theory is required for explaining, for example, why schools close and why residents get upset.

Actors

From the perspective of structuration theory, a neighborhood resident in this example is a social agent or actor who thinks about the closure of a school in his or her neighborhood, and thus, he or she will be reflexive about it. Residents may reflect from within their “practical consciousness” about how they should have reacted earlier to social trends culminating in declining student enrollments. Moreover, they will be able to share their feelings about the closure with friends and neighbors, from within their discursive consciousness. They may be sad or angry about its negating a period of childhood and thus threatening personal “ontological security.” Even an ex-resident who lives many miles away, or, in the lingo of structuration, is “time-space distanciated,” may think as an absent, as opposed to a present, actor about contacting residents or the authorities to fight the closure.

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