Recommended Reading
In Sociology, the traditional orthodoxy has been to polarise this debate by saying that our behaviour is either determined by structures, or that our consciousness means that we have agency, or self-determination. So we are either puppets of social forces like education: mass media and religion, or we are largely autonomous social actors. Whilst both these explanations still have credence for many, Anthony Giddens (formerly Professor at Cambridge University and Director of the LSE) has broken with this orthodoxy by saying that both structure and action are part of the same process.
Behaviour and Structure
Sociologists who advocated a structural explanation of behaviour first came about in the mid-nineteenth century with the birth of the subject. People like Karl Marx, Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim were products of Modernity. Modernity was an optimistic period in human history that started with the European enlightenment and ended soon after the conclusion of the Second World War. These founding fathers of Sociology wanted to advance their political views, be they radical or conservative and they thought the most effective way to do that was to emulate the methodological practices of the natural sciences. As natural science had a high status, brought economic prosperity and appeared to answer most of the puzzling questions of the day, Sociology became inextricably bound up with notions synonymous with natural science. As the natural sciences discovered scientific laws of nature though the study of natural facts, they thought a similar set of circumstances must be at work in society. If the natural world was shaped by incontrovertible truths and pervasive forces like gravity, all one had to do was objectively measure social facts like poverty, types of suicide or institutions through quantitative methods.
For Marx our behaviour and identity are shaped by membership of social classes. We are largely prisoners of class and there's little we might do to change our class, agency and social mobility is limited. Our economic interests and how we see the world was dictated through class membership, one is either Ruling Class, the Bourgeoisie, or we are part of the Subject Class, the Proletariat.
For Functionalists like Comte, Durkheim and Talcott Parsons, social behaviour is governed by shared norms and values. Yet we are not born subscribing to these invisible forces, we have to learn them through primary socialisation in the family and secondary socialisation by institutions like education, religion and mass media. These norms and values are viewed as social facts and they maintain the conscience collective, our stable and cohesive society.
In keeping with these ideas, Feminists are also structuralists because they view individual behaviour and our social experiences as being determined by our gender. Society is patriarchal, male dominated and for Radical Feminists like Shulamith Firestone (1979), men use their superior physical strength to maintain their apex position in the family. The female is servile, exploited and may be psychologically abused, or physically assaulted.
Critique
Structural theory is deterministic and manifestly fails to appreciate that institutions change in response to the collective actions of individuals. Additionally, people clearly have agency and may change their lives for the better even in very difficult material or social circumstances.
Class as Marx defined it has changed beyond recognition and many would argue that homogenous social classes are a thing of the past. Inequalities of income and wealth persist but class is not so much of a defining, or constraining structure that it dominates our behavior and our identity.
The norms and values that Functionalists hold so dear are actually not as pervasive or dominant as they would like to assume. Paul Willis, in his Learning to Labour (1976) studied how working class males got working class jobs. He discovered that the "lads," as they became known, actively chose to opt out of the values of the school and challenged the middle class professionals that were charged with their education and socialisation. Willis illustrated how people have agency and in his case study, structures are only as constraining as one allows them to be.
Finally, some argue that we live in a post-Feminist era where gender means much less than it did in the past. For example, the post-Fordist economy and new more flexible educational opportunities have meant that women are far more economically successful than they were even 20 years ago. Additionally, we have seen changes in the law and changes in the Police as a response to changes in social attitudes. Domestic violence is no longer acceptable in our communities and this demonstrates the power of agency to change deeply entrenched institutional/structural practices.
Behaviour and Action
Although action theories or interpretive approaches to Sociology became more influential in the late 1950's, these were originally influenced by the work of Max Weber, the late nineteenth century theorist who actively criticised the deterministic nature of structuralism, particularly Marxism. Action theory rejects this idea that society exists as some kind of external entity that can be objectively measured. If society exists at all, it only does so as a set of subjective ideas in people's heads. Sociology should be concerned with the social actors first order constructs, why we act in the ways we do and how we make sense of the social world. Why we behave in the ways we do can only be understood through qualitative methods like interviews and observation. This discovers the reasons for our behaviour; what is going on inside our heads and how we interact and understand others.
Goffman (1959) in his Representation of Self argued that we have a front stage and a back stage self. We assume different roles at home or work and may present a public face or a private face to particular individuals and groups. Roles can be suspended or modified as we interact with others. Roles give us the general idea about how we might be expected to act but we rarely stick to them in a ridged fashion. Again, we make choices about our behaviour.
Similarly, Howard Becker (1963) in his The Outsiders described how deviant behaviour might be labelled negatively but he also noted that some may not be aware of this process and some might reject the label. So our behaviour is largely self-determined.
Critique
Action theory is useful but it fails to appreciate how constraining structural forces can be. A young working class black male, living in social housing, who is regularly stopped and searched by the Police and threatened by gangs operating on post-code districts, certainly feels the suffocating influence of structures. It is not so easy to exercise agency or self-determination to improve ones circumstances.
Anthony Giddens: Reflexivity and Structuration
Giddens argues that our behaviour is the product of Reflexivity. People think and reflect on their activities before they act. They are not puppets of social forces. Reflexivity is influenced by our circumstances, which we might call structures, our knowledge, what we know, and the feedback we get from other social actors. For Giddens, structures may be constraining but they can also be enabling too. Education can offer a way of achieving upward social mobility but it might also maintain the status quo. Finally, Giddens uses the phrase Structuration to recognise that whilst structures exist, they are formed by individuals and individuals have the power to change them; just as the Police changed their attitude and response to domestic violence. Giddens does provide a useful and less dogmatic approach to understanding how society influences us and how we in turn influence it. If he deserves any criticism, one might argue that he is a little too dismissive of the sometimes insurmountable structures that govern the circumstances and behaviour of many millions of people. His contribution is a valuable one but Sociologists are unlikely to discard the unique approaches of structure and action in seeking to understand our social behaviour.
