Structural Determinism

Conceptual Overview

Structural determinism has been used as a conceptual and mechanistic framework at multiple levels of analysis across many fields of study, including sociology, philosophy, linguistics, technology, sociobiology, psychology, and political science. Examples of structural determinism research are found in the following areas:

1. In sociology, structural determinism has been used as a framework for explaining migration across social classes. For instance, expanding Goldthorpe's work examining social mobility in Britain, Erickson and Goldthorpe studied social migration patterns in more than a dozen countries. They found four dominant factors were the primary determinants of mobility across social classes: inheritance, hierarchy, affinity, and economic sector. At a different level of sociological level of analysis, Anderson responded to structural deterministic (among other) critiques of his work on inner-city community organization. One of his observations was that critical arguments of his work (including those based on structural determinism) contained elements of ideology and dogma, which prevent a complete understanding of his view of social dynamics occurring in inner-city neighborhoods and social organizations. Likewise, both Nash and Benford describe recent movements in sociological theories and frameworks away from the structural determinism of resource mobilization and political opportunity models.

2. In philosophy, structural determinism is an epistemological contention that is controversial and provocative for its explicit denial of free will and choice. For example, determinism is a philosophical doctrine holding that every event, mental as well as physical, has a cause, and that, the cause being given, the event can be foretold. It is the conceptual opposite of a philosophy of free will, as in the capacity, power, or ability of the human mind to choose a course of action or make a decision from among alternative courses of action and to act on the choice made.

3. In the field of biology, Maturana has long argued that any living system is structurally determined. More specifically, Maturana asserts that living systems are structurally determined entities that operate as functions of their structural dynamics (i.e., according to how they are made) and the domains (interplay of the properties of their components) in which they interact.

4. In semiotics and linguistics, structural determinism is the stance that the pregiven structure of some signifying system—such as language or any kind of textual system—determines the subjectivity (or at least behavior) of individuals who are subjected to it.

5. In organization theory, structural determinism can be viewed as a guiding premise—albeit implicit—of structural contingency theory, a mainstay of organization theory. In this theory, given any set of industry and environmental contingencies, it is argued that there is a preferred “fit” in terms of organizational structural variables (e.g., control mechanisms, hierarchy, formalization) that will result in increased organizational performance. In this theory, structural determinism is visible in the normative expectation that there can be an optimal fit between identified contingencies and organizational structure. As it pertains to organization theory more broadly, structural determinism can be seen as predictive and, arguably, normative, in its implications for structural outcomes, given a set of environmental and internal organizational factors.

...