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California State University, Dominguez Hills
University of Wisconsin, Parkside
Created: January 16, 2002
Latest Update: January 16, 2002
Faculty:
jeannecurran@habermas.org
Olivier at tapcourse@yahoo.com
takata@uwp.edu

Agency, Structure, and Dualism

I hadn't thought of interdependence in relation to dualism. No one's brought up that term in my sociology classes in a long time. But Ade Thompson asked the question, and it seemed that we ought to try to clarify it.

On Wednesday, January 16, 2002, Ade Thompson wrote:

Hello, i don't know if you still work there, but i figured it was worth a shot. I go to the University of [X in the] UK, and we've just been given this assignment to do about agency and structure. I was wondering if you could perhaps let me know of any theories that seek to overcome dualism, as EVERY book i've taken from the library seems to be missing a chapter on it, and thus none of them explain its relationship to agency and structure.

Thank you for your time.
~ADE THOMPSON

On Wednesday, January 16, 2002, jeanne responded:

I welcome other interpretations, but this one will at least get us started:

Dualism is a philosophical approach that sees the world in conflict between good and evil, male and female, white and black, strong and weak, or any other dichotomy. Especially in the age of postmodernism and postcolonialism, we have come to recognize that dichotomies don't work too well in categorizing humans. They generally represent an oversimplification that fails to take into account human variations.

Interdependence is one plausible alternative to dualism. Interdependence recognizes the tension between the individual and the community, between good and evil, between male and female, and accepts that humans are not consistently quantifiable into categories based on those tensions.

We have discussed interdependence primarily in conjunction with the constitutive theory of Henry and Milovanovic, and I am by no means an expert on this philosophical issue. But is an important issue, one that recognizes the difference between perceiving humans as static and categorizable, as opposed to dynamic and ever changing.

Ade responded:

Thanks for the weblink, but it seems that you don't have any archives on Figurational theory, or at least none in the index displayed.

This essay is a real bastard. I mean, tell me if i'm wrong here, but Giddens' book on sociology that i have taken from the library on campus, has no mention of duality in the index, which i can just about cope with. However, what does start to aggravate me somewhat, is when I decide to read up on other theories such as structuration and figuration and all that is written is who first came up with the idea for it. The book in now way attempts to describe what either word means.

I have lecture notes that are more detailed and yet they were written by ME! a 21 yr old from Maidenhead!!! God, i mean, i appreciate the fact that if i hadn't left this so late to do, then perhaps my patience would be slightly more difficult to test, but then if we're looking at "IF"s then, IF Giddens had actually described what the hell it was that he was criticising, perhaps he'd have gone down in history as more of a great mind, rather than an author.

Maybe that's just the way these things work. Maybe it's not down to intelligence. From what i can see, the only intelligence illustrated in the sociology texts that i have read is that EVERY author writing their opinions conveniently forgets to describe the theory that they're reviewing, in a crude attempt to make their argument look stronger.

Any thoughts?
Thankyou once again for your time.
Yours Waiting for an 'F'
ADE THOMPSON~

And jeanne responded:

Ade, you sound exactly like one of my students. And you remind me how desperately we need this site for those of us who aren't yet experts on all this stuff. I'm not sure that clarifying his terms would have marked Giddens a greater mind, but I'm pretty sure he needs to recognize that those of us who need that clarification are a factor to be considered in public and civil discourse.

I've got to run off to school to meet a group of my own students. But I couldn't resist putting up at least some response to you:

• The Constitution of Society by Anthony Giddens "Structuration theory is based on the premise that this dualism has to be reconceptualized as a duality -- the duality of structure. Although recognizing the significance of the 'linguistic turn', it is not a version of hermeneutics or interpretive sociology. While acknowledging that society is not the creation of individual subjects, it is distant from any conception of structural sociology. The attempt to formulate a coherent account of human agency and of structure demands, however, a very considerable conceptual effort. An exposition of these views is offered in the opening chapter and is further developed throughout the book. It leads on directly to other main themes, especially that of the study of space-time relations. The structural properties of social systems exist only in so far as forms of social conduct are reproduced chronically across time and space. The structuration of institutions can be understood in terms of how it comes about that social activities become 'stretched' across wide spans of time-space. Incorporating time-space in the heart of social theory means thinking again about some of the disciplinary divisions which separate sociology from history and from geography."
  Scroll about an inch down the file to find this.

• Structuration Theory and Organizations "Structuration Theory is a constructionist theory -- that is, a theory which holds that humans are social constructs and that their institutions of all sorts are constructs upheld by humans acting according to their images of what reality is. The formulator and major exponent of Structuration Theory is Anthony Giddens.

  "All institutions and social practices are known as structures: we can imagine or describe their structure, how they work and how people should operate within them -- the roles, the rules, the resources that the structures require and create.

  "Structures have persistence over time, which is caused by people drawing on and participating in them and also recreating them all the time. What we are all doing here is producing the structure of the university -- we draw on these rules, roles and resources in order to take advantage of what the structure is here for: I'm here, you're there, I'm writing, you're reading, there are all sorts of physical resources and so forth. As Giddens writes, social systems, as reproduced social practices, do not have 'structures' but rather exhibit 'structural properties' and ... structure exists, as time-space presence, only in its instantiations in such practices and as memory traces orienting the conduct of knowlegable human beings.... The most deeply embedded structural properties, implicated in the reproduction of social totalities, I call structural principles. The practices which have the greatest time-space extension within such totalities can be referred to as institutions."
  The Constitution of Society, 1984, p. 17

  Hope this helps.
  peace, jeanne