Knowra Anthony Giddens Anthony Giddens Anthony Giddens is a British sociologist whose work developed structuration theory and analyzed modernity, globalization, and political change. He also helped shape New Labour’s ideas, including the Third Way.
Structuration theory : A social theory in which human action and social structures recursively produce and reproduce one another. Giddens’s best-known theory explains how routine action both depends on and sustains social structures.
Modernity : A historical condition associated with industrialization, capitalism, bureaucratic states, and rapid social change. Giddens explains modernity as a distinctive institutional order rather than a simple break from tradition.
Émile Durkheim : A French sociologist who analyzed social facts, solidarity, and the institutions that bind societies together. Giddens engages with the problem of how social order constrains and coordinates individual action.
Marxist sociology : Sociological approaches that explain social life through class relations, capitalism, and material power. Giddens draws on Marxism but argues that modernity cannot be reduced to capitalist relations alone.
Agency (sociology) : The capacity of people to act, make choices, and affect social circumstances. Giddens treats people as knowledgeable agents who can reproduce or alter social practices.
Globalization : The intensification of worldwide social, economic, and political connections. He analyzes globalization as a transformation of social relations across distance.
Max Weber : A German sociologist who studied social action, authority, bureaucracy, and rationalization. Weber’s analysis of rationalization informs Giddens’s account of modern institutions.
Poststructuralism : A family of approaches that questions stable structures and emphasizes language, power, and the instability of meaning. Giddens’s emphasis on knowledgeable agents and structured practices differs from poststructuralist accounts of subjectivity.
Social structure : Durable patterns of social relations and institutions that organize collective life. His account rejects the idea that structure simply stands apart from human action.
Late modernity : A condition in which modern institutions intensify and reshape everyday life rather than giving way to a wholly new era. Giddens uses this idea to describe the heightened reflexivity and uncertainty of contemporary societies.
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