The Duality of Structure

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The Duality of Structure

• Michael Ryan

Principles of Sociology SOC 101 DCCC, 2001
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Introduction

• Introduce students to Anthony Giddens theory of
  social structuration and his concept of the
  duality of structure in the analysis of everyday
  life in Modern society.
• Michael T. Ryan
• Professor of Sociology
• Dodge City Community College

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Topics of Discussion

• Structuration theory
• Concept of the duality of structure
• Determinism and freedom in social interactions

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Topic One Structuration Theory

• Structuration theory attempts to capture the
  interaction and relations between social
  structures and social actors interactions in
  everyday life, with structure and everyday life
  seen as two different levels of analysis and
  social reality.
• Analysis can proceed on either level while the
  other level is set aside or bracketed.

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• Social structures are sets of rules and resources
  that are institutionalized out there in society
  and simultaneously carried as memory traces in
  socialized actors.
• They stretch across time and space as they are
  recurrently produced in everyday life.
• For example How do individual actors think and
  communicate through the social structure of
  language?

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Language as a Social Structure

• Semiology is the science of signs
• Signs are collective representations
• Signs are arbitrary differences that have
• meaning because we have agreed within a
• language group to use them to refer to
• material objects, social conditions, and
• internal experiences and states of
• consciousness.

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• For example, tree is a sign and an
• acoustic image in the English language
• that refers to those things out there,
• i.e., oaks, cedars, maples etc.
• We can talk about them across our language group
  because this is a conventional usage.

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• We think through the medium of language
• Actors thoughts--signs--objects,external, and
• 
  internal conditions
• internal referent external
  referent
• Signs can be analyzed in terms of both semantic
  and syntactic chains.

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• In the first case, signs have multiple meanings,
  or connotations.
• For example, red is a sign that has multiple
  meanings.
• What are some of the meanings of the sign, red?

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• How do we know the precise meaning of a sign when
  we see it in print or hear it in a conversation?

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• The precise, or denotative, meaning depends upon
  the context of the sentence, the paragraph, or
  the conversation as a whole.
• For example He stopped at the red light.

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• Here red means stop, and the context is
  produced by stringing together according to the
  rules of syntax the subject (He), the verb
  (stopped) and the predicate (red light).
• Despite differences on the surface, all human
  language groups share the same syntactical
  structure, or infrastructure.

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• Thus, in order to express our thoughts and to
  enter into conversations in everyday life, we
  must draw upon our knowledge of the
  institutionalized rules and resources of the
  English language as a social structure.
• For Giddens, this process demonstrates the
  interaction of structure and agency.

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Topic Two Duality of Structure

• Anthony Giddens claims that social structures are
  both the media for actors to produce interactions
  with each other in everyday life as well as the
  products of these interactions, although largely
  as unintended consequences of these interactions.

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• For example, actors draw upon their knowledge of
  the rules of syntax as well as vocabulary
  resources, the institutionalized properties of
  the English language, to produce their
  conversational interactions with others in
  everyday life.
• I feel terrible today.
• You should take some aspirin for your cold.
• Again, Giddens calls this the interaction between
  structure and agency, structures and actors.

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• If actors do this in a grammatically correct way,
  they not only produce and participate in an
  everyday conversation, but they contribute, in a
  modest and unintended fashion, to the
  reproduction of the English language as a social
  structure.
• The English language is a living language because
  it is recurrently reproduced through the everyday
  conversations of the millions of English speaking
  actors across the globe.

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Topic Three Social Interactions-Determinism or
Freedom?

• The followers of Durkheim, the structural
  functionalists, emphasize the constraints that
  social structures impose on individual actors.
  Human actions are determined by forces that are
  beyond the control of the social actors involved.
• For example, in moments of rapid social change
  (market booms and busts), the suicide rates for
  wealthy Americans tend to increase.

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• Whereas, the interactionist schools of thought in
  the field of sociology tend to err in the
  opposite direction in emphasizing the freedom of
  actors, groups and organizations to construct
  their social relations in everyday life.
• For example Race and gender relations and
  identities are said to be socially constructed by
  the actors, groups, organizations or social
  movements involved.

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• Social structures do constrain us in a number of
  ways.
• For example, if we want to initiate a
  conversation with someone, we have to formulate
  our thoughts according to the rules of syntax and
  the conventional meanings of words.

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• Otherwise what we say will be unintelligible to
  the individuals with whom we are conversing.
• The following sentence makes no sense
• Like, like, like ....

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• But social structures also enable us to solve
  problems in everyday life.
• Despite the constraints that the English
  language, or any language, imposes on us, we can
  think and say whatever thought that comes to our
  minds.
• We do not have to have heard these thoughts or
  have been rewarded for thinking these thoughts in
  the past.
• Imitation in learning processes for G.H. Mead
• The conditioned responses of behavioral
  psychology

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• We have the capacity to create new thoughts and
  ideas.
• The content of our thoughts and speech is not
  determined by the social structure of language
  it is a contingent outcome of our creative
  thought processes and involves some degrees of
  freedom, although not complete freedom.

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• This theory allows Giddens to capture
  interactions between structure and agency without
  reducing sociological analysis to either side.
• Social actors, or agents, are not typically
  driven by forces beyond their control as the
  functionalists see it.

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• Nor are they masters of their own destinies,
  acting with full knowledge and exercising
  complete freedom in everyday interactions as
  interactionists and social constructionists
  sometimes see it.
• Human actors are simultaneously the products of
  their circumstances as well as the producers of
  their circumstances.
• As Karl Marx put it, Men make history, but not
  in the circumstances of their own choosing.

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What This Means-1

• Structuration theory and the concept of the
  duality of structure allows us to think about
  society from both a structural and a behavioral
  perspective without reducing the analysis to
  either the institutional level or to the level of
  everyday life (behavioral).
• It allows us to do our analysis on one level
  while we set aside the other level.

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• It allows us to see how the two levels are
  connected both in theory and in social reality.
• Finally, it allows us to appreciate the fact that
  individual actors and social groups are not
  simply products of their social circumstances,
  but they are also the producers and reproducers
  of these social relations and circumstances.

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What This Means-2

• Giddens theory can be applied to the analysis of
  social interactions in any social structure or
  subsystem in everyday life.
• For exampleHow is the duality of structure
  evident in social interactions on the streets and
  highways of Kansas?
• What sorts of resources are necessary for
  interactions in this system?

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• What sorts of rules must be followed to produce
  interactions?
• How do drivers contribute to the reproduction of
  the system?
• How do drivers exercise any degree of freedom in
  this system?