In the social sciences there is a standing debate over the primacy of structure or agency in shaping human behaviour. Structure is the recurrent patterned arrangements which influence or limit the choices and opportunities available. Agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. The structure versus agency debate may be understood as an issue of socialization against autonomy in determining whether an individual acts as a free agent or in a manner dictated by social structure.
Structure, socialization and autonomy The debate over the primacy of structure or of agency relates to an issue at the heart of both classical and contemporary sociological theory: the question of social ontology: "What is the social world made of?" "What is a cause of the social world, and what is an effect?" "Do social structures determine an individual's behaviour or does human agency?" Structural functionalists such as Émile Durkheim see structure and hierarchy as essential in establishing the very existence of society. Theorists such as Karl Marx, by contrast, emphasize that the social structure can act to the detriment of the majority of individuals in a society. In both these instances "structure" may refer to something both material (or "economic") and cultural (i.e. related to norms, customs, traditions and ideologies). Some theorists put forward that what we know as our social existence is largely determined by the overall structure of society. The perceived agency of individuals can also mostly be explained by the operation of this structure. Theoretical systems aligned with this view include:
structuralism some forms of functionalism Orthodox Marxism All of these schools in this context can be seen as forms of holism – the notion that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts". On the other hand, other theorists stress the capacity of individual "agents" to construct and reconstruct their worlds. In this sense the individual can be viewed as more influential than the system. Theoretical systems aligned with this view include:
methodological individualism social phenomenology interactionism ethnomethodology Lastly, a third option, taken by many modern social theorists, attempts to find a point of balance between the two previous positions. They see structure and agency as complementary forces – structure influences human behaviour, and humans are capable of changing the social structures they inhabit. Structuration issue one prominent example of this view. The first approach (emphasizing the importance of societal structure) dominated in classical sociology. Theorists saw unique aspects of the social world that could not be explained simply by the sum of the individuals present. Durkheim strongly believed that the collective had emergent properties of its own and saw the need for a science which would deal with this emergence. The second approach (methodological individualism, etc.), however, also has a well-established position in social science. Many theorists still follow this course (economists, for example, tend to disregard any kind of holism). The central debate, therefore, pits theorists committed to the notions of methodological holism against those committed to methodological individualism. The first notion, methodological holism, is the idea that actors are socialized and embedded into social structures and institutions that constrain, or enable, and generally shape the individuals' dispositions towards, and capacities for, action, and that this social structure should be taken as primary and most significant. The second notion, methodological individualism, is the idea that actors are the central theoretical and ontological elements in social systems, and social structure is an epiphenomenon, a result and consequence of the actions and activities of interacting individuals.
Major theorists
Georg Simmel Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was one of the first generation of German nonpositivist sociologists. His studies pioneered the concepts of social structure and agency. His most famous works today include The Metropolis and Mental Life and The Philosophy of Money.
Norbert Elias Norbert Elias (1897–1990) was a German sociologist whose work focused on the relationship between power, behaviour, emotion, and knowledge over time. He significantly shaped what is called process sociology or figurational sociology.
Talcott Parsons Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) was an American sociologist and the main theorist of action theory (misleadingly called "structural functionalism") in sociology from the 1930s in the United States. His works analyze social structure but in terms of voluntary action and through patterns of normative institutionalization by codifying its theoretical gestalt into a system-theoretical framework based on the idea of living systems and cybernetic hierarchy. For Parsons there is no structure–agency problem. It is a pseudo-problem. His development of Max Weber's means-end action structure is summarized in Instrumental and value-rational action
Pierre Bourdieu Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was a French theorist who presented his theory of practice on the dichotomic understanding of the relation between agency and structure in a great number of publications, beginning with An Outline of the Theory of Practice in 1972, where he presented the concept of habitus. His book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979), was named as one of the 20th century's 10 most important works of sociology by the International Sociological Association. The key concepts in Bourdieu's work are habitus, field, and capital. The agent is socialized in a "field", an evolving set of roles and relationships in a social domain, where various forms of "capital" such as prestige or financial resources are at stake. As the agent accommodates to their roles and relationships in the context of their position in the field, they internalize relationships and expectations for operating in that domain. These internalized relationships and habitual expectations and relationships form, over time, the habitus. Bourdieu's work attempts to reconcile structure and agency, as external structures are internalized into the habitus while the actions of the agent externalize interactions between actors into the social relationships in the field. Bourdieu's theory, therefore, is a dialectic between "externalizing the internal", and "internalizing the external".
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