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The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration

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In this book Giddens gives us The answers, not only to why societys are like they are - the structural parts as well as the cultural - but allso the reason why we, the actors, let them be like they are. By doing this Giddens puts a final end to the micro-macro disussion of whether society constitutes actors or actors constitutes society, where he through his concept of "duality of structure" implodes the debate by not only defining the action of social reproduction as the constitution of society, but allso explaining the psychological reasons, the need for "ontological security", behind. While avoiding the temptation to reduce either actors to be a function of society or to reduce society to be an aggregate of individuals, makes it possible to discuss the links between as well as within the two analytical parts. Unfortunately his theory still lacks one essential aspect - the social dynamic. As a consequence the reader interested in social change will be mighty dissapointed. In the prospect of explainging social order Giddens develops a theory that lacks any other explanation to social change than the orthodox dogmas of unexpected consequences. My suggestion is that Giddens would do well to adapt the time perspective used by Piotr Sztompka, Margaret Archer and other critical realists. In doing so he would undisputably undermine any concurrence to the title as the one who closed the mest vigouros debate of social sciences in the 20th century.

Dr. Giddens' work is grand on many accounts: it attempts to synthesize the insights of "macro" and "micro" sociology, and in doing so claims to explain the full range of human action using the disciplines of developmental psychology, philosophy, sociology, and human geography. "The Constitution of Society" (CoS) is simply fantastic in comparison with an earlier Giddens piece like "Central Problems in Social Theory" (CPST). While CoS does not give equal space to the myriad of social concepts it discusses, I found the book well organized and quite thorough on several important points.

I will not provide a restatement of Giddens' "structuration" theory in this review, although doing so might be of use to many amazon.com readers. Instead I'd like to discuss Giddens' primary motivation for developing structuration theory: an attempt to clarify the relationship between both material and social situations and human action. Giddens is an action theorist who, particularly like Marx and Weber, has tried to explain this quintessential sociological relationship.

Like CPST, CoS is organized around select elements of Marx's sociology. While this may be more readily apparent in the case of the former monograph, one need only read page xxi of CoS's introduction to get the picture: "This book, indeed, might be accurately described as an extended reflection upon a celebrated and oft-quoted phrase to be found in Marx. Marx comments that 'Men [let us immediately say human beings] make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.' Well, so they do. But what a diversity of complex problems of social analysis this apparently innocuous pronouncement turns out to disclose!"

Neither Marx, Durkheim, nor Weber posited a one-way relationship between environment and acting subject, but none of their theories described the relationship with enough clarity to satisfy Giddens. Reading CPST after CoS, one can see how the earlier work presents what would later become many of Giddens' mature views as the most important contributions of the classical authors.

In my opinion, structuration theory is so successful at explaining the environment/subject relationship because of its use of developmental psychology. Openly borrowing from Erik Erikson, Giddens considers the need to minimize anxiety as the primary motivation of human action. He argues that we engage in the type of regular social behavior observed by Garfinkel and Goffman because doing so lessens the anxiety that we first develop as infants. As if wedding the work of "interactionist" and "structuralist" sociologists were not impressive enough, Giddens enhances microsociology by providing a psychological basis for its observations. Furthermore, this combination facilitates the incorporation of arguments and observations from human geography. The spatial notions of presence and absense that form the basis of individual anxiety also define societies at large. Thus the "problem of order" in structuration theory is how it's possible that actors who are not co-present can coordinate their actions and reproduce anxiety-minimizing social norms across space and time.

As Giddens' critics have stated at length, the empirical utility of structuration theory is debatable. Even so, I consider "The Constitution of Society" an underutilized resource for guiding sociological investigation, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to all those interested in social theory.

I think Giddens' structuration theory is the most promising theory since collapse of Parsons' framework.I read this book at undergraduate for the first time. while I studied Husserl and Heidegger at the same time. this help me understand Giddens with ease. I recommend to read Heidegger's Sein und Zeit to see the motive under Giddens' theory. this is not hidden fact. Giddens himself noted it several times. without philosopical background knowledge, it's impossible to access him properly. u will see my point if u read the first page of his 'Central Problem of Social Theory'. I agree to Turner's point that Giddens' theoretical framework is vague at best sencitising for actual research. concepts are clearly defined but how those concepts are related to each other is not that clear. reader himself should fill the gaps. one should make up for this difficulty with grasping Giddens' deep motive under framework. to do so, u should know well the tradition of Sociology and modern philosophy.

This is Giddens' magnum opus, and the crucial breakpoint in modern social theory. I do think that to really understand his structuration theory, you also need to read 'New Rules of Sociological Method', 'Central Problems of Social Theory,' and for how his thought evolved, 'Consequences of Modernity', 'Modernity and Self-Identity', and probably 'Beyond Left and Right'. [Not to mention the work of other theorists with which his is intertwined.] After those works he turned to relatively practical politics, forswore high structuration theory, and basically went out into left field. But 'Constitution of Society' is his central integration. I can't really describe its substance here, but there are a number of good summaries. I'll try to indicate its aims and significance.

Giddens does somewhat deep scholarship in very select places, but he doesn't really write detailed explanatory analyses a la Bourdieu's '...Theory of Practice' or densely layered theory like Habermas. Those aren't his goals. What he purposefully does is survey, critique, conceptually transform, integrate, and redirect the ideas of social theory. He doesn't go deep because he has to be broad instead--there's too much to transform and integrate. Obviously, to achieve those goals, he has to be eclectic and disrespect disciplinary boundaries; those aren't flaws unless the product is in error in other ways. I don't see most critiques of structuration theory accurately identifying its real concepts, goals, and claims, so their counterarguments rarely have any force.

Giddens' transfiguration of social-theoretic concepts is decisive. He has mastered the art of insightfully summing up main paths of thought, showing their weaknesses, retaining their insights. He takes the most important problems plaguing social disciplines and flat-out solves them. Not perfectly or completely, but in ways that let us see way past them and step out of the old theoretic mires. Doubtless there are new mires requiring more work, but that's intellectual life. Giddens' reformulation also frees us to consider the old social forms and processes from a perspective consonant with the new.

Giddens is a deceptively clear writer. Compared to many other theorists, he reads seamlessly and straightforwardly. But his value is actually not the explicit statements he gives to ideas; it's the way he wades into rivers of past and present thought that he has mastered and so can dam up, channel in new directions, create new reservoirs, and use to generate ideational power. The stream that is released doesn't let one see the old shorelines, the new reservoirs, or the sources of the new energy. I apologize for the metaphors above.

Anthony Giddens is a world famous theoretical sociologist. This book is an outline of his mature thought, which he terms structuration theory. Giddens is intelligent, thoughtful, and does not confuse social analysis with social pleading. He is typical, though, of the modern sociological `guru' in developing a theory that (a) stands alone rather than building on and complementing previous sociological theories; (b) embraces inductive, high-level interpretive generalizing about contemporary society with no analytical or microsocial foundations; (c) ignores all the other behavioral sciences, including biology, economics, anthropology, and political science; and hence (d) presupposes that one can understand modern human society without the slightest knowledge of premodern social formations and non-human societies.

Human society is a complex dynamical system, and as such cannot be fully or deeply understood in terms of purely analytical models with axiomatic mathematical bases. It is for this reason that broad, synthetic investigations into human society are absolutely indispensable for fully understanding its structure and dynamics. In the hands of some Sociological Guru types, this stance leads to interesting sociopolitical commentary that is about as close to science as it is to humanist studies, but in the hands of a Freud, a Foucault, or a Habermas offers insights and dimensions of thought inaccessible in traditional behavioral science models. Giddens is of a different sort. He does not have any earth shattering insights to offer, but rather synthesizes the incompatible insights of other Sociological Gurus into a harmonious blend of fundamental compromises.

In particular, he takes the two major strands of Marxism, nomological and structural on the one hand, and praxeological and action-oriented on the other, and blends them into a reasonable system in which, following the Karl Marx of the Eighteenth Brumaire, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language." I will not go through the basic argument, which is spottily developed and merely alluded to in the book, but it is a strong argument. Basically, there is a social structure that coordinates the activities of individuals and determines the macrosocial rules of distribution, allocation, and system evolution (the nomological) and there is the active, reflexive, conscious individual and the resulting network of minds that acts to staff and reproduce the structure, as well as to transform the rules of the game (the praxiological).

This of course is tremendously interesting, but nothing new. Moreover, Giddens routinely falls in the Continental Ruse of criticizing a theory he does not like by using tons of big words that at first appear impenetrable, but upon investigation turn out to be trivial. Here is his critique of the rational actor model of economic and decision theory: "This approach can draw only sparingly upon the analytical philosophy of action, as `action' is ordinarily portrayed by most contemporary Anglo-American writers. `Action' is not a combination of `acts': `acts' are constituted only by a discursive movement of attention to the durée of lived-through experience. Nor can `action' be discussed in separation from the body, its mediations with the surrounding world and the coherence of an acting self. What I call a stratification model of the acting self involves treating the reflective monitoring, rationalizing and motivation of action as embedded sets of processes." (p. 3) Now, I have nothing against the discursive movement of attention, but that hardly justifies abandoning the analytical models that have been so successful in economics, decision theory, and other parts of the behavioral sciences.

The simple fact is that Giddens and the other Sociological Guru simply take human society as given and philosophize on a few far-flung aspects of modern society as though they could be understood without any fundamental understanding of the basic forces that foster the coherence of society and the nature of the forces that impel social change. For these aspects of social theory we need gene-culture coevolution as developed in biology and anthropology, a strong understanding of the varieties of sociality as developed in sociobiology and behavioral ecology, a psychological theory based on modern cognitive science and neuroscience and not the speculations of century-old psychoanalysts.

Theoretically, modern sociology is dead. But like the phoenix, it has the capacity to rise from its ashes, born anew, and wrapped in its many insights from its illustrious past. For now, read this book and weep.

La constitución de la sociedad, de Anthony Giddens, constituye junto a La Distinción de Pierre Bourdieu y Teoría de la Acción Comunicativa de J. Habermas, una de las tres principales obras de la sociología contemporánea.
Más allá de que Giddens terminó en el polo opuesto político de Bourdieu, sus teorías lograron romper con la falsa dicotomía entre estructura y construcción o agencia social.
Es una de las obras que ningún estudioso de sociología o teoría social puede dejar de considerar, desgraciadamente la traducción en castellano es pésima y es necesario recurrir a su lectura en inglés para poder comprender la obra.
Roberto von Sprecher
Prof. Sociología Universidad Nacional de Córdoba. Argentina.

This author jumps from subject to subject like a jack-rabbit with fleas. He can't stay on one thought longer than a paragraph, and he's on to something unrelated for the next. He makes up his own ridiculous jargon, because no one else offers acceptable terminology in his opinion. He attacks every reputable social theorist out there, because he Giddens, has a better idea. Many times however, he actually repeats their theory in his own torturous, twisted style. It is so hard to follow the substance of his own theories because he renames every conceivable term in social theory-even the most basic ones, including "society"! Gidden's definitions do not match his newly-named yet refurbished theories (ie: time-space edges are defined as "interconnections, and differentials of power"). RIDICULOUS! He's far worse than jargonistic; his writing and style reflects more a serious personality disorder than anything else. He certainly is no powerhouse of intellect--more like an intellectual charlatan, if anything.