Structuration

Structuration theory, which is associated with the work of Anthony Giddens, centres on the way agents produce and reproduce social structure through their own actions. Structuration offers a way to understand human social and cultural activity as involving both agency and structure. Here regularized human activity, or structure, is not brought into being by individual actors as such, but is continually re-created by them via the very means whereby they express themselves as actors. That is, in and through their activities agents reproduce the conditions that make those activities possible. For example, having been constituted as a man or a woman by the structures of gendered expectations and practices, and having learned to be a father or mother, we then act in accordance with those rules reproducing them once again.

Giddens argues that social order is constructed in and through the everyday activities and accounts (in language) of skilful and knowledgeable actors (or members). The resources that actors draw on, and are constituted by, are social in character. Indeed, social structure (or regular patterns of activity) distributes resources and competencies unevenly between actors. That is, regularities or structural properties of social systems, which are distinct from any given individual, operate to structure what an actor is.

Central to the theory of structuration as developed by Giddens is the concept of the ‘duality of structure’ by which structures are not only constraining but also enabling. That is, while individual actors are constrained and determined by social forces that lie beyond them as individual subjects, it is those very same social structures that enable subjects to act. For example, what it means to be a mother in a given society may mean that we cannot undertake paid employment and in that sense we are constrained. However, the structures of motherhood also allow us to act as a ‘mother’, to be close to our children, to form networks with other mothers, and so forth. Likewise with language: we are all constructed and constrained by a language that pre-exists us, yet language is also the means and medium of self-awareness and creativity. That is, we can only say what is sayable in language, yet language is also the medium by which we can say anything at all.