Theory Beyond Structure and Agency

Theory Beyond Structure and Agency
Author: Jean-Sébastien Guy
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2020-09-20
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9783030189853

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This book offers a solution for the problem of structure and agency in sociological theory by developing a new pair of fundamental concepts: metric and nonmetric. Nonmetric forms, arising in a crowd made out of innumerable individuals, correspond to social groups that divide the many individuals in the crowd into insiders and outsiders. Metric forms correspond to congested zones like traffic jams on a highway: individuals are constantly entering and leaving these zones so that they continue to exist, even though the individuals passing through them change. Building from these concepts, we can understand “agency” as a requirement for group identity and group membership, thus associating it with nonmetric forms, and “structure” as a building-up effect following the accumulation of metric forms. This reveals the contradiction between structure and agency to be a case of forced perspective, leaving us victim to an optical illusion.

Structure and Agency in Young People’s Lives

Structure and Agency in Young People’s Lives
Author: Magda Nico
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 234
Release: 2021-05-12
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000367746

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Structure and Agency in Young People’s Lives brings together different takes on the possible combinations of agency and structure in the life course, thus rejecting the notion that young individuals are the single masters of their lives, but also the view that their social destinies are completely out of their hands. ‘How did I get here?’ This is a question young people have always asked themselves and is often asked by youth researchers. There is no easy and single answer. The lives that are told, on one hand, and their interpretation, on the other, may have the underlying idea of 'own doing' or the idea of 'social determinism' or, more accurately and frequently, a combination of the two. This collection constitutes a comprehensive map on how to make sense of youth’s biographies and trajectories, it questions and reshapes the discussion on the role and responsibility of youth studies in the understanding of how people juggle opportunities and constraints, and contributes to escaping what Furlong and Cartmel identified as the "epistemological fallacy of late modernity", in which young people find themselves responsible for collective failures or inevitabilities. It can thus interest students, researchers and professors, youth workers and all of those who work for and with young people.

Agency, Structure and International Politics

Agency, Structure and International Politics
Author: Gil Friedman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2002-11-01
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1134743718

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The concepts of agency and structure are of increasing and defining importance to international relations and politics as fields of enquiry and knowledge. This is the first book to explore the two concepts in depth in that context. The agent-structure problem refers to questions concerning the interrelationship of agency and structure, and to the ways in which explanations of social phenomena integrate and account for them. This is an important contribution to the study of international relations and politics.

Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation

Structure, Agency and the Internal Conversation
Author: Margaret Scotford Archer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2003-08-28
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 9780521535977

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Explores the relationship between structure and agency through human reflexivity and the internal conversation.

Culture, Structure and Agency

Culture, Structure and Agency
Author: David Rubinstein
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 260
Release: 2001
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780761919285

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This book addresses two key issues in sociological theory: the debate between structural and cultural approaches and the problem of agency. It does this through looking at the work of Marx, Weber, and Durkheim and the ideas of modern theorists like Pierre Bourdieu, Anthony Giddens, and Talcott Parsons. The book examines economics, rational choice theory, network theory, ethnomethodology, and symbolic interactionism.

Structure and Agency in Everyday Life

Structure and Agency in Everyday Life
Author: Gil Richard Musolf
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2003
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780742525283

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Structure and Agency in Everyday Life outlines the major concepts of interactionism through its leading theoreticians, from William James to Erving Goffman, to contemporary writers. The text underscores the dynamic relationship between the structures or social forces of constraint and humans' ability to act self-reflexively and constitute meaning in their lives through everyday action. The major foci of interactionism-emotions, deviance, childhood socialization, gender, the negotiated order, and the self are covered in-depth. The text presents a history of the interactionist perspective.

Structure, Culture and Agency

Structure, Culture and Agency
Author: Tom Brock
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2016-11-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317392493

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Professor Margaret Archer is a leading critical realist and major contemporary social theorist. This edited collection seeks to celebrate the scope and accomplishments of her work, distilling her theoretical and empirical contributions into four sections which capture the essence and trajectory of her research over almost four decades. Long fascinated with the problem of structure and agency, Archer’s work has constituted a decade-long engagement with this perennial issue of social thought. However, in spite of the deep interconnections that unify her body of work, it is rarely treated as a coherent whole. This is doubtless in part due to the unforgiving rigour of her arguments and prose, but also a byproduct of sociology’s ongoing compartmentalisation. This edited collection seeks to address this relative neglect by collating a selection of papers, spanning Archer’s career, which collectively elucidate both the development of her thought and the value that can be found in it as a systematic whole. This book illustrates the empirical origins of her social ontology in her early work on the sociology of education, as well as foregrounding the diverse range of influences that have conditioned her intellectual trajectory: the systems theory of Walter Buckley, the neo-Weberian analysis of Lockwood, the critical realist philosophy of Roy Bhaskar and, more recently, her engagement with American pragmatism and the Italian school of relational sociology. What emerges is a series of important contributions to our understanding of the relationship between structure, culture and agency. Acting to introduce and guide readers through these contributions, this book carries the potential to inform exciting and innovative sociological research.

The Causal Power of Social Structures

The Causal Power of Social Structures
Author: Dave Elder-Vass
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 235
Release: 2010-06-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1139488198

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The problem of structure and agency has been the subject of intense debate in the social sciences for over 100 years. This book offers a solution. Using a critical realist version of the theory of emergence, Dave Elder-Vass argues that, instead of ascribing causal significance to an abstract notion of social structure or a monolithic concept of society, we must recognise that it is specific groups of people that have social structural power. Some of these groups are entities with emergent causal powers, distinct from those of human individuals. Yet these powers also depend on the contributions of human individuals, and this book examines the mechanisms through which interactions between human individuals generate the causal powers of some types of social structures. The Causal Power of Social Structures makes particularly important contributions to the theory of human agency and to our understanding of normative institutions.

Encyclopedia of Social Theory

Encyclopedia of Social Theory
Author: Austin Harrington
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 752
Release: 2006
Genre: Reference
ISBN: 0415290465

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The Encyclopedia of Social Theory cuts across all relevant disciplines, theories, approaches, and schools to present the latest information and research.

The New American Cultural Sociology

The New American Cultural Sociology
Author: Philip Smith
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 306
Release: 1998-06-28
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780521586344

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American Cultural Sociology presents a serious challenge to British Cultural Studies and European grand theory alike. This exciting volume brings together sixteen seminal papers by leading figures in what is emerging as an important intellectual tradition. It places them in the context of related work in Sociology and other disciplines, exploring the connections between cultural sociology and different approaches, such as comparative and historical research, postmodernism, and symbolic interactionism. The book is divided into three sections: Culture as Text and Code, The Production and Reception of Culture, and Culture in Action. Each section contains edited contributions, both theoretical and empirical, addressing the key debates in cultural sociology, including the autonomy of culture, power and culture, structure and agency and how to conceptualise meaning.