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Agency and reproduction
Structures, systems and institutions are closely tied in with his idea of human action, (agency), because they are all part of the ?duality of structure?.
Individuals don?t just create society, and structure does not simply determine individual behaviour.
Structure effects individual behaviour because of the knowledge that individual has about ?how to get things done?.
An example
Agents, (people) know how to go about their everyday lives in Singapore and get what they want, or in chimology, accomplish their objectives.
Routine mundane behaviour is constantly carried out, and requires little thought.
Agents are drawing on their stock of knowledge for that society, which exist in the structure.
Making use of material commodities,
resources and authoritative resources.
Giddens feels that agents have a need for predictability in their every day life. Or as he calls it ?ontological security? or ?confidence and trust that the natural and social worlds are as they appear to be.?
A ?basic security system?, essential for survival of the human body.
Durkheim?s organic solidarity, Plato?s analogy of the cave.
Agency and transformation
Regulations are produced as a result of mutual knowledge and the need for ontological security.
Patterns are repeated and in this way society, systems and institutions are reproduced.
However agents are always aware that society can be changed.
If a particular goal has not been achieved then new action will be implemented, forming new patterns of behaviour resulting in an altered, society, system or institution.
Unintentional changes
Not all change may have been intended.
You go home tonight, tell the maid to clean the windows, she slips, falls out the window and dies because you live on the 15th floor.
You never intended to make her fall, but this happening may result in a further pattern of behaviour, becoming a system, an institution. You have aided in the creation of a new social problem.
This is the problem of unintended consequences.
Criticisms of Giddens
M. Archer (1982) Margaret argues that Giddens has linked the notion of agent and structure too closely. It seems to allow for the possibility that if agents started acting differently tomorrow,
then all of societies structures would be changed.
Fidel Castro encouraged every person in Cuba who could read to teach one person who could not. It was a failure.
Actors maybe able to implement change but not to the level that Giddens Structuration theory implies.
Archer also takes Giddens to task for arguing that material resources enter social life and when humans choose to make use of them.
Volcanic eruptions, floods, or other environmental situations are not the product of human will.
Giddens acknowledges the freedom of action of agents and the constraints put in place by the social structure.
What Giddens doesn?t do is indicate when these two factors are at work in a particular instance.
Archer says, ?The theory of Structuration remains incomplete because it provides an insufficient account of the mechanisms of stable replication versus the genesis of new social forms.?
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