Structure and agency

Structure and agency is the debate over how social arrangements constrain and enable human action, and how people reproduce or change those arrangements.

Structuration theory: Anthony Giddens’s theory that social practices both draw on and reproduce the rules and resources composing social structures. It frames structure and agency as mutually sustaining aspects of social practice.
Anthony Giddens: A British sociologist whose work developed structuration theory and the theory of modernity. His account makes structure both the medium and outcome of social action.
Methodological individualism: An approach that explains social phenomena through the actions and interactions of individuals. It gives explanatory priority to individual action rather than social structures.
Social stratification: The patterned ranking of people and groups into unequal positions in society. It raises the question of how inherited positions constrain choices and are reproduced.
Habitus: Pierre Bourdieu’s concept for durable, socially acquired dispositions that guide perception and action. It explains how social history shapes action without mechanically determining it.
Margaret Archer: A British sociologist known for the morphogenetic approach and analytical separation of structure and agency. She challenged theories that collapse structural conditions into ongoing practice.
Structuralism: An approach that explains meaning and social life through underlying systems of relations. It emphasizes systems that shape conduct beyond individuals’ intentions.
Social mobility: Movement by individuals or groups between positions in a social hierarchy. It tests how far action can overcome structural barriers.
Morphogenetic approach: Margaret Archer’s framework that distinguishes structural conditioning, social interaction, and structural elaboration over time. It analyzes how structures and agents affect one another in separate phases.
Pierre Bourdieu: A French sociologist whose concepts of habitus, field, and capital explain patterned social practice. His framework links embodied dispositions to unequal social settings.

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