Anthony Giddens
Anthony Giddens is a prominent sociologist known for his theory of structuration, which explores the relationship between individuals and society. He has made significant contributions to the study of globalization, modernity, and social theory. Giddens' work has had a profound impact on the fields of sociology, politics, and international relations.
8 Key excerpts on "Anthony Giddens"
eBook - ePubGiddens and Politics beyond the Third Way
Utopian Realism in the Late Modern Age
- P. Kolarz(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Palgrave Macmillan(Publisher)
...Introduction: Anthony Giddens – Social Theory and Politics Anthony Giddens is a major figure in the discipline of sociology, with impressive breadth of scope and influence. His theory of structuration provided an essential approach for the study of social transformation, especially in complex organizations, and presented a possible solution to several long-standing problems in social theory, notably including how to coherently engage in sociological enquiry with due attention to both structure and agency. His analysis of late modernity put the term ‘globalization’ firmly on the sociological map and shaped debates about the distinctiveness of the present age, providing the terminology and descriptive foundations for research on individualization, challenges to tradition and individuals’ self-understanding in the global age. His breadth of expertise has helped establish both his early expository works on classical sociological theory as well as his later sociology textbooks as standard reading for anyone entering into sociological endeavours. Outside academic circles, Giddens is best known for his political move in the mid 1990s. His Third Way 1 was a key influence on centre-left governments across the globe, though most clearly on the UK’s New Labour government under Tony Blair. Promising a renewal of social democracy beyond left and right, and suited to the changed nature of contemporary societies, his thoughts helped shape the political agenda and lent intellectual clout to centre-left endeavours at the turn of the twenty-first century. The majority of his career was rooted in academia. Following completion of his master’s degree from the London School of Economics (LSE), his professional academic career began in 1961 at the University of Leicester and included brief periods at Simon Fraser (Vancouver) and UCLA. In 1969, he was hired by the University of Cambridge, where he spent the bulk of his professional life...
eBook - ePub- Andrew Edgar, Peter Sedgwick, Andrew Edgar, Peter Sedgwick(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...GIDDENS, ANTHONY (1938–) British social theorist, and currently director of the London School of Economics. A broad-ranging body of work, which engages particularly with the problem of modernism (Giddens 1973, 1990, 1991), is grounded in the development of the theory of structuration. Structuration is offered as an explanation of the relationship between individual human agency and the stable and patterned properties of society as a whole. On the one hand, orthodox social theories such as functionalism or structuralism tended exclusively to emphasise the organised nature of society, so that society was presented as existing independently of the agents who composed it (and indeed, as a force that constrained and determined their actions, much as natural forces do). On the other hand, another strand of social theory (including symbolic interactionism and hermeneutics) emphasised the skills of social agents in creating and managing the social world in which they lived. Giddens recognises a partial truth in both extremes, for society is patterned, so that the isolated and self-interested actions of its individual members do take on the appearance of having been planned or co-ordinated. Annual social statistics, for example, show remarkable stability for the occurrence of many everyday events and activities. Further, precisely because this stability and order are outside the control of individual agents, society does appear to constrain and control them. However, agents are highly competent, with a vast stock of knowledge and range of skills that allows them to make sense of complex and often unique situations, and to manage their relationships with others. Giddens therefore talks of the ‘duality of structure’. Social structure, which is to say, the organised and enduring character of social life, is dual in that it is at once external to the society’s members, and internal (constituting the agent as a competent member of society)...
- John Scott, John Scott(Authors)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Anthony Giddens Giddens is perhaps Britain’s leading sociologist, renowned especially for his theories of structuration and late modernity and his championing of ‘Third Way’ politics. Born in London in 1938, he attended the University of Hull and graduated in 1959 in sociology and psychology. He studied for a master’s degree in sociology at the London School of Economics (LSE), and in 1961 became a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Leicester University. He held positions at Simon Fraser University and the University of California at Los Angeles before moving to King’s College, Cambridge. He formed Polity Press in 1985 and became director of the LSE in 1997. His growing status as the most visible intellectual proponent of ‘Third Way’ politics drew him into the inner circle of British prime minister Tony Blair, and in 2004 he was given a life peerage as Lord Giddens of Southgate. Giddens’ intellectual career is best understood in terms of four overlapping periods, each marked by a distinctive set of theoretical concerns. His early work, 1970–5, focused on the exposition of the classical tradition of European sociology and Giddens was influential in establishing the canonical trilogy of Marx, Weber and Durkheim as the basis of social theory. Subsequently, until 1989, he focused on the possibility of transcending a series of perceived dualisms within social theory, most significantly that between agency and structure. The resulting theory of structuration led to an attempted rewriting and re-periodizing of human history. The third phase of his career, 1990–3, developed these theoretical and temporal insights into a more substantive analysis of the contours of modernity and the contemporary stage of what he referred to as ‘late modernity’. This prepared the way for the most recent phase in his work, in which he moved from sociology to more directly political-theoretical concerns...
eBook - ePubContemporary Social Theory
An Introduction
- Anthony Elliott(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Whereas Bourdieu tended to dismiss globalization processes as intrinsically anti-democratic, Giddens recognized that globalism is a much more complex political phenomenon – one that opens out to ‘depoliticized global space’ and is central to the economic and political problems of our time. By contrast, globalization for Bourdieu appears as a remorseless totalization, one to which the only political counterweight is ‘anti-globalization’. 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, exhibiting 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...
- Stewart Clegg, Miguel Pina e Cunha, Stewart Clegg, Miguel Pina e Cunha(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...4 Anthony Giddens and structuration theory Ira Chatterjee, Jagat Kunwar and Frank den Hond Chapter objectives The relationship between individual action and social structure has been the subject of considerable discussion and debate in social theory. This chapter presents Anthony Giddens’ proposal to reconcile the opposition between structure and agency. His structuration theory proposes to see structure and agency as mutually constitutive, as a duality: as inseparable as the two sides of a coin (cf. Craib, 1992). It is not just that structure influences human behaviour and that humans are capable of changing the social structures they inhabit; structure enables and constrains action while simultaneously being (re)constituted through action. Such an analysis of the dynamic relationship between individual action and social structure is a topic with important empirical implications. Structuration explains the motivations for actions, the choices – real and perceived – due to structural opportunities and constraints, and the interactions involved. This chapter discusses: Giddens and the development of structuration theory: a prologue to the theory and its genesis Core aspects of structuration theory as formulated by Giddens and key developments in the field The relationship of structuration theory to other social and organizational theories and some of the major criticisms challenging the theory Implications and empirical applications of structuration for research in management and organization studies Anthony Giddens Anthony Giddens was born on January 18, 1938 in Edmonton, north London. He was the first member of his family to go to college and, in 1974, obtained his doctorate from the University of Cambridge. He began his working life at the University of Leicester and then worked for some ten years at Cambridge University before he was eventually promoted to a full professorship (Giddens & Pierson, 1998)...
eBook - ePubGiddens' Theory of Structuration
A Critical Appreciation
- Christopher Bryant, David Jary, Christopher Bryant, David Jary(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...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)...
eBook - ePub- Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
...From the standpoint of structuration theory, globalisation is simultaneously humanly produced and a force largely beyond conscious human control. While this process is undoubtedly dramatically reshaping the role of nation-states, Giddens rejects simplistic assertions that globalisation entails the death of this institution. Rather, because globalisation is a contingent and contested enterprise, it is subject to the same sort of reflexivity that characterises all of modernity. KEY ADVANCES AND CONTROVERSIES Giddens’ works played a major role in advancing and popularising social theory in many social sciences. He drew upon both Marxist and Weberian lines of thought to articulate a coherent, unified vision of social structure and everyday life that included such diverse issues as the phenomenology of everyday life, the emergence of the nation-state, and the dynamics of the world-system. Structuration theory made contingency an integral part of social theory, and Giddens’ longterm perspective – encompassing societies ranging from the Neolithic to the postmodern – significantly advanced the understanding of social relations as historically situated and dispelled simplistic notions that equated historical time with inevitable progress. Giddens’ ideas became enormously widespread, popular, and influential. His works played an important role in the formulation of a coherent alternative to both Marxism and humanist geography that emphasised the social construction of space and its contingent reproduction and transformation...
eBook - ePub- Inger Furseth, Pål Repstad(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...7 Anthony Giddens From sociological syntheses to political advice DOI: 10.4324/9781003181446-8 Anthony Giddens (1938–) began his academic life as a theoretically interested sociologist, but became increasingly active as an administrator, and not least as a political commentator and adviser. His most significant contribution to sociology is his attempt to build a bridge between structure-oriented and actor-oriented sociology. He analyzes critical features of Late Modernity and introduces self-reflexivity and individualization to the analysis on the decline of traditionalism. One can divide his work into several phases: first, some empirical studies, before a period of critical analyses of sociological classics; next, a distinctive design of the interplay between agents and social arrangements. From about 1990 he explored the consequences of modernity for society and individuals, and finally came a phase in which Giddens became politically involved and wrote about current societal problems, with an increasingly international perspective. Giddens has made a long journey socially, from a middle-class upbringing in London, where his father was a clerk in London Transport and his mother a housewife, until in 2004 he became Lord Giddens with a seat in the Upper House for the Labor Party. He has repeatedly teased in interviews that he started studying social sciences because he did not have good enough grades to get into philosophy. At the bachelor’s level, he probably had as much psychology as sociology in his curriculum. His interest in individual agents’ room to maneuver in society and how individuals adapt to late modern society may reflect these early studies. Drawing direct lines from life to work seems to have relatively limited interest in this case, however...
