Transcript Theoretical Issues: Structure and Agency

Theoretical Issues: Structure and
Agency
Lecture One
Dawes: the Two
Sociologies
Why study sociological theory?
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What do you think you have to offer as social
scientists in the contemporary and future world?
How useful do you think your commonsense,
current worldview will be in responding to these
rapid changes?
Understanding your consciousness as a world
view that has been made through a series of social
experiences and circumstances – making your own
‘norms’ an object of social scientific exploration
Sociological Theory is …
Paradox: we comprehend the social world from our position
within it. Consequently, there is not universal consensus as
to the nature of the social world, or solutions to social
problems. Unsurprisingly, therefore, social theory is linked
with ideology.
 This implies a struggle to interpret the social world and to
establish methods for comprehending social relations and
responding to social change.
 MODERNITY: rationality, techno-scientific world view;
progress (as opposed to tradition); secular (as opposed to
religion).
 POSTMODERNITY: plurality, scepticism of universalist
metanarratives; fragmented (as opposed to linear
development).
Dawes (1970) THE TWO
SOCIOLOGIES:
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KEY CONCEPTS: Structuralism - Dualism Determinism
According to structuralism, sociological concepts and
debates (like language itself) are organised in terms of
a series of dualisms
According to Dawes, the sociological approach can be
expressed in terms of series of dualisms, or the
organisation of social phenomena into competing
binary categories, each component of which was
intrinsically related to the other, but also was potentially
in opposition to it.
KEY DUALISMS
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AGENCY -STRUCTURE
ONTOLOGY-EPISTEMOLOGY
SUBJECTIVE-OBJECTIVE
MICRO-SOCIOLOGY -MACRO-SOCIOLOGY
INDIVIDUAL - COLLECTIVE/SOCIETY
BASE-SUPERSTRUCTURE
FREE WILL-DETERMINISM
ACTION THEORY - SYSTEM THEORY
Two Sociologies (2)
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Dualism or binary systems of meaning imply that these
terms are mutually denotative
That they are in tension with each other
You are required to have a working understanding of
these concepts.
Please research these concepts, build on your
understanding of how they have been understood and
used by key sociological theorists, make a note of your
findings and keep them as key tools for the course.
Two Sociologies (3)
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This shows that, up to the point that Dawes was writing
which was in the late 1960s and 1970s, the
sociological framework for understanding and
examining the social world could be expressed in
terms of these binary categories.
The whole discipline of sociology, he went on, was
organised conceptually according to these binary
relationships. These are among the central and
ongoing debates within sociology, and around which
this course is organised.
Structure/Agency
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Structure: The panoply of social institutions, customs, laws,
traditions, ideologies which establishe frames of reference for
social agency/action.
Agent: One who acts. The central problem of agency is to
understand the difference between events happening to me or in
me, and my taking control of events or doing things – e.g.
determinism free will, action.
Agent-causation: a presumed social category of causation
whereby agents initiate sequences of events when they act
without the initiation being causally determined
Objectivism
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Sociologists (Durkheim, Marx, Weber, Parsons) concerned with
the problem of social order
Societies create basic patterns of regulation and organisation
suggesting some form of external constraint upon individual
actions and behaviours
Durkheim: collective consciousness. A general set of social
beliefs about what is good/correct/right
arises from social interaction process and collective conscience
Rooted in individual behaviour, but the relationships people create
produces a set of norms, values, routines and responsibilities.
Thus, certain "social facts" arise which, Durkheim argues, we can
effectively consider as "things" that can be studied sociologically:
Objectivism (2)
Just as in the natural world there are facts we can
elaborate, so too with human behaviour there are
"facts" about the nature of a particular society that can
be discovered and explained.
Dawes (1970) The Two Sociologies says: "Reduced to
its essentials, the argument is that, since individual's
cannot of their own volition create and maintain order,
constraint is necessary for society to exist at all;
without it, the only possibility is the war of all against
all.
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Objectivism (3)
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Societies develop a central value system (for a variety
of reasons).
Values are passed-down through the socialisation
process.
If, therefore, we can identify patterns of values,
patterns of interaction, patterns of meaning, etc., then it
is objectively possible to study such things "as if" they
were real.
Implications of objectivism
Society is created from the relationships between people (it is,
in effect, something that is greater than the sum of its
individual parts):
The value-systems that are involved in maintaining and
reproducing social systems are, in turn, passed down from
one generation to the next via the socialisation process:
Individual values, ideas, meanings and so forth are no-more
than "simple" expressions of structural imperatives or
necessities
Our values reflect our experiences in the world and since these
experiences are socially-conditioned, values, meanings and
actions are merely the expression of structural imperatives.
Objectivism (4)
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‘Subjective’ meaning is an effect of structural relationships, I.e.
subjective perspectives are intrinsically related to social structures
and rules
What appears to us as individual reality or experience is simply
the product of social relationships at the structural level of society
We should be able to:
Study features of human societies from an
experiential/subjective/individual perspective as the outcomes of
objective social relations
Dawe (1970) "...subjective meanings are, through the existence
of consensus, ultimately derived from the central value system
and are thus, at root, external conditions of an actor's situation".
Subjectivism
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Society is seen to be the product of meaningful social interaction
whilst we can clearly talk about such things as a "social system" or
a "social structure", these are the product (or "effect") of human
interaction, not the cause
External, objective, social reality is a conceptual fabrication
The social world is not governed by "laws" about "human nature"
or human society
There are no "facts" waiting to be discovered, only subjective
interpretations and experiences.
We can make objective statements about the nature of society at
any given moment in its development, but we must remember that
these statements are themselves subjective
Action Theorists
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Symbolic Interactionists, Chicago School,
Subcultural Theorists
Action theory: Social life is a made up of changing
beliefs, norms, values and so forth.
In order to study the social world we have to
specify the initial conditions under which "society"
operates at any given moment in its development.
Interactionist research is relatively small scale, indepth and cannot be generalised
Concluding remarks
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Thus, from this viewpoint, sociology can be:
Subjective: because it is created by living, conscious, human
beings whose relationships are not fixed and unchanging.
Objective: if we make objective statements that are true, but only
for as long as our conceptual definitions apply.
Alternatively, it cannot be:
Value-free (because the values of sociologists direct them to make
conceptual definitions about ‘social reality’.
Natural scientific: because there can be no real separation
between "man" and the society they create. Therefore, there can
be no universal laws of behaviour and no predictions can be made
about future forms of behaviour.