Structuration theory

Structuration theory is a term used by the British sociologist Anthony Giddens in a series of publications in the 1970s and early 1980s as he attempted to define a distinctive approach to the study of social relations. Giddens wanted the term to both embrace and go beyond the more static notion of social “structure.” He wanted the praxis and dynamic qualities of agency also to be included within the term. Thus, both structure and agency are captured within the philosophy of structuration. Many commentators soon noted the striking similarity between Giddens's structuration theory and the work of Pierre Bourdieu in France. Bourdieu also wanted to go beyond the reification and objectivism of approaches that emphasized the pressures of the social milieu to the exclusion of individual and collective action. By creating a synthesis of the best from different traditions, Giddens was able to fashion a path between the deterministic tendencies of Marxism and Positivism, on the one hand, and the overly voluntaristic, free-floating approaches of interpretive sociologies such as ethnomethodology and symbolic interactionism, on the other. Bourdieu, working within the French post-war intellectual scene, devised a path between the overly objectivist and dehumanizing tendencies of structuralism and Marxism, and the idealistic and subjectivist tendencies of existentialism, which put far too high a premium on the role of an individual's will power.