Introduction to Contemporary Social Theory by Anthony Elliott & Charles Lemert

Author:Anthony Elliott & Charles Lemert [Elliott, Anthony & Lemert, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Gender Studies, Sociology, Social Science, Human Geography, General
ISBN: 9781136237379
Google: O0fIAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

Summary points

Structuration theories seek to comprehend how individual action is organized within the mundane activities of practical social life, while simultaneously recognizing that the structural features of society are reproduced through individual action.

In borrowing the term ‘structuration’ from the French, British social theorist Anthony Giddens argues that society should be understood as a complex of recurrent practices forming institutions. The focus of Giddens’s work is not society as fixed or pre-given, but rather the active flow of social life.

Giddens insists that the dualism of agency and structure should instead be conceived as a duality. On this view, social systems are at once the medium and outcome of the practices they organize.

Critiquing structuralist and post-structuralist thought, Giddens argues that society is not ‘structured like a language,’ although language does exemplify core aspects of social life. According to Giddens, human agents draw from structured ‘rules and resources’ in order to carry out social interactions, which in turn contribute to the reproduction of society as a whole.

Structures for Giddens have no independent existence of the knowledge that agents have about what they do in social life. Social structures thus exist outside of time and space, and exhibit a ‘virtual’ existence.

In Giddens’s late work on the ‘runaway world’ of modernity, reflexivity is key to the production of personal life and the complexity of society. For Giddens, reflexivity means that social practices are continually examined and reformed in the light of ongoing information about those very practices – which thus influences the very texture of those practices.

There have been various criticisms made of Giddens’s version of structuration theory, including that it is unhelpful to amalgamate human agency with social structure and that the notion of ‘rules and resources’ is limited for grasping social reproduction. Giddens’s account of reflexivity has also been criticized for its individualistic bent, as well as neglect of emotional and interpersonal factors.

In French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s version of structuration, the fluidity of social life is captured by the notion of habitus – which refers to how bodily dispositions and well-practiced habits bridge personal and social life.

For Bourdieu, the habitus of an individual or group is anchored in the institutional life of ‘fields.’ Fields, such as the domains of the economy or culture, refer to the structured space of positions in which individuals act.

Bourdieu’s social theory has been criticized, among other things, for suppressing change in personal and social life, as well as overemphasizing the rigidity of the habitus in which social practices are generated.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.