Giddens' Theory of Structuration

A Critical Appreciation

Christopher Bryant, David Jary, Christopher Bryant, David Jary

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317829218
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Categoría: Wirtschaftsgeschichte

Anthony Giddens is one of the most respected and influential social theorists at work today. This wide-ranging and stimulating volume, first published in 1991, provides an authoratative and penetrating critical assessment of social theory. It will be of use to all students of sociology and social theory.

Chapter one

Introduction: coming to terms with Anthony Giddens

Christopher G.A. Bryant and David Jary

The need for a critical appreciation

The world of sociology does not know quite what to make of Anthony Giddens and his theory of structuration. There are a number of reasons for this. For a start he has written so much -twenty-three books alone between 1971 and 1989 (eleven sole-authored, four sole-edited, four joint-edited and four collections of his own articles and essays) – that it is difficult to take it all in. Many readers are also discouraged from trying to keep up with his output by the evident repetition (although most items do contain something novel if one cares to look closely). There is also a reluctance in some British quarters to concede that we have a star in our midst, so habituated have we become to the notion that the big names, especially in theory, are always foreign – first European (Spencer apart), then American, now, more often, European again. There has also been uncertainty as to both the originality and the utility of structuration theory, countered by a belief that there must be something to be said for the product of someone with such a command of languages (especially French, German and Italian), and such a knowledge of other disciplines (psychology, philosophy, linguistics, geography, history, politics and economics in particular), who can lecture so fluently without notes, and who can also find time to join with others to start a major new publishing house (Polity Press) and establish the first new faculty in the University of Cambridge for over half a century (Social and Political Sciences). Doubts about this or that may remain, but the scale of the enterprise and the virtuosity of the man compel respect.

In Chapter Eight Giddens affirms that structuration theory is the label he attaches to his ‘concern to develop an ontological framework for the study of human social activities’ (p. 201). Ontology here refers to ‘a conceptual investigation of the nature of human action, social institutions, and the interrelations between action and institutions’ (ibid). The originality and utility of structuration theory are matters to which we and our contributors will return. For the moment let us just say that we believe it to be a considerable achievement in social theory that deserves our critical appreciation. But what does Giddens himself claim for it? Here he displays a curious ambivalence that may well not have helped its reception. On the one hand, he presents it as an approach to social science that avoids the dualisms of subject and object, agency and structure and structure and process, which have so bedevilled other social theories. On the other hand, he makes no exclusive claims for it and he clearly has no wish to impose it on anyone; he believes it provides a basis for good sociology, but does not believe it provides the only basis for good sociology. It is an approach that has been hammered out with great single-mindedness at least since New Rules of Sociological Method (1976a), and arguably longer. Yet those who submit to the rigours of the major ‘summation’ of structuration theory in The Constitution of Society (1984a) find that it is possible to be a structurationist without knowing it in so far as empirical studies there cited in illustration of its principles and value were done by others without reference to it; those who turn to the recent co-edited overview of leading theoretical traditions and trends, Social Theory Today (1987b), find an endorsement of post-empiricism in the ‘Introduction’ but no claims for structuration theory as such; and those who work with his vast new textbook, Sociology (1989a), find no profession of structuration theory, nor even a single reference to ‘structuration’ (even if the theory does suffuse the whole book). This combination of conviction and reticence is unusual and disorienting. The explanation for the paradox may well be personal. Giddens would seem to be a grand theorist in spite of himself – a grand theorist who finds pretentions of grandeur overbearing, who is deeply serious about his work but who finds repellent anything suggestive of arrogance or pomposity.

Kilminster (see Chapter Four) argues persuasively that Giddens’ theorizing is synthetic but not eclectic. It is, however, almost always singular, and therefore hard to grasp in all its implications. Giddens’ critique of historical materialism is a case in point. Such critiques, as Wright has observed, tend to be either attacks from outside the Marxist tradition intent on exposing falsity, perniciousness or theoretical anachronism or reconstructions from inside, intent on overcoming weaknesses in order further to advance the Marxist project (Wright, 1983:11). Giddens’ is neither; instead it is an appreciative critique from a non-Marxist who seeks to appropriate what is valuable in the Marxist tradition for an alternative theoretical framework of his own. It is the work of someone who endorses post-Marxism without ever having been a Marxist (see the interview in Mullan, 1987:113, 94). Sociologists are often unsure what to make of Giddens because he is too big to be ignored, and too singular to be labelled with confidence.

We have no illusions about delivering in one collection of essays the manageable Giddens, but we do think it possible to help colleagues and students decide for themselves what to make of him. In the rest of this Introduction we will say something about his intellectual formation; we will then outline some of the basics of structuration theory and indicate where it is possible to read further on some of its most important features; next, we will highlight points of particular significance in each of our contributors’ essays; finally we will say more about what we make of structuration theory ourselves. We will offer those judgements now, and not in a concluding essay, in order to leave the last word to Anthony Giddens. We are pleased that he has accepted our suggestion that he should write an essay which is as much prospective as retrospective.

Life and early work

Giddens is disinclined to make much of his background and he denies that there have been major influences upon him, but the basics would seem to be these. He was born in 1938 in Edmonton, North London, went to the local grammar school and then to Hull University. He had not done well at school and intended to read at Hull a non-school subject, philosophy, having been refused entry to English. On arrival he found little philosophy on offer that particular year and switched to two other non-school subjects -sociology and psychology. At these he excelled, graduating with first class honours in 1959. He says he greatly enjoyed Peter Worsley's teaching in sociology and George Westby's in psychology. Worsley's version of sociology was more anthropological than most, and Westby's teaching in psychology covered Freud and social psychology but not the more dominant experimental psychology which Giddens found disagreeable. He had had ideas about entering the Civil Service, but, having graduated with distinction, he went instead to LSE and did an MA thesis entitled Sport and Society in Contemporary England (1961), supervised first by Asher Tropp and then by David Lockwood. In 1961 he started as a lecturer in sociology at Leicester University. He acknowledges that whilst many other sociologists at that time thought the sociology of sport to be a trivial concern, the leading figures at Leicester, Ilya Neustadt and Norbert Elias, did not. At Leicester he taught neither the second-year course in classical sociological theory (apart from three lectures on Simmel) – this was Neustadt's preserve; nor the third-year course on more recent developments in theory – this was given by Percy Cohen whose Modern Social Theory (1968) is based on it. Instead, he was primarily responsible for the third-year course in social psychology in which he chose to link ‘social personality’ to a number of other topics including socialization, language, attitude formation, identity, institutions and national character.

We do not wish to make too much of this early experience but some features are worth noting. First, Giddens’ version of sociology has always been open to developments in anthropology and social psychology. Having been introduced to these at Hull, he found at Leicester a sociology department with in-house teaching not only in anthropology but also in psychology (the psychology department there not being trusted to provide a suitable course). Indeed, it was through in-house psychology courses that Leicester sociology undergraduates first encountered Mead, Becker and Goffman. With hindsight, the contribution of Elias to this conception of sociology is plain enough but it was not visible to students at the time and one of us, Chris Bryant, managed, not untypically, to leave Leicester in 1966, after three years as an undergraduate, and a fourth as a postgraduate and tutorial assistant, without appreciating Elias's part in it, and without knowing anything about Elias's (con)figurational sociology. Giddens has told us that Neustadt was the greater intellectual influence – he was later to co-edit a Festschrift for him (Giddens and Mackenzie, 1982a); but he also says it was Elias who impressed him as a model of what a sociologist should be – the single-minded scholar willing to pursue a large-scale personal project, heedless of distractions, over very many years.¹ There are two respects in which the influence of Neustadt can readily be identified. Giddens has said that when he wrote Capitalism and Modern Social Theory (1971a), he wanted to contest the then prevailing Parsonian view of social theory in which Marx was treated as a precursor only (Mullan, 1987:95). Such a view may have been common elsewhere but it had never shaped the theory course that Neustadt constructed at Leicester. Neustadt was also a dedicated teacher – Teaching Sociology’ was even the title of his inaugural lecture (1965); and so is Giddens – the author of both a short introduction to, and a massive textbook in, sociology (Giddens, 1982d, 1989a, 1990a). (The textbook even has separate UK and US editions with different illustrative material to maximize its appeal to students.)

Giddens has mentioned to us that he regards all his work as one continuous project, which we are calling ‘the making of structur-ation theory’. In addition to their merits as commentary, Giddens’ writings prior to New Rules of Sociological Method (1976a) have thus also to be seen as part of a larger venture, the critical appropriation of earlier traditions in order to secure a base upon which to build theoretical constructions of his own. There are certainly some, especially in Britain and the Netherlands, who argue that Giddens owes more to Elias than he acknowledges. (Kilminster, incidentally, discusses the Elias/Giddens issue on pp. 97–103.) We have no reason to question Giddens’ claim that he never knew enough about Elias's (largely unpublished) work for it to have been a major influence, although in 1961–62 he did attend Elias's first-year lecture course at Leicester, which was organized around the theme of development, and he did read Volume I of The Civilizing Process in unpublished translation and later in German (Elias, 1939). (In 1962–64 Elias was, in any case, in Ghana.) But there is a more profound sense – provision of a role model – in which the influence of Elias may have been decisive.

Giddens taught at Simon Fraser University, near Vancouver, in 1966–67. There he saw how difficult it was for a European Marxist head of department, Tom Bottomore, to cope with students whose radicalism far exceeded his own. In 1967–68 Giddens moved on to the University of California at Los Angeles. Southern California, he says, was a revelation; old European structural sociologies of class and authority shed little light on the revolution of everyday life associated with the hippies and with new social movements including the student and anti-Vietnam movements. He recounts how a trip to a beach populated with large numbers of people in strange garb brought home to him that European sociology, and the agenda of the European left, had their limitations. It was then that he first conceived the project that has become the making of structuration theory, the first part of which was the critical appropriation of elements of the European tradition, the second specification of the parameters of modern life and the third work on anthropological issues.

In 1969 Giddens left Leicester for a university lectureship at Cambridge and a fellowship at King's College. He belatedly acquired a doctorate at Cambridge in 1974 and eleven years later became the second holder of the chair of sociology in succession to John Barnes. He has remained there ever since, but has also made numerous visits to universities and other institutions in North America, Europe and Australia. According to Footnotes, the newsletter of the American Sociological Association, Giddens will be teaching half and half at the University of California at Santa Barbara and Cambridge from 1989–90 (Appelbaum, 1988). Our understanding is that he has not yet committed himself to any such arrangement in the long term.

The pre- New Rules writings include a number of articles on suicide (Giddens, 1964b; 1965d, e, f; 1966). These are interesting for their commitment to a sociology of suicide which discards Durkheim's rigid division between the sociology of suicide rates and the psychology of individual suicides. The essay on Simmel (Giddens, 1965a) is also worth noting because Simmel's concept of ‘sociation’ is evidence of a desire, which Giddens shares, to avoid the dualism of the individual and society. It is in The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (1973), however, that the concept of ‘structuration’ makes its first appearance. It does so in a discussion of class structuration in which no attempt is made to distinguish structuration in general from class structuration in particular. Giddens differentiates between the mediate structuration of class relationships, which refer to ‘the factors that intervene between the existence of certain given market capacities and the formation of classes as identifiable social groupings’, of which the most notable is mobility chances, and proximate structuration, whose sources are: ‘the division of labour within the productive enterprise; the authority relations within the enterprise; and the influence of … “distributive groupings’”, i.e. ‘Relationships involving common patterns of the consumption of economic goods’ (Giddens, 1973:107, 108, 109). We have never found the mediate/proximate distinction very helpful and it is notable that Giddens never uses it again, but references to class structuration do signal a concern to theorize the unending variation in class formation; it is never some fixed schedule of classes he seeks but rather actual formations under particular conditions. As Giddens indicates in Chapter Eight, consideration of class formation raised ‘in an acute form the question of the relation between agency and structure’, especially with respect to the way in which ‘knowledge is somehow incorporated in social relations in a constitutive fashion’ (p. 203).

The making of structuration theory: the duality of structure

‘Structuration’ in a more expanded sense, and with it the theory of structuration, first appear in 1976–77 in New Rules of Sociological Method (1976a) and in ‘Functionalism: après la lutte’ and its Appendix ‘Notes on the theory of structuration’ (Giddens, 1976c; 1977i; page references to 1976c are those of the more accessible reprint in 1977a). ‘To study structuration’, Giddens states, ‘is to attempt to determine the conditions which govern the continuity and dissolution of structures or types of structure’ (Giddens, 1977a: 120). Structuration also ‘refers abstractly to the dynamic process whereby structures come into being’ (ibid: 121). As such structuration theory differs from both structuralism and the philosophy of action. The limitation of structuralism – whether in its functionalist, Marxist or modern structuralist variants is that it regards the ‘reproduction’ of social relations and practices ‘as a mechanical outcome, rather than as an active constituting process, accomplished by, and consis...