Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration

Key takeaways

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Reading notes

Introduction

• The social science is a lost if they are not directly related to philosophical problems by those who practise them.
• Structured theory is based on the premise, but this dualism has to be reconceptualized as a duality. The duality of structure.
• The structural properties of social systems exist only insofar as the forms of social conduct are reproduced chronically across time and space.
• Marx's comments that men led us immediately say human beings make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.
• Reflexivity operates only partly on a discursive level, while agents know about what they do and why they do it, their knowledgeability as agents is largely carried in practical consciousness Practical consciousness consists of all the things which act as notacetly about how to go on in the context of social life, without being able to give them direct, discursive expression. (This is understood as the heart of risk aversion.)
• The repetitiveness of activities which are undertaken in like man a day after day is the material grounding of what I call the recursive nature of social life.
• Fundamentals of social life is the positioning of the body in social encounters, positioning here is a rich term The body is positioned in the immediate circumstances for co-presence in relation to others.
  • Every individual is at once positioned in the flow of day-to-day life in the lifespan, which is the duration of his or her existence, and the duration of the institutional time the supra individual structuration of social institutions finally. each person's position in a multiple way within social relations conferred by specific social identities. This is the main sphere of application of the concept of social role. The modalities of Co presence mediated directly by the sensory properties of the body are clearly different from social tyres and forms of social interaction established with others absent in time or in space.
• Locales are not just places, but settings of interaction. As Garth Finkel has demonstrated particularly persuasively, settings are used chronically and largely in a tacit way by social actors sustained meaning in communicative acts.
• Functionalism and naturalism tend to encourage unthinking acceptance of societies of clearly delimited entities and social systems as internally highly integrated unities.
• As conceptualised and theory structure in something different from its usual usage in the social sciences.
• We tend to associate temporality with a linear sequence, and thus history thought of in this way with movement in a discernible direction. But this may very well be a culture bound fashion of thinking about time.
• In structoration theory structure is regarded as rules and resources recursively implicated in social reproduction institutionalised features of social systems have structural properties in the sense that relationships are stabilised across time and space.
  • Structure can be conceptualised abstract leaves two aspects of rules, normative elements and codes of signification
  • Resources are also of two kinds, authoritative resources which derive from the coordination of the activity of human agents and allocative resources which stem from patrol of material products or of aspects of the material world.

Elements of the theory of structuration.

• Strategist thought, especially in the writings of Levi Strauss, has been hostile to evolutionism and free from biological analogies.
• If interpretive sociology is founded, as it were, upon an Imperialism of the subject, functionalism and structuralism proposed an imperialism of the social object.
  • The basic domain of study of the social sciences, according to the theory of structuration, is neither the experience of the individual actor nor the existence of any form of societal totality that social practises ordered across space and time.
• In structuration theory, a hermeneutic starting point is accepted insofar as it is acknowledged that the description of human activities demands a familiarity with the forces of life expressed in those activities.
• Reflexivity hence should be understood not nearly as self consciousness, but as the monitored character of the unknown flow of social life to be a human being is to be a purposive agent who both has reasons for his or her activities, and is able have asked to elaborate discursively upon those reasons, including. lying about them.
• Action is not a combination of acts. Acts are only constituted by discursive moment of attention to the duree of lived through experience.
• What I call a stratification model of the active self involves treating the reflexive monitoring rationalisation and motivation of action as embedded sets of processes The rationalisation of action referring to intentionality as process is like the other two dimensions, a routine characteristic of human conduct carried on in a taken for granted fashion.
  • The rationalisation of action within the diversity of circumstances of interaction is the principle's basis upon which the generalised competence of actors is evaluated by others.
• The unconsciousness includes the. includes those forms of cognition impulsion, which are either wholly repressed or unconsciousness, or appearing consciousness only in distorted form.
  The agent agency.
• The reflexive monitoring of activity is a chronic feature of everyday action and involves the conduct not just of the individual, but also of others. That is to say, actors not only monitor continuously the flow of their activities and expect others to do the same for their own. They also routinely monitor aspects, social and physical, of a context in which they move.
• The main criterion of competence applied in day-to-day conduct is that actors will usually be able to explain most of what they do, if asked.
• The phrases refer to the grounds of action. Motives refer to the wants which prompted However, motivation is not as directly bound up with the continuity of action, as are its reflexive monitoring or rationalisation. Motivation prefers the potential for action rather than to the mode in which action is chronically carried on by the agent.
• Unconscious motivation is a significant feature of human conduct, although I shall later indicate some reservations about Freud's interpretation of the nature of the unconscious The notion of practical consciousness is fundamental to structural theory is the characteristic of the human agent or subject to its structuralism has been particularly blind.
• Between discursive and practical consciousness, there is no bath. There are only the differences between what can be said and what is characteristically simply done, however. there are barriers centred principally upon repression between discursive consciousness and the unconscious.
• mastery of I me you relations are applied reflexively in discourse is of key importance to the emerging competitive agents' learning language.
• As an example, one of the regular consequences of my speaking or writing English in a correct way is to contribute to the reproduction of the English language as a whole. My speaking English correctly is intentional. The contribution I make for reproduction of the language is not.
• Even the view that for an event account is an instance of agency, it must be intentional only under some description or another is wrong It confuses the designation of agency with the giving of act descriptions. And it mistakes the continued monitoring of an action which individuals carry out with the defiling properties of that action as such.
• Unintentional doings can be a separated conceptually from unintended consequences of doing, although the distinction will not matter whenever the focus of concern is the relation between the intentional and unintentional consequences. consequences for what actors do intentionally or unintentionally are events which would not have happened if that actor had behaved differently. But. which are not within the scope of the agent's power to have brought about regardless of what the agent's intentions were.
• In general, it is true that the further remove the consequences of an actor in time and space from the original context of the act, the less likely those consequences are to be intentional. But this is of course influenced both by the scope of the knowledgeability that actors have and the power they are able to mobilise.
• For most spheres of life and in most forms of activity, the scope of control is limited to the immediate context of action or interaction.
• Martin contrasts intentional activity manifest functions with its unintended consequences, latent functions While the AMS of identifying Lacey functions is to show that apparently irrational social activities may not be so irrational after all. Is particularly likely to be the case, according to Martin, with enduring activities or practises. These may often be dismissed as superstitions, irrationalities, mere inertia of tradition, et cetera. However, in. Mertens view, if we discover that they have a latent function. An unintelligent consequence for a set of consequences which help to secure the continued reproduction of the practise in question. Then we demonstrate that it is not so irrational at all.
• As game theorists have convincingly pointed out, the outcome of a series of rational actions undertaken separately by individual actors may be irrational for all of them.
• Repetitive activities located in one context of time and space have radialized consequences unintended by those who engage in those activities and more or less distant time space contexts.
  Agency and the power
• Action depends upon the capability of the individual to make a difference to a pre-existing state of affairs or course of events. Agency. an agent ceases to be such if he or she loses the capability to make a difference. That is, to exercise some sort of power.
• But it is of the first importance to recognise circumstances of social constraint in which individuals have no choice and not to be equated with a dissolution of action as such.
• In my opinion, Bachrach and Baratz are right when in their well-known discussion of the matter. They say that there are two faces of power, not 3 as loop declared. They represent these as the capability of actors to enact decisions which they favour on the 1 hand, and the mobilisation of bias that is built into institutions on the other.
• Power within social systems which enjoy some continuity over time and space presumes regularised relations of autonomy and dependence between actors or collectivities in context of social interaction But all forms of dependence offer some resources whereby those who are subordinate can influence the activities of their superiors. This is what I call the dilectic of control in social systems.
  Structure, structuration.
• As conceptualised and structuralist and post-structuralist thought, on the other hand, the notion of structure is more interesting. Here is its characteristically thought of, not as a patterning of presences, but as an intersection of presence and absence, underlying codes have to be inferred from surface manifestations.
• In analysing social relations, we have to acknowledge both the syntagmatic dimension, the paddling of social relations in time, space involving the reproduction of situated practises and a paradigmatic dimension involving a virtual order of modes of structuring. Recursively implicated in such reproduction.
• Structure thus refers in social analysis, so the structuring properties allowing the binding of time space in social systems, the properties which make it possible for discernibly similar social practises to exist across varying spans of time and space which lend them systemic form.
• The most deeply embedded structural properties implicated in the reproduction of societal totalities, I call structural principles. Those practises which have the greatest time space extension within such totalities can be referred to as institutions.
• Structural properties express forms of domination and power
• Every competent social actor is Ipsofacto, a social theorist on the level of discursive consciousness and a methodological specialist on the levels of both discursive and practical consciousness.
• Rules relate on the one hand to the Constitution of meaning, and on the other to the sanctioning of modes of social conduct.
• Wittgenstein remarks to understand the language means to be a master of a technique. This can be read to mean that language use is primarily methodological and that rules of language are methodically applied procedures implicated in the practical activities of day-to-day life. Which is very important, although not often given much prominence by the followers of Wittgenstein,
• Let us regard the rules of social life, then as techniques or generalizable procedures apply to the enactment reproduction of social practises formula. rules, those that are given verbal expression as cannons of law, bureaucratic rules, rules of games and so on. A thus codified interpretations of rules, rather than rules as such, they should be taken not as exemplifying rules in general, but as specific types of formulas it rules, which by virtue of their overt formulation take on various specific qualities.
• Those types of rule which are the most significance for social theory are locked into the reproduction of institutionalised practises. That is, practises most deeply sedimented in time space.
• Structure refers not only to rules implicates in the production and reproduction of social systems, but also to resources.
• Institutions, by definition, are the more enduring features of social life in speaking. of the structural properties of social systems, I mean their institutionalised features, giving solidity across time and space.
• Social reproduction must not necessarily be equated with the consolidation of social confusion.
• Structure has no existence independent of the knowledge that agents have about what they do in their day-to-day activity.
• The duality of structure is always the main grounding of continuities in social reproduction across space time It in turn presupposes the reflexive monitoring of agents in and. is constituting the juror of daily social activity. But human knowledgeability is always bounded. (Bounded agency)

Consciousness, self and social encounters
Routinization and motivation

• A sense of trust in the continuity of the object world and in the fabric of social activity, I shall suggest, depends upon certain Specifiable connexions between the individual agent and the social context through which that agent moves in the course of day-to-day life. If the. subject cannot be grasped, saved through the reflexive constitution of daily activities and social practises and cannot understand the mechanics of personality apart from the routines of day-to-day life through which the body passes and which the agent produces from reproducers. The concept of routinization is grounded in practical consciousness is vital to the theory of structuration. Routine is integral both to the continuity of the personality of the agent as he or she moves along past the daily activities and to the institutions of society which are such only through their continued reproduction.
• The specific individuals or clusters of individuals are themselves built into the regularity of social life by the very nature of the intersection between the life process of the cycle of the individual, the duree of the activity on the one hand, and the longue duree of institutions on the other.
• By critical situations, I mean circumstances of radical disjuncture of an unpredictable crime which affects substantial numbers of individuals, situations that threaten or destroy the substitute of institutionalised routines.
• Ordinary day to day social life and greater or less a degree according to context from the vagaries individual personality involves an ontological security founded on a autonomy of bodily control within predictable routines And encounters. The routinized character of the past along which individuals move in the reversible time of daily life does not just happen, is made to happen by the modes of reflexive monitoring of action, which individuals sustain in circumstances of co presence.

Time, space and regionalization.
Time geography

• Most social analysts treat time and space as mere environments of action and accept unthingly that the concept of time as measurable clock time characteristic of modern Western culture.
• Time geography, as formulated by Hargestran, takes as its starting point the very phenomenon which I have much stressed. The routinized character of daily life. This is in turn connected with features of the human body, its means of mobility and communication, and its path through the life cycle. And therefore. with the human being as a biographical project.
• Hagerstown's approach is based mainly upon identifying sources of constraint over human activity given by the nature of the body and the physical context in which activity occurs. Such constraints provide the overall boundaries and limiting behaviour across Time space.
  • For the indivisibility of the human body and of other living and inorganic entities in the milieu of human existence, corporality imposes strict limitations upon the capabilities of movement and perception of the human agent.
  • The finitude of the lifespan of the human agent is a being towards death. This essential element of the human condition gives rise to certain inescapable demographic parameters of interaction across time space.
  • The limited capability of human beings to participate in more than one task at once, coupled with the fact that every task has a duration, turn taking exemplifies the implications of this sort of constraint.
  • The fact that movement in space is also movement in time.
  • The limited packing capacity of time space no to human bodies can occupy the same space at the same time. Physical objects have the same characteristic, therefore any zone of time space can be analysed in terms of constraints over the two types of objects which can be accommodated within it. (this is. a type of conflict between persons or people)
• These five facets of time geographic reality, according to Hargestland, expresses the material axes of human existence and underlie all context of association in conditions of CO presence. (methodologically speaking, this demands something like a fix or random effects modelling or multi level modelling within quantum. within quantitative social science)
• The trajectories of agents as Haggislam puts it path to accommodate themselves under the pressures and the opportunities which follow from their common existence in terrestrial space time.
• Ordering these data as a lifetime biographies, he sought to analyse them as composing live paths in time space. There could be jarted using a particular form of notation. The typical patterns of movement of individuals, in other words, can be represented as the repetition of routine activities across days for longest bands of time space. (This is exactly what I am doing by looking at the economic activity of individuals. This is the routinization of their time space biographies. To a further extent, this could be extended by looking at an individual's economic activity over longer periods of time)
• Interactions of individuals moving in time space compose bundles of France. over parentheses encounters or social occasions in Goffman's terminology) meeting at stations or definite time space locations within bounded regions (EG, homes, streets, cities, states. The outer limit. of terrestrial space being as a whole save for the odd space traveller or two in the current age of high technology)
• As a portrayal of a life path, this would involve generalised patterns of time space movement within the life cycle. The person may live in the House of his or her parents, for example, until establishing the residence on marriage. This may be associated with a change of job such that both home and workplace as stations along the daily trelectory become altered
• Hagerstland acknowledges, of course, the agents are not merely mobile bodies, but intentional beings were purposes for what he calls projects. The projects which individuals seek to realise if they are to be actualized have to utilise the inherently limited resources of time and space to overcome constraints which they confront Capability constraints are those of the sort listed above. Some affect primarily time distribution. For example, the need for sleep or for food or regular pinfuls ensure certain limits to the structuration of daily activities. Coupling constraints refer to those that condition activities undertaken jointly with others. The volume of time space available when individual in a day is a prism bounding with a pursuance of projects.
• A live biography Pakistan says is made up of internal mental experiences and events related to the interplay between body and environmental phenomena.
• Regionalization of time space, the movement of life paths through settings and interactions of various forms of spatial demarcation. (good definition)
• The main reservations one must have about time geography are the following. First, it operates with a naive and defective conception of the human agent in stressing the corpurality of the human being and structured time space, context ideas are called closely with those I have sought to elaborate previously, but he tends to treat individuals as constituted independently of the social settings which they confront in their day-to-day lives.
  • Second, Hogestran's analyses therefore tend to recapitulate the dualism of action and structure, albeit in rather novel form, because of this preeminent concern with time and space.
  • All types of constraints, as I have said, are also types of opportunities. Media for the enablement of action, the specific way in which Congress tends to conceptualise constraint. Moreover, the trade of certain cultural bound elements in his views, the capability. the capability constraints, coupling constraints and so on are typically discussed by him in terms of their operation as scarce resources. It is not difficult to see here once more a possible link with a version of historical materialism. Opal parentheses are really important points)
  • Finally, time geography involves only a weekly developed theory of power. August 1 does talk of authority constraints, which he links to capability and coupling constraints. But these are both vaguely formulated and invoke a zero sum conception of power as a source of limitations upon action. If power is conceived of as generative, on the other hand, the constraints of which have a stamp speaks are all modalities for the engendering and sustaining of structures of domination.
• The term place cannot be used in social theory simply to designate a point in space any more than we can speak of points in time as a succession of 'nows'.
• In developing the theory of structuration, I have introduced two notions that are of some relevance here, the concepts of locales and of present availability, as involved in the relations between social system integration.
  • Locals refer to the use of space to provide the settings of interaction, the settings of interaction in turn being essential to specifying its contextuality. The constitution. the Constitution of locales certainly depends upon the font phenomena given pride of place by Hagerstwat the body, its meteor of mobility and communication in relation to physical property of the surrounding world.
    Modes of regionalization.
• Regionalization should be understood not merely as localization in space, but is referring to the zoning of time space in relation to routinized social practises. Thus the private house is a locale which is a station for a large cluster of interactions in the course of a typical day.
  Time space context
• The lines marked with the arrows represent paths of time space movement the length of the line prefers to the amount of time measured chronologically spent moving between stations in the course of a particular day by a particular. or typical individual. The degree of elongation of the boxes indicates how long is spent within a specifically cow. (diagrams available on page 134)

Structure system social reproduction

• Instructoration theory, a range of dualisms or oppositions fundamental to other schools of social thought, a reconceptualizes dualities In particular, the dualism of the individual and society is reconceptualized of the duality of agency and structure.
  Society's social systems.
• All societies both the social systems and at the same time are constituted by the intersection of multiple social systems. Such multiple systems may be wholly internal to societies, or they may cross cut the inside and outside, forming a diversity of possible modes of connexion between societal totalities and inter societal systems.
• Time space edges refer to interconnections and differentials power found between different societal types comprising into society systems.
• Society's lend in some are social systems which stand out in bass relief from a background of a range of other systemic relationships in which they are embedded. They stand out because definitive structural principles serve to produce a specificable overall clustering of institutions across time and space. Such clustering is the first and most basic identifying feature of a society These include.
  • An association between the social system and a specific locale or territory. The locales occupied by societies are not necessarily fixed areas.
  • The existence of normative elements that involve laying claim to the legitimate occupation of the locale.
  • The prevalence among the members of the Society of feelings that they have some sort of common identity. However, that might be expressed or revealed.
    Structure and constraint Dirkhime and others.
• Most forms of structural sociology from Durkheim onwards have been inspired by the idea that structural properties of society form constraining influences over action.
• In contrast to this view, structuration theory is based on the proposition that structure is always both innate length and constraining in virtue of the inherent relation between structure and agency and agency in power.
• Instructoration theory structure is defined as rules of resources.
• Carlstein remarks. A major drawback in Gibbons's paradigm is that the enabling aspects of structure are not sufficiently balanced by constraining ones.
  • Constraint as discussed in structural sociology tends to have several senses (dirkimes terminology for what it is worth actually oscillated between the terms constructing and coercion) and constraint cannot be taken as a uniquely defining quality of structure.
• In structuration theory structure has always to be conceived of as a property of social systems carried in reproduce practises embedded in time and space. Social systems are organised hierarchically and laterally within social societal totalities. The institutions of which form articulated ensembles. If this point is ignored, the notion of structure and the theory of structuration appears more idiosyncratic than it really is.
• In his earlier writings, Durf hunt heavily emphasised the constraining elements of socialisation, but later he in fact came to see more and more clearly that socialisation fuses constraint and enablement.
• Human societies or social systems were plainly not exist without human agency, but is not the case that actors create social systems. They reproduce or transform them, remaking what is already made in the continuity of praxis.
• Durkheim remarks ''the hardness of bronze lies neither in the copper nor in the tin, nor in the lead which have been used to form it, which are all soft and malleable bodies. The hardness arises from the mixing of them, the liquidity of water, its sustaining and other properties are not in the two gases of which it is composed, but in the complex substance which they form by coming together. Let's apply this principle to sociology If, as is granted to us, this synthesis sui generis, which constitutes every society, gives rise to new phenomena different from those which are clear in consciousness. Thus, in isolation, 1 is forced to admit that these specific facts reside in the society itself that produces them and not in its parts. Namely, its members in this. in this sense, therefore, they lie outside the consciousness of individuals as such in the same way as the descent of features of life lie outside the chemical substances that make up a living organism.''
  • Social systems do Have structural properties that cannot be described in terms of concepts referring to the consciousness of agents. But human actors is recognisable content agents do not exist in separation from one another as copper, tin and leads do. They do not come together ex nihilo to form a new entity by their fusion or association.
  • 3rd time here confuses a hypothetical conception of individuals in a state of nature (untated by association with others) and real processes of social reproduction.
• Durham sociology in fact may be seen as irredeemably flawed in respect of the absence of a conceptation of power distinguished from the generalised constrained properties of social facts.
• Power is never merely constrained, but is at the very origin of the capabilities of agents to bring about intended outcomes of action.
  Three senses of constraint
• I mean, first of all, consider the meaning of constraint in respect of material constraint and associated with sanctions, then move to structural constraint (These are the three types of constraints)
• One, as I have said, is that the physical properties of the body and its material milieu of action are enabling as well as constraining. And these two aspects have to be studied together.
• Another isn't the identification of physical constraints provides no particular fuel to defend a materialist interpretation of social life.
• Turning to power is a source of constraint. Again, it needs to be stressed. The power is the means of getting things done. Very definitively enablement as well as constraint. The constraining aspects of power experience are sanctions of various kinds, ranging from the different application of force or violence or the threat of such application to the mile expression of disapproval.
• Our relations are often most profoundly embedded in modes of conduct which are taken for granted by those who follow them, but especially in routinized behaviour, which is only diffusely motivated. (really important point)
• Once constraint deriving from sanctions is separated off, there comes other points collapse into one if scrutinised it all closely.
• In each case, constraint stems from the objective existence of structural properties that the individual agent is unable to change. As with the constraining qualities of sanctions, it is best described as placing limits upon the range of options open to an actor or plurality of actors in a given circumstance or type of circumstance (This is the definition of constraint and to an extent choice)
• Mark says that workers must sell themselves, or, more accurately, their labour power to employers. The must in the phrase expresses a constraint which derives from institutional order of modern capitalist enterprise that the worker faces. There is only one course of action open to the worker who has been rendered property Ness. The seven his or her labour power to the capitalist That is to say, there's only one feasible option given that the worker has the motivation to wish to survive.
• Full structural properties of social systems have a similar objectivity. Visa v the individual agent. How far these are constraining qualities varies according to the context and nature of any given sequence or of action or strip of interaction. In other words, the feasible options open to agents may be greater than in the case of the labour contract example.
• Why is it then that some social forces have an apparently inevitable look to them? Is because, in such instances, there are few options open to the actors in question, given that they behave rationally. Rationally, in this case, meaning effectively aligning motives with the end result of whatever conduct is involved. That is to say, the actors have good reasons for what they do, reasons which the structural sociologist is likely to assume implicitly, rather than explicitly attributing to those actors (Again, this point refers implicitly to the context of agency and structure, dualism)
  Constraint and reification.
• His variable in relation to the material in institutional circumstance of activity, but also in relation to the forms of knowledgeability that patients possess about those circumstances (talking about constraint,)
  The concept of structural principles
• Structural constraint is not expressed in terms of the inflacable causal forms with structural sociologists have in mind when they emphasise so strongly the Association of structure with constraint. Structural constraints do not operate independently of the motives and reasons that agents have for what they do.
• The only moving object in human social relations are individual agents who employ resources to make things happen intentionally or otherwise. The structural properties of social systems do not act or act on. Anyone likes forces of nature to compel him of her, behave in a certain way.
• The problem of order in the theory of structuration is the problem of how it comes about that social systems bind time and space, incorporating an integrating presence and absence in this. in turn is closely bound up with the problematic of time space, distantiation, the stretching out of social systems across time space, structural principles can thus be understood as the principles of organisation which allow recognisably consistent forms of time, space, distantiation on the basis of definite mechanisms of societal integration.
  Contradiction.
• But existential contradiction, I refer to an elemental aspect of human existence in relation to nature on the material world. There is one might say an antagonism of opposites at the very heart of the human condition in the sense that life is predicated upon nature, yet is not of nature and is set off against it.
• Structural contradiction refers to constitutive features of human societies. I suggest that structural principles operate in contradiction. What I mean by this is the structural principles operate in terms of one another, but yet also contravene each other. Contradiction in this sense can be further divided into. By primary contradictions, I refer to those which enter into the Constitution of society totallities. By secondary contradictions, I mean those which are dependent upon or are brought into being by primary contradictions.
• The primary contradiction of catalyst nation states is to be found in the mode in which a private sphere or civil society is created by with a separate from and intention with the public sphere of the state.
  • Secondary contradiction in the novel global order ushered in by the advent of modern capitalism is concentrated upon the tension between the internationalisation of capital and of capitalistic mechanisms as whole, and the internal consolidation of nation states.
    Critical notes, structural sociology and methodological individualism.
• Wallace identifies the crucial difference between what he calls social structural theory and social actionist theory in the following way. Social structureless theory treats perpursiveness and other subjective orientational factors as at least secondary and at most irrelevant in explaining social phenomena.
• Structures prefer to networks of relations and such networks can and should be analysed without any illusion. The characteristics of individuals in structural sociology, the unit of analysis, he says, is always the social network, never the individual.
• Mayhew argues structuralists do not employ subjectivist concepts such as purpose or goals in their analysis.
• The task of studying on structural parameters, according to plough, delimits the distinctive concern of sociology. Two types of structural parameter could be distinguished, nominal parameters are lateral separating in given population into categories such as gender, religion or race. Graduated parameters are hierarchical, differentiating individuals along a scale and include, for example, wealth, income and education.
  • One of the main objects of structural study is to examine the relation between these parameters insofar as they are associated with clusters of interaction.
• There was no such thing as a distinctive category of structural explanation, only an interpretation of the modes in which varying forms of constraint influence human action.
  An alternative methodological individualism.
• Max Weber said if I have become a sociologist, it is mainly in order to exercise the spectre of collective conceptions which still linger among us. In other words, sociology itself can only proceed from the actions of one or more separate individuals must therefore adopt strictly individualistic methods.
  • Human action, as Weber says in economy and society, exists only as the behaviour of one or more individual human beings.
• The doctrines that advocate methodological individualism involve one or more of the foreign thesis.
  • Plougheristic social atomism. This is the view which holds that it is self-evident and social that social phenomena can be explained only in terms of the analysis of the conduct of individuals, though. Hayek says there was no other way toward an understanding of social phenomena, but through our understanding of individual actions to directive towards other people and guided by their expected behaviour.
  • The idea that all statements about social phenomena such as blouse expedition of structural parameters can be reduced without loss of meaning to descriptions of the qualities of individuals.
  • The assertion that only individuals are real. Thus it seems to be held by some writers to any concepts which refer to properties of collectivities or social systems Our abstract models, constructions of the theorists in some way have a notion of individual is not.
  • The allegation that there cannot be laws in the social sciences, saving so far as there are laws about the psychological disposition of individuals.
• The most important assertion in the quotation from Watkins, and perhaps also from Hayek, is to be found in the declaration that rock bottom explanations of social phenomena have to involve the dispositions, beliefs, resources and interrelations of individuals.
• Mythological individualism is not, as Lukes suggests, harmless in respect of the objectives of structural sociologists. The methodological individualists are wrong insofar as they claim that social categories can be reduced to descriptions in terms of individual predicates, but they are right to expect that the structural sociology blocks out for at least radically underestimates the knowledgeability of human agents. And they are right to insist that social forces are always nothing more and nothing less than mixes of intended or unintended consequences of action undertaken in specifiable contexts.
• Structural sociology and methodological individualism are not alternatives such that to reject one is to accept the other.
• History is not unmastered human practises, it is the temporality of human practises, fashioning and fashion by structural properties within which diverse forms of power are incorporated, not by any means as neat a tonne of phrase, but I think it is more accurately put.
• The government decided to pursue policy X is a shorthand description of decisions taken by individuals, but normally in some kind of consultation with one another or a resulting policies normatively binding decisions that are taken by governments for underorganizations may not represent the desired outcome of all or the most desired outcome of any of those who participate in making them in such circumstances. It makes sense to say that participants desired individually to decide corporately upon. a given course of action. That is to say, individual members of a cabinet may agree to be bound by the outcome of meeting with which they disagree or a proposal which they voted against, which found majority support.

Structuration theory empirical research and social critique
A reiteration of basic concepts.

• All human beings are knowledgeable agents. That is to say, all social actors know a great deal about conditions and consequences of what they do in their day to day lives.
• The knowledgeability of human actions is always bounded. On the one hand, by the young conscious and the other by the acknowledged conditions, unintended consequences of action.
• The study of day to day life is integral to analysis of the reproduction of institutionalised practises.
• Routine psychologically linked to the minimising of unconscious sources of anxiety is the predominant form of day-to-day social activity.
• The study of context or of the contextualities of interaction is inherent in the investigation of social reproduction. Context involves the following time space boundaries, usually having symbolic or physical markers around interaction strips. The code presence of actors making possible the visibility of a diversity of facial expressions, bodily gestures and linguistic and other media communication and awareness and use of these phenomena reflexively to influence or control the flow of social interaction.
• Social identities and the position practise relations associated with them are markers in the virtual time space structure.
• Now you just remaining can be given to constraints in social analysis. Constraints associated with the structural properties of social systems are only one type among several others characteristic of human life.
• Among the structural properties of social systems, structural principles are particularly important since they specify overall types of society. It is one of the main emphasis for structuration theory that the degree of closure, cycle totalities and of social systems in general is widely variable.
• The study of power cannot be regarded as a second order configuration and social sciences. Power cannot be tacked on, as it were, after the more basic concepts in social science have been formulated. There is no more elemental concept than that of power.
• There was no mechanism of social organisation or social reproduction identified by social analysts, which lay actors cannot also get to know about and actively incorporate into what they do.
  The analysis of strategic conduct.
• In institutional analysis, structural properties are treated as chronically reproduced features of social systems, and the analysis of strategic conduct. The focus is placed upon modes in which actors draw upon structural properties in the Constitution of social relations.
• The analysis of strategic conduct means giving primacy the discursive and practical consciousness and strategies of control within the fine contextual boundaries. institutionalised properties of the settings of interaction are assumed methodologically to be given.
• Constrained in other words, is shown to operate through the active involvement of the agent's concerned, not as some force of which they are passive recipient.
  Unintended consequences against functionalism.
• Willis stresses that social forces operate through agents reasons, and because his examination of social introduction makes no appeal at all to functionalist concepts.
• Thus, it could be always the industrial capitalism meets large numbers of people either to work in unrewarding manual labour or to be part of an industrial reserve army of the unemployed. Their existence is then explained as a response to these needs somehow brought about by capitalism. That's as a result of some unspecified social forces which such needs call into play.
• Those activities are shown to be carried on in an intentional way for certain reasons within conditions of bounded knowledgeability. Specification of those bounds allows the analysts to show how unintended consequences of the activities in question derived from what the agents did intentionally the interpretation involves an attribution of rationality and of motivation to the agents concerned. The actors have reasons for what they do and what they do have certain festival consequences, which they do not intend.
• Cohen has recently suggested an ingenious way in which it might yield the key rescues. However, this is by postulating what he calls consequence laws, interpretation. interpretation is not an explanation because it does not supply a mechanism linking the positing of a functional need, and the consequences that are presumed to ensue for the wider social system in which the activities to explain are involved. This establishing consequence laws we set up generalisations to the effects that whenever a given social item is functional for one another, the first socialising is found to exist. Subsumption of a particular instance of social activity under a consequence law can be regarded as an unelaborated functionless explanation.
• But unelaborated functions are not explanations at all, and moreover, have the dangerous side property of implying that a higher degree of cohesion exists that may in fact be the case in the social system to which they refer.
• Suppose we render Willis findings in a functional mode as follows. Education in the capitalist society has the function of allocated individuals to positions in the occupational division of labour. First, such as safe and acceptable if understood as an implicit counterfactual, many functionalist assertions of ported explanations can be read in this way. In fact, they set off a relation which calls for explanation rather than explaining it. A black box. We can express the statement in a different manner without using function as follows. In order for the occupational division labour to be maintained, the educational system has to ensure that individuals are allocated differentially to occupational positions. The force of past 2 here is counterfactual. It involves identifying conditions that must be met with certain consequences are to follow.
• Second, the statement may be red is referring to a feedback process which depends wholly upon unintended consequences.
• Sashuni's exist as causal factors implicated in social reproduction only when they are recognised as such by those involved at some point and acted upon them. The educational system in which the lads are involved was supposedly established in order to further a quality of opportunity.
  The duality of structure.
• All social interaction has expressed at some point the aim of through the contextualities of bodily presence.
• You can specify analytically what is involved in making a conceptual move from the analysis of strategy to conduct to examination of the duality of structure has below institutional analysis would begin at the other end as the upward arrow indicates (look to page 290 8 4 diagram).
• Other structural sets beside that skus previously implicated in the reproduction of industrial capitalism as another of society, tamarind represented as follows (Look the page 300 and 2)
  • The convertibility of the structural properties towards the right hand side depend upon ways in which the labour contract is translated into industrial authority.
  • The equivalence of labour power is essential, as is that provided by the unitary exchange Museum of money to the structural transformations involved in the existence of industrial capitalism as a generic type of production system.
• The identification of structural sets is a very useful device for conceptualising some of the main features that were given institutional order. But as I emphasise previously, structures referred to a virtual order of relations out of time and space. Structures exist only in their instantiation, in the knowledgeable activities of situated human subjects, which reproduce their instructor properties of social systems embedded in spans of time and space. Insemination of the duality structure, therefore always involves studying what I've earlier full dimensions or axes for structurations.
  Problem with structural constraint.
• First constraints do not push anyone to do anything if he or she has not already been fooled. In other words, an accountant persive conduct is implied even when the constraint's limiting course of action are very severe. (this is really important to note when talking about choice and constraint)
  • Second constraints are of various kinds. Is important in this case as signatures in constraint deriving from differential sanctions and structural constraint.
  • 3rd to study the influence of structural constraint and context of action implies specifying relevant aspects of the limits for agents and knowledgeability.
• Come backspace has to say is, in fact, to do with identifying the bounds of agency's knowledgeability For instance, he devotes some considerable attention to specifying what parents and children are actors know, but labour markets in their local area. This is manifestly important. The same is true of knowledgeability in respect to the school milieu, a study of a statistical type cannot produce material of the richness of detail offered in worse's work. But inferences can be made and backed up by the research material as can better shows. But the sorts of knowledge parents and children are likely to have of the cash value of education. (This is vitally important, and I need to add more qualitative phase research into my study of economic activity and use transitions. Probably start with Dan better)
• I should be punched out that there are various sorts of attention which affect the position of children. This can quite easily be distinguished from sources of structural constraints. School attendance and the minimum school leaving age are fixed by law. Parents and children sometimes disregard this legal obligation, especially in southern areas of Italy. But for most it sets the framework within which the sorts of decisions analyse gambit are taken.
• Children are also subject to informal sections on the part of parents and of other figures in the school. Since parents have to support those of their progeny who stay on at school, they have a strong economics action with which to influence whether or not their children go on into further education. Of course, a range of other more suitable sanctional mechanisms are also likely to be involved. (It is within the second portion of informal sanctions that the study of social stratification takes place within whilst. everyone within society is bounded by primary sanctions or The informal sanctions that we see are in actuality. that are culturally reproduced and reaffired based on structural constraints. and thus identify the groupings of people based on class gender, ethnicity, etc. This being said, there is something to notate with the study of strengthening primary or legalistic sanctions. Increasing requirements for everyone in society may have an impact on the informal sanctions within a society.)
• Identifying structural constraint in a specific context or type of context of action demands consideration of access as reasons in relation to the motivation that is at origin of preferences and constraints. So narrow the range of feasible alternatives that only one option or type of options opens the actor. Presumption is that the actor will not find it worthwhile to do anything other than comply.
• If the agent could not have acted otherwise in the situation, it is because only one option existed given that agents wants. This must not be confused as I have consistently upsized with the could not have done otherwise, but marks the conceptual boundary of action. It is exactly this confusion that structure sociologists tend to make for only one feasible option exists. Awareness of such limitation in conjunction with wants supplies the reason for the agent's conduct is because the constraint understood as such by the actor is the reason. is the reason that the conduct that the... of structural source sociology is readily made.
• Structural constraints. In other words, always operate by agents of motives and reasons, establishing often indifferent confidence ways, conditions and consequences affecting options open to others, and what they want from whatever options they have.
  Contradiction and the empirical study of conflict.
• The most important and interesting of recent attempts to give the concept of contradiction a definite empirical content are to be found in the work of authors influenced by game theory, adopted viewpoint explicitly linked to methodological individualism.
• Rudolph and Ulster associate contradiction with the unintended consequences of action. The subclass of the perverse effects that may result from the intentional acts of a plurality of individuals else to distinguishes two varieties of contradiction must understood that involving counterfinality and that involving suboptimalism.
  • The first of these associated with what else of course the policy of composition and the 2nd view that what is possible for 1 person in a given set of stars is necessarily possible to materiality for everyone else in those circumstances.
  • As his point is that many instances of the Palace of composition can be redescribed as involving contradictory social relations. Contradiction consequences ensue that every individual and maggler of individuals acts in a way which, while producing the intended effect of diamond isolation, creates a prefers effect if done by everyone. All the audience in electrical gets their feet to obtain better view of the speaker. No one will in fact do so.
  • The second type of contributive dictary relation, suboptimality, is a fun in terms of game theory is where all participants in a game theoretical solution, situation opt for a solution strategy, a way that the other participants will do so as well, and that all could have obtained as much and one more if another strategy had been adopted. I'm at the case of cabinality. Those involved are aware of the outcomes to which their behaviour can lead, in which various conductions within the action of others.
• We don't aspire to somewhat comparable interpretation to research into the educational social mobility in the 1960s higher education expanded virtually all the industrialised countries. It's educational levels rose more and more people took up occupations for which, according to formal demands of the work involved, Hill markingly overqualified, partly as a response to frustrations thus incurred in many countries, there was a setup that has come to be called short cycle higher education. Short causes offering more flexible short term options. However, if you chose to enter such courses, why should this be? But Don suggests that failure a short psychoeducation can be on soon in terms of analogous to those of the prisoners, dilemma and sub optimal result of rational decisions taken by the student population in cognizance of their probable outcome.
• The choice is students make depend as does the prisoners glider from the back to each individual is choosing knowledge that others are making choices from the same alternatives. Students actually do maximise their chances by losing long-term education, even knowing that others are likely to think the same way, and even though some individuals would profit more from selection short-term options.
• Three consequences of intended act contradictory when those consequences are perverse in such a way that the very activity pursuing an objective diminishes the possibility of reaching it.
  Throwing together the threads, structuration theory and forms of research.
• All social research presumes a homoistic moment, but the presumption may remain latent, where research draws upon mutual knowledge that is unexplicated because researcher and research and habit a common cultural milieu, the more vicarious advocates of quantitative research, repress the essential significance in two ways. They either take to be purely descriptive rather than expiratory, or else they fail to see that their entities formulation affair research work at all.
• Research, which is geared primarily to hermoetic problems and made a bit of generalised importance insofar as it serves to elucidate the nature of agencies, knowledgeability and thereby their reasons for action across a wide range of action contexts.
• Identifying the bounds of agency's knowledge is in the shifting context of time and space. It's fundamental to social science (This is exactly what I am attending to do with one of my research questions for my phd. To understand the shifting choice. and opportunities of those in their first youth transitions)
• Another study of the structural properties of social systems can be successfully carried on or its results interpreted without reference to the mulgibility of the relevant agents. Although many proponents have structured sociology, imagine that this is exactly what defines the province of sociological method.
• All social interaction is situated within time space boundaries of co-presence, whether or not this is to be extended by a media such as lesson telephones, etc.
• Reflects a monitoring of social conduct as intrinsic to the facility which of the structural properties or social systems display, not something either marginal or additional to it.
• Cox said detainees are usually likely to be demanded when a large number of cases of phenomenon are to be investigated in respect of a restricted variety of designated characteristic.
  Mutual knowledge vs common sense
• The identification of agencies reasons normally intimately bound up with the herniaetic problems posed by the generating of mutual knowledge Given that this is so we should distinguish what I shall call credibility criteria from the validity criteria relevance, the critical reasons as good reasons. Credibility criteria refer to criteria hermoetic in character used to indicate how a grasping of actors is reasons illuminates what exactly they are doing in the light of those reasons. Validity criteria concerned criteria factual evidence and theoretical understanding employed by the social sciences in the assessment of racing is as good reasons.