The Theory of Structuration & the Politics of the Third Way
The theory of structuration is an effort to overcome the dualism of structure and agency (social theory) and subject and object (philosophical sources of social theory) by reformulating the concepts of agency, structure, social practice and social interaction. This theory arose as a response to the radicalism of the 1960s (Giddens was directly influenced by 1968 in particular). Functionalism - split between the subjective voluntarism of its concept of agent and a deterministic (indeed, monolithic) concept of society - could not theorise to the social crisis of the 1960s and 1970s. In this context, Marxism became a serious intellectual competitor with mainstream sociology, yet by the 1970s - with structural Marxism - it also had succumbed to the same functionalist dualism, except that in the case of Marxism it was split along macro (structure — Althusser) and micro (agent - E. P. Thompson) lines into warring camps. For Giddens, two central problems prevent Marxism and functionalism from becoming bases for the renewal of social theory: their tendency to adopt one side of the structure versus agent dichotomy to the exclusion of the other and their impoverished conception of social subjectivity (or selfhood).
Giddens proposes that social theory has to position the social construction of reality at its centre, especially the ways in which the intuitions of space and time are culturally formed. For Giddens, social reproduction is dependent upon reflexive social practices that mobilise the social rules constitutive of a public culture. He aims to mediate structure and agency within the terms of the “linguistic turn,” drawing upon the language pragmatics of the philosopher Wittgenstein. The social agent is primarily a reflexive actor capable of providing a rational justification for their actions. Agency also entails practical consciousness, namely, “all the things that we know as social actors, and must know, to make social life happen, but to which we cannot necessarily give discursive form”.[16] Structure is therefore theorised as a set of rules, resources and consequences of the actions of agents, where the reproduction of structures depends upon the consent and competence of the agents. For Giddens, the agent is never a “cultural dupe” of the structure.
Indeed, Giddens links the concept of agent to the concept of a social actor through the social theory of Irving Goffmann. For Goffmann, the social actor is a role player in a scripted social world, who effectively performs the drama of their role, status, subjectivity and so forth for the various publics that their social interactions imply. Social status is therefore something enacted and the dialogical forms of mutual recognition involve both a performative dimension and a lot of repair and maintenance work, since social performances can easily be misunderstood. The performative dimensions of social credibility and the creation of shared expectations are not mere window dressing but integral to the effectivity of social agents: politicians who do not kiss babies cannot expect to be re-elected. For Giddens, this highlights the fragility and complexity of everyday life and it draws attention to the highly skilled character of social performances and competencies. Further, Goffmann’s conception of a “front” and “back” stage (an arena of public performances and a private realm for the creation and maintenance of the necessary social illusions) draws attention to the integral relation between the sphere of intimate social relations and the capacities of social agents in politics, economic and so forth. Yet Giddens argues that the “front stage” performances cannot be an indifferent technology of theatrical illusion: without the affective investments made possible through the “back stage” arena, social roles would be performed indifferently or would become only a source of anxiety. These affective investments make stable routines possible, as well as role-identification, and routines lend themselves to social integration and systemic reproduction.
Reformulating the basic concepts of structural linguistics, Giddens proposes that the concept of meaning as the effect of diacritical (differential) relations between words has to be supplemented by an analysis of language pragmatics. Socially constructed meaning is not wholly differential and therefore the society is not a text. Instead, the production of meaning relies on the combination of differential terms (linguistic utterances) and rule-governed pragmatic contexts. This purports to exceed the semantic theories of Austin as well as the structural linguistics of Saussure: at issue is more than “how to do things with words,” since, as the critical appropriation of Goffmann indicates, social actions engage the full range of performative skills and cannot be limited to the formalised semantics of language. For Giddens, meaning derives “from the procedures which agents use in the course of practical action to reach interpretations of what they and others do”.[17] Non-discursive aspects of social practice are as vital as discursively formalised aspects. This constitutes a mutual knowledge of the “methods used by lay actors to generate the practices which are constitutive of the tissue of everyday life”.[18] Indeed, the bulk of persons’ knowledge of social conventions is non-discursive and embedded instead in the routine aspects of social practice.
This opens a new concept of social agency, or the capacity to act in the social world. The minimal conception of the agent situates them as an active subject located in the spatio-temporal frame of reference of a particular culture. Agency is centred upon rationality and knowledge, instead of the will (as in classical social theory based on early modern philosophy). The capacity to act otherwise (to make contingent decisions, including on undecidable terrain) is constitutive of agency: when the subject is fundamentally constrained they are not really an agent at all, but a mere bearer of structures. The rationality involved in agency is context bound and not Weberian universal instrumental rationality. The rationalisation of action is a contextually specific skill that is not automatically transferable into new contexts: no universal rationality independent of particular social practices exists. (Giddens, as we have seen, is an avowed cultural relativist.)[19]
Giddens constructs a three tiered model of agency:
The critical level is practical consciousness. For Giddens, we generally experience our social activities as the continuous flow of conduct and not a series of rationally cognised discrete acts.[20] This means that practical consciousness is the mediation between conscious and voluntary actions and the unconscious motivations and structural determinations of activities. Practical consciousness is akin to the concept of “lifeworld” or “pre-understanding” in phenomenological and hermeneutic philosophies: the mute but definite interpretations of the world sedimented into the functional roles of things and persons experienced as “ready to hand” and not requiring any interpretation.
The implied understandings present in practical consciousness are structured by the presence of rules in social situations. There are two dimensions of rules: “that relating to the constitution of meaning and that relating to sanctions involved in social conduct”.[21] Therefore rules relate social power to the self-reflexive consciousness of agents. Hence social interactions are not power-neutral “language games,” but profoundly affected by the realities of social domination. Giddens’ concept of power is also two-sided: power refers to the transformative capacity of agents and to the possibility of having one’s will prevail. Clearly, when transformative capacity is excessive in relation to the practical tasks to hand, and the dominant agent also possesses capacities related to domination (police forces, legal knowledge, psychological techniques, and so forth), this surplus capacity can be directed towards the domination of the will of another. On this basis, Giddens claims that the recreation of structures involves meaning, capacity and the evaluation of actions based on moral norms.
Drawing on the existential psychology of R. D. Laing and Erikson, Giddens proposes that the self-identity of social agents depends on “ontological security": the ability to construct a coherent narrative of selfhood, including the reliability of social institutions and the continuity of self-identity over time. For stable and continuous social relations to exist, there must be a basis of trust between agents, and this trust springs directly from the ontological security experienced by the agents. Social performances generate anxiety (since they involve contingent decisions and therefore risk), and this anxiety can only be managed and overcome with a sense of shared trust. The continuity of personality and institutions is therefore closely bound to the ability of agents to have ontological security in their lives.
Social practices are defined by Giddens as “what cannot be said (or thought)”.[22] Social practice links agent to structure, since social practices develop with the transformation of rules and resources over time and between different locations. Social practice is therefore the social and institutional dimensions of practical consciousness, and deeply sedimented (routinised) social practices form institutions.[23] Social practices are therefore the “points of articulation between agents and structures”.[24] For Giddens, this is a riposte to the post-structuralist concept of a “social text”. The social is not structured like an abstract language, because “the constitution of language as meaningful is inseparable from the constitution of forms of social life as continuing practices”. Indeed, language itself is a social practice that cannot be abstracted from “that which has to be done”.[25]
For Giddens, social theory has been caught in the dualism of structure (objectivism) and agency (subjectivism). For action theory, the concentration on agency leads to a concept of the social as the sum of individual actions, and hence an inability to define the limitations on action (voluntarism) and blindness to the determination of agents’ capacities by structures (subjectivism). For structuralism and functionalism, emphasis on structures leads to a concept of the social as an independent system or entity, indifferent to the agents who comprise the society, and hence an inability to locate the efficacy of subjective agency (determinism) and a tendency to identify individual capacities with system requirements (objectivism). The theory of structuration conceptualises social practice as the mediation between structure and agency. From this concept, Giddens develops the theory of the “duality of structure": structures are both the result and the medium of the actions of agents in social practices. The society is viewed as a structuration process whereby human actions are both structured by the social and structural determinants of the society.
The theory of structuration is therefore neither a theory of the social totality nor a phenomenological description of the experience of the individual agent. For structuration theory, “structuration” describes the variety of social practices distributed in the spatio-temporal manifold that constitute the society. [26] It theorises the mediation between the social formation and the individual actor.
For Giddens, social life is constituted through social practices. Social practice constitutes individuals as agents and embodies and realises structures. Consequently, social practice is the mediating concept between agency and structure, and between individual and society.
The project of The Constitution of Society (1984) is the definition of social practice. Social practice is the total process involving power, agency, action, structure, systems and space-time. Social practice is a relation between two distinct entities, structure and agency. This is done through making social practice a structured process that involves structure, agent and action as diacritical moments.
The diagram above outlines this schematically.
The entire project in The Constitution of Society (1984) consists of defining social practice as the totality of the circuit from structure to agent to action and the return to structure. The concept of social practice is defined through a reconstruction of the concepts of agent, power, action, structure, system and space-time, so that the totality of the movement constitutes social practice. Giddens contribution is to have defined social practice as the diacritical totality of the classical constituents of social theory. Giddens maintains that social practices constitutes the individual as an agent and simultaneously both carries out the determinations of structure and creates structures. Actor and structure are therefore the two entities related by social practice.
For Giddens, structures do not act behind the backs of agents. In the theory of structuration, every moment of the process of social practice contains a productive and a reproductive aspect - that is, both an agency dimension and a structural dimension. Therefore agent, structure, action, system and so forth all contain the same double property, or duality of agency and structure. This knowledge about social reproduction is sometimes expressed through unconscious motivations. Drawing on Habermas’ very similar account, Giddens argues that unconscious motivations are formed by repression and inhibit discursive formation.[27] For Giddens, the major problem with theories centred on structure and system is that they theorise the agent as a mere bearer of structures, whereas, “a conception of action ... has to place at the centre the everyday fact that social actors are knowledgeable about the conditions of social reproduction in which their day-to-day activities are enmeshed”.[28]
Yet reflexive knowledge is expressed principally as practical consciousness - that is, the ability to conduct action without the necessity for conscious reflection. Such actions have a nearly ritual character and the knowledge involved is a tacit knowledge: the existence of these action entails the possession of certain types of knowledge, even though the agent might not be able to completely thematise this fact. These everyday actions are routinised and automatic, and practical consciousness is the central feature of social life - although frequently neglected in social theory.
Self-reflexively thematised knowledge encompasses the knowledge that cannot be directly accounted for through immediate features of everyday life. This constitutes discursive consciousness — as exemplified in professional and technical training, or social knowledge of sub-cultures and dangerous urban situations. A discursive explanation means that the agent can explicitly express an activity in relation to a body of knowledge, opinion or prejudice. The element of consciousness and will in relation to the maintenance of structures is thereby theorised in terms of discursive consciousness as a theory of will-formation.
The concept of the agent as knowledgeable is closely connected to the reformulation of the theory of agency. Agency is theorised as a process - that is, as a flow of events, which stream through life continuously and endlessly, an incessant process analogous to the process of cognition (as theorised by phenomenology). “The notion of agency connects directly to the concept of praxis, and when speaking of a regularised types of acts, I shall talk of human practices, as an ongoing series of ‘practical activities'”.[29] Agency is a flow and not a series of discrete events. Only when the agent reflects upon an activity and thematises this action within discursive consciousness is it relevant to talk of “agency”. Agency considered as a specific event is in reality this complete loop of action and reflection.
Giddens tries to escape the vicious cycle of intentional explanations of agency by arguing that intentional consciousness is also a process. For Giddens, all of the actions undertaking by the agent happen with knowledgeability and consciousness on the part of the agent, although this is usually only practical consciousness.
The entire action process is summarised by Giddens’ model of the agent and agency:
The core constituents of the model (rationalisation, motivation and reflexive monitoring) represent aspects of the subjectivity of the agent. These processes are embedded in the body of the agent and their cognitive activities. Reflexive monitoring, motivation and rationalisation are not states, but co-present moments of an indivisible process. Indeed, the reflexive monitoring of action and the rationalisation of action are closely connected and virtually impossible to distinguish. The crucial analytic distinction is that reflexive monitoring is part of both practical and discursive consciousness, whereas rationalisation can only be a constituent of discursive consciousness. The components of both reflexive and rationalisation include context, effects, intended consequences and the response of the other. Reflexive monitoring is essential to the social functionality of the agent: even bearers of structure have to be able to competently enact their roles and adjust their performance to structural demands. The vast majority of social actions are routinised and recursive, yet entail reflexive monitoring - this suggests that agency is everywhere and nothing exceptional.
The rationalisation of action likewise takes place mainly at the level of practical consciousness. This process should not be confused with the ability to provide discursive explanations for conduct. Rather, rationalisation of action happens as a process whereby the agent maintains a tacit understanding of the grounds for their actions. Whereas the reflexive monitoring of action concerns the intentional part of the process, rationalisation of action centres upon the ability and competence to evaluate the relation between the action and its reason. The aspects of “what do I want to do” (reflexive monitoring) and “why do I want to do it” (rationalisation of action) are closer to components of intentionality than to formal activities of performance evaluation and causal explanation. Only at the moment when a rupture or lapse takes place in a routine do we actually explicitly consider (discursively) the reasons for the result of a given action or ask about the intention behind the initiation of an action sequence.
The many social routines, monitored reflexively and rationalised by the agent, lend the concepts of agency and agent a reproductive character. The repetition of routines at the level of practical consciousness and the extension of actions over space and time (collective tasks or dispersed task locations with temporal duration - for instance, a series of factory processes involving the “collective worker” and various regular tasks of inventory, production and distribution) contribute to the reproduction of social relations, lending the social reality the aspect of a structure or system.
The motivations for action are distinct from the rationalisation of action and its reflexive monitoring. Motivation refers primarily to the potential for action. The majority of daily practices are not directly motivated, occurring mainly as routines. Motives appear in special social situations, where, for instance, routines are breached. Giddens draws upon the post-Freudian existential psychoanalysis of Erik Erikson and R. D. Laing for his theory of motivation. For Laing in particular, for a child to develop an identity requires a basic security system. The basic security system facilitates the avoidance of anxiety and the preservation of self-esteem. The main defence from anxiety takes the form of unconscious mechanisms of guilt, doubt, mistrust and shame. These mechanisms evolve before the acquisition of language and are therefore (in Laing and Erikson’s view) the primary unconscious processes. Inspired by Laing, Giddens calls the mechanisms ontological security. The effect of these routines in adult life is that the majority of activities - that is, routines of everyday life - provide the agent with the sense of security and trust. These activities are unconsciously motivated routines that reproduce the conditions necessary for ontological security. We need this security to avoid the situations where we are exposed to extreme anxiety and to maintain self-esteem.
The three levels in Giddens’ model of the agent appear as recursive activities. Yet recursive activities have unacknowledged conditions and unintended consequences. Giddens approaches the question of structure from the perspective of the reproductive consequences of actions. The agent’s knowledge is always limited by these unacknowledged conditions and unintended consequences of action.
Giddens begins from the supposition that the human agent is in possession of transformative capacity - that is, with the power to intervene in social processes or to refrain from intervention. This means that the agent has (potentially) the power to act differently. Agency therefore does not refer to “the intentions people have in doing things, but to their capability of doing those things in the first place”.[30] To act is to exert power. “To be able to ‘act otherwise’ means being able to intervene in the world or to refrain from such intervention, with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs”.[31]
As a component of the theory of agency, power means:
“the capability of actors to secure outcomes where the realisation of these outcomes depends upon the agency of others. The use of power in interaction can be understood in terms of the facilities that participants bring to and mobilise as elements of the production of that interaction, thereby influencing its course”.[32]
Interaction always contains relations of interdependence and autonomy. This is described by Giddens as the dialectic of control.[33] Where the dependent agent can no longer act otherwise, they are not an agent. This locates the concepts of power and transformative capacity as central to the definition of agency developed by Giddens.
Ontological security, practical consciousness, reflexive monitoring of action and the rationalisation of action, lend to the concept of agency a recursive character vital to understanding how Giddens claims that agency and structure are results of the duality of social practices. Agency and agent have a reproductive dimension. The concepts of transformative capacity, discursive consciousness, unacknowledged conditions and unintended consequences of action, lend the concept of agency the possibility of the invention of new social relations. Agency and agent therefore also have a ruptural or transformative dimension.
Giddens’ concept of society is one of structuration processes enacted through social practices that produce and reproduce the social. For Giddens, a distinction between structure and system exists. Social systems consist of relations between actors or collectivities reproduced across time and space - that is, actions which are repeated and therefore extend themselves beyond the duration of the individual act. Social systems are therefore social practices that are reproduced and from which emerges a pattern of social relations.
Social structures by contrast are characterised by the absence of agency. Structures have only a virtual existence, in that structures exists only as a possibility that have not actively manifested themselves. Inspired by structuralism, Giddens writes:
“to say that structure is a “virtual order” of transformative relations means that social systems, as reproduced social practices, do not have “structures” but rather exhibit “structural properties” and that structure exists, as time-space presence, only in its instantiations in such practices and as memory traces orienting the conduct of knowledgeable human agents”.[34]
Structures only appear in memory traces once we reflect discursively on a previously performed act. They also appear as the intentional plan informing a social practice. But they do not exist as instantiations of the totality of social practices subtending individual social acts as a linguistic code precedes and structures all utterances within that code. Therefore, for Giddens, it is entirely incorrect to theorise structure as an external constraint on action. Structure refers to the ensemble of rules and resources which the agent utilises for the production and reproduction of social life. This concept of structure as rules and resources is inspired by the later Wittgenstein’s concept of a language game. Rules are procedures which are applied in the performance and the reproduction of social practices and they operate as formulae for “how to go on in social life” (Wittgenstein) - that is, how to continue ‘playing’ the ‘language game’ in question by producing another move or new move that constitutes an application (modification) of the rules. The concept of resource is closely linked to the concept of power as the medium by which the agent can exert transformative capacity.
Agent, agency and structure are therefore linked. Structure is not external: the concept of structure becomes the means to action and its result, but only in consciousness. This is the introduction to the duality of structure - the core concept of structuration theory and the key to Giddens’ position on the concept of social practice. Duality of structure aims to transcend the dualism between action theory and functionalism/structuralism. “Structure is both the medium and outcome of the practices which constitute social systems”.[35] The concept of the duality of structure links the production of social interaction (conducted by knowing agents) with the production of social systems (with spatio-temporal duration beyond the individual event).
Structure as structural properties consisting of rules and resources means that structures are both enabling and constraining. (The primary illustration of this is language.) Giddens’ criticism of structuralism and functionalism centres on the determinism inherent in the reduction of social systems to constraining structures. Structure is an alien external imposition upon the individual’s capacities for completely autonomous action. This binary - inherited from Kant - dissolves in Giddens’ treatment of the duality of structures, for the concept of structure is actually located within the knowledge of the agent. At the same time, Giddens seeks to avoid the problem of voluntarism by maintaining the reproductive character of agency in the form of structural properties. Giddens embeds norms and values (rules and resources) within the agent rather than in the structure or system. For both Parsons’ functionalism and Althusser’s structuralism, norms and values are external constraints upon the actions of the agent.
But what are “structural properties” if not an evasive middle ground which does the conceptual work of both structure and system? Giddens differentiates between structural principles, structures and structural properties:[36]
Structural principles are principles of the organisation of social totalities - for instance, capitalism and representative democracy are two structural principles constitutive of modernity.
Structures are rule and resource sets, involved in the institutional articulation of social systems.
Structural properties are the institutionalised features of social systems stretching across time and space.
The fundamental level of a social totality is that of structural principles. Capitalism is characterised by the structural principles of the separation of economy and politics (of the nation state from the accumulation of capital). The structural set of capitalism is the following: private property, money, capital, labour contract, profit. The structural properties of capitalism are the institutional features characteristic of this aspect of modernity, including the division of labour, corporate hierarchies, the split between banking, industry and commerce and the economic role of the state (central bank, taxation and contractual enforcement, unification of internal markets).
Social systems are defined as the activities of human agents situated in various contexts, where the activities are reproduced in space and time.[37] Social systems are therefore not independent of the actor but only constituted through social practices. The society is a special type of social system, which is not reducible to the borders of the nation state. Society differentiates itself from the rest of the field of social systems because “definite structural principles serve to produce a specifiable overall clustering of institutions across time and space”.[38] To speak of a society requires certain prerequisites:
a connection between a social system and a specific locale or territory. By locale is meant a physical region connected to a specific environmental interaction. Locale has boundaries and system interactions are intensified within this locale.
The existence of normative elements, which entail a claim to the legitimate occupation of the locale. This can be a territorial claim (as in for instance a nation state) or an environmental claim (the rightness of a way of life relative to the environmental parameters of the locale).
The widespread feeling among members of a society that they possess a common identity - even if this is only vaguely specified.
Note that this is too loose a definition of a society: it would embrace a commune in the Pyrennes but exclude pre-modern Germany.The term structural principles is a means to differentiate between societies of different types. Social totalities are woven into a network of what Giddens calls inter-social systems. Inter-social systems are social systems that cut across any kind of demarcation line that might exist between societies.[39]
Giddens claims that time and space are neglected dimensions in social theory, which has tended to exclude the physical constitution of society for its existence as a rationally intelligible unity. Giddens draws principally on Martin Heidegger’s hermeneutic philosophy in Being and Time (1927) for an account of temporality, and the geography of Torsten Hägerstrand for a theory of the social constitution of space. Inspired by Heidegger, Giddens claims that time-space relations “express the nature of what things are” - that is, that the irreducibly temporal character of human existence means that human being is radically historical, that this historicity involves the construction of physical objects as discursive elements, and that this is what things are in themselves, namely, discursively constructed and socially mediated bearers of human interactions.[40] Social practice involves three forms of temporality. The duration (durée) of everyday life is a reversible time of the continuous return of recursive events and the repetition of routine actions. “Daily life has a duration, a flow, but it does not lead anywhere ... [this] time is constituted only in repetition”. The duration of the lifespan of the individual is the second form of temporality, constituting an irreversible durée defined by the human condition of “being towards death”. The experience of finitude (of contingent embeddedness and the non-absolute character of human knowledge) culminates in the (non)experience of death. These two forms of termporality are mediated by “the longue durée of institutions, the reproduction of institutions and institutional time”. This latter is a reversible time.[41]
“The reversible time of institutions is both the condition and the outcome of the practices organised in the continuity of daily life, the main substantive form of the duality of structure. It would not be true ... to say that the routines of daily life are the “foundation” upon which the institutional forms of societal organisation are built in time-space. Rather, each enters into the constitution of the other, as they both do in the constitution of the acting self. All social systems, no matter how grand or far-flung, both express and are expressed by the routines of daily social life, mediating the physical and sensory properties of the human body”.[42]
Social systems are temporally and spatially binding and time-space constitutive. By this, Giddens means that those actions that constitute and are constituted by the social system produce the space in which social practice takes place. At the same time, the social system also binds the actions to a specific temporal and spatial context.
Every form of interaction entails the combination of presence and absence. Taking inspiration from Goffmann, Giddens terms face-to-face presence “co-presence” to denote an event limited to the coincidence of the actors in the same time and space. The advent of communications technologies with modernity means the attenuation of co-presence and the rise of new social interactions.
The constitution of society through time-space situated practices is closely interrelated with the conception of the human agent. For Giddens, the agent is a continuous coming-to-be of presence, or presencing. Agency and action are not single events or isolated sequences but a flow of being. Intentions and practices of human beings emerge dialectically as aspects of the flow of temporality and spatiality.