Giddens

1
Giddens

• Structuration
• And
• The Juggernaut

2
Structuration

• Rework Structure and Agency(relationship is
  dialectic)
• People produce and reproduce the structures in
  which they exist
• Constraining and/or enabling
• Begins with social practices

3
Social Practices

• ARE NOT
• Mentally created (are part of action)
• Created by structural conditions
• ARE
• Peoples expressions
• Historical, processual and dynamic

4
Action and Motivation

• Free action from intention
• Intention, Reason, Motive misleading
• Production of society brought about by active
  constituting skills

5
Double Hermeneutic

• Actors/agents reflect upon/interpret (use
  language to account for)
• Social researchers reflect upon/interpret (use
  language to account for)
• Relationship between what lay people and what
  social scientists do

6
Motivation and Action

• Discursive consciousness ability to describe
  our actions in words
• Practical consciousness - actions that actors
  take for granted, without being able to express
  in words what they are doing (see p. 234)

7
Agency and Intent

• For Giddens, these are separate
• (figure 17.1 on p.
  233)

8
Structure, System

• Structure rules and resources
• System reproduced social practices, or
  relations between actors or collectivities.

9
Back to Structuration

• Conditions governing the continuity or
  transformation of structures, and therefore the
  reproduction of systems
• InvolvesInterplay of meanings, norms and power

10
Agents knowledge

• Actors enmeshed in their structural setting
• They have important knowledge about their
  activity even if not fully conscious
• Oppressed have more conscious knowledge about
  social forms that oppress them

11
The Juggernaut

• Metaphor for society
• Massive force
• Barely controllable
• Constraining, risky, but also enabling
• Effects of social practice have wide reaching
  consequences
• Creates risk and uncertainty

12
How do we deal with risk

• Must develop trust in people who control
  (parents, authority figures, systems and
  institutions)
• Learn trust through socialization

13
Risk is still ever present

• Juggernaut is uncontrollable because of
• Design problems
• Operator errors
• Unintended consequences of intentional
  modification
• Unintended consequences of new knowledge

14
Juggernaut

• Modernity as
• Impersonal Interdependence
• Estrangement and familiarity
• Personal trust and impersonal ties
• Abstract systems and day-to-day knowledge
• Pragmatic acceptance and activism