Social Theory : Twenty Introductory Lectures (9781316098110) by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780521870634
Publisher: CambridgeUP
Published: 2014-04-23T05:00:00+00:00

So much for Giddens’ theory of action and its characteristic features. The last of these mentioned above marks the point at which we pass from a theory of action to a theory of order, to asking which set of concepts allows us to capture the interconnection of the actions of several or many people. The specific features of Giddens’ theory of order are as follows.

(A) Giddens, as we have suggested, is an anti-functionalist, and in a radical sense. He wrestled with functionalism as early as the 1970s and early 1980s, assimilating the epistemological arguments against this way of thinking (see Lecture III). He agrees with the criticism that functionalism features a peculiar conflation of causes and effects and implies causal relationships where none exist (Giddens, ‘Commentary on the Debate’). But he does not rely solely on epistemology in making his criticism, but also brings empirical arguments into play. In his opinion, functionalism is wrong because it assumes that social relations are stable and that actors can do nothing about them. Giddens’ notion of structuration is based on the contrary observation that the actors not only reproduce the structures, but also produce and change them. The functionalist notion of systems – his critique asserts – assumes that social structures are hyper-stable in a highly questionable way, an assumption that seems entirely unjustified and which also makes the analysis of historical processes of change unnecessarily difficult.

This does not mean that Giddens rejects entirely the concept of ‘system’ and its use in the social sciences. He fully recognizes that there are also highly stable patterns of action in the social world, that actors or even generations of actors perform the same actions time and again, thus producing highly stable structures which point to the need for the concept of system and justify its use. But this should not lead us to conclude that all social structures and processes exhibit such stability. In contrast to Parsons, who used an analytical concept of system, and Luhmann, who simply assumed in essentialist fashion that systems exist and thus works with his functionalist-systems theoretical toolkit without further justification, Giddens has an empirical understanding of systems: on this view, the concept of system is applicable only if the empirical conditions are such that one may assume a high ‘degree of systemness’ when observing a social phenomenon. In other words, only if one observes precisely and with absolute certainty that the interaction produces consequences which affect, via feedback loops, the initial conditions of the action carried out by the actors and which trigger the same forms of action again and again, can one truly speak of a ‘system’. Such systems rarely occur in social reality. But even when they do: Social systems should be regarded as widely variable in terms of the degree of ‘systemness’ they display and rarely have the sort of internal unity which may be found in physical and biological systems.

(Constitution, p. 377)

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