Download or read book Theory Beyond Structure and Agency written by Jean-Sébastien Guy and published by Palgrave Macmillan. This book was released on 2020-09-20 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Structure and Agency in Young People s Lives written by Magda Nico and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-12 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Structure Agency and the Internal Conversation written by Margaret Scotford Archer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2003-08-28 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the relationship between structure and agency through human reflexivity and the internal conversation.
Download or read book Agency Structure and International Politics written by Gil Friedman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Society in Action written by Piotr Sztompka and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1991-08-27 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Society in Action, Piotr Sztompka sets forth a highly topical contribution to central theoretical debates of contemporary sociology. Taking the idea and practice of collective mobilization as his theme, Sztompka argues that modern institutions, particularly of late, are characterized by an increasing awareness of collective empowerment. The most obvious concrete expression of this phenomenon, as Sztompka makes clear, is the rise of a diversity of active social movements such as those which dramatically transformed Europe in the 1980s, from the birth of Solidarity in 1980 to the 1989 "Autumn of Nations." Sztompka connects the interpretations of such collective activity to a wider grasp of the nature of social action. The result is a comprehensive and original theory of social change which focuses on the self-transforming influence on society of its members' striving for freedom, autonomy, and self-fulfillment. He develops his theory by means of a general concept of "social becoming," the roots of which he traces to the early romantic and humanist work of Karl Marx and his followers and to two influential sociological schools of today, the theory of agency and historical sociology. Sztompka situates his theory midway between the rigid determinism of social totalities and the unbridled voluntarism of free individuals. Social change, he demonstrates, can be understood neither as the outcome of individual actions taken alone nor as structurally determined actions. Instead, he confers upon social organizations and movements a "self-transcending" quality: they express human agency yet, by virtue of their active character, are quite often able to achieve unpredictable outcomes. Throughout his analysis of social movements and revolutions in history, Sztompka emphasizes the dynamics of spontaneous social change generated from below—a theoretical testimony to the rapid and fundamental social change in Eastern Europe in recent history. Against the fashions of postmodernist malaise, boredom, and disenchantment, his theory of social becoming expresses the possibility of emancipation, of change leading to positive gains. His work registers a belief in progress, not inevitably gained, but its attainment fully dependent upon the creativity and optimism of an active citizenry.
Download or read book Structure Culture and Agency written by Tom Brock and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2016-11-10 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The New American Cultural Sociology written by Philip Smith and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998-06-28 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Culture Structure and Agency written by David Rubinstein and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2001 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Social Theory written by Austin Harrington and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 752 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Encyclopedia of Social Theory cuts across all relevant disciplines, theories, approaches, and schools to present the latest information and research.
Download or read book Structure and Agency in Everyday Life written by Gil Richard Musolf and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2003 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Political Analysis written by Colin Hay and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political Analysis provides an accessible and engaging yet original introduction and distinctive contribution, to the analysis of political structures, institutions, ideas and behaviours, and above all, to the political processes through which they are constantly made and remade. Following an innovative introduction to the main approaches and concepts in political analysis, the text focuses thematically on the key issues which currently concern and divide political analysts, including the boundaries of the political; the question of structure, agency and power; the dynamics of political change; the relative significance of ideas and material factors; and the challenge posed by postmodernism which the author argues the discipline can strengthen itself by addressing without allowing it to become a recipe for paralysis.
Download or read book The Causal Power of Social Structures written by Dave Elder-Vass and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-17 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Culture and Agency written by Margaret Scotford Archer and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1996-09-26 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Margaret Archer's Culture and Agency was first published in 1988, and proved a seminal contribution to social theory and the case for the role of culture in sociological thought. Described in Sociological Review as 'a timely and sophisticated treatment', the book showed that the 'problems' of culture and agency, on the one hand, and structure and agency, on the other, could be solved using the same analytical framework. In this revised edition of Culture and Agency, Margaret Archer contextualises her argument in 1990s cultural sociology and links it explicitly to her latest book, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Download or read book The Structure of Social Theory written by Anthony King and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last three decades, social theory has become an increasingly important subdiscipline within sociology. Social theory has attempted to elucidate the philosophical basis of sociology by defining the nature of social reality. According to social theory, society consists of objective institutions, structure, on the one hand, and individuals, agency on the other, it promotes human social relations, insisting that in every instance social reality consists of these relations.
Download or read book Structures of Agency written by Michael E. Bratman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-04 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of published and unpublished essays by distinguished philosopher Michael E. Bratman of Stanford University. They revolve around his influential theory, know as the "planning theory of intention and agency." Bratman's primary concern is with what he calls "strong" forms of human agency--including forms of human agency that are the target of our talk about self-determination, self-government, and autonomy. These essays are unified and cohesive in theme, and will be of interest to philosophers in ethics and metaphysics.
Download or read book Agents Structures and International Relations written by Colin Wight and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-10-12 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The agent-structure problem is a much discussed issue in the field of international relations. In his comprehensive 2006 analysis of this problem, Colin Wight deconstructs the accounts of structure and agency embedded within differing IR theories and, on the basis of this analysis, explores the implications of ontology - the metaphysical study of existence and reality. Wight argues that there are many gaps in IR theory that can only be understood by focusing on the ontological differences that construct the theoretical landscape. By integrating the treatment of the agent-structure problem in IR theory with that in social theory, Wight makes a positive contribution to the problem as an issue of concern to the wider human sciences. At the most fundamental level politics is concerned with competing visions of how the world is and how it should be, thus politics is ontology.
Download or read book Housing in Taiwan written by William D.H. Li and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-15 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Published in 1998, in this book the author points out the inadequacies caused by the division between housing research on production and consumption, and the theoretical divide between structural and agent-centred approaches on housing. By developing an understanding of social relations within the structured process of housing provision, the author argues that action and the specific form of housing provision can be better understood. By using pre-sale housing in Taiwan as a positive example, the author shows how housing production and consumption are closely related and structured through agents' purposive interaction, and how agents are benefited through their relations.
