Structural Suggestion

The agency-structure problem concerns the relationship between agents and environmental influences. For some writers, power is exclusively a property of agents; for others it is exclusively a property of structures. It is clear that agents act, and that agents such as organizations or collectives act through the agency of people. However, with organizations it can also be clear that the nature of the actions that people take on behalf of the organization might be severely constrained, and completely enabled by the operating rules, interests, and resources of that organization rather than by what the person believes might be the best actions. In other words, the person's environment fully determines how that person will act on behalf of the organization. Some writers see all actions carried out by an agent as fully constrained or enabled by the structure in which the agent is located. Structural determinism is the idea that while we might see agency through the actions of people, those actions are fully determined by factors external to the individual. Others dispute the idea that the actions of people are so fully determined. They argue that, while people decide their interests and the interests of those on whose part they might act based upon information received from the world around them, that same information will not lead every person to act in the same way. Structuralists reply that while there might be some noise in the system such that each person does not behave identically in the same environment, behavior is nonetheless largely determined by structure.

For example, we might define two elements entering into the explanation of any given outcome: first, the structure composed of institutions, property relations, resources, and technology at any given time t, Rt; and second, a list of every person and their preferences at that time t, Pt. We could combine Rt and Pt to explain Rt + 1 or we could combine Rt and Pt to explain Pt + 1. In other words, we can use the structure and preferences at one time to explain structure at the next point in time, or we could use them to explain the preferences of everyone at the next point in time. However, if preferences can be fully explained by structure, then they can be left of the explanation. Keith Dowding introduced the idea of structural suggestion in order to overcome the fully determinist nature of structural determination and leave a role for individual agency while recognizing that structures largely determine preferences. Dowding argued that structures suggest actions to people. Sometimes those structures suggest obvious courses of action that few people would not follow, though such “obvious suggestions” are weaker than determination.

However, often structures leave open courses of actions—their “suggestions” are not so strong and here we see human action as random and [Page 641]unconstrained. It thus implies a very weak form of structural power.