“The fundamental problem of linking human agency and social structure stalks through the history of sociological theory. Basically it concerns how to develop an adequate theoretical account which deals simultaneously with men constituting society and the social formation of human agents” (455). Archer makes the claim that different approaches to this problem are shifting either more towards structure or more towards agency, which she believes is becoming more pronounced over time.
This article explores two approaches to the agent-structure problem that attempt to find a more thorough balance between the two competing variables: the morphogenesis approach and the structuration approach. The former approach was most strongly advocated by Walter Buckley, and it traces its genealogy back to revisions in sociology, and can also be seen through cybernetics. The second approach is that of structuration, most clearly addressed by Anthony Giddens.
“Both the ‘morphogenetic’ and ‘structuration’ approaches concur that ‘action’ and ‘structure’ presuppose one another: structural patterning is inextricably grounded in practical interaction. Simultaneously both acknowledge that social practice is ineluctably shaped by the unacknowledged conditions of action and generates unintended consequences which form the context of subsequent interaction. The two perspectives thus endorse the credo that the ‘escape of human history from human intentions, and the return of the consequences of that escape as causal influences upon human action, is a chronic feature of social life’” (456).
For the discussion of structuration, Archer uses Giddens. “Giddens’s whole approach hinges on overcoming three dichotomies and it is these dualisms which he strips away from a variety of sources, then recombining their residues” (456). Firstly, he views human action as being deeply embedded within actions in society, transcending the dichotomy between voluntarism and determinism. Secondly, he promotes the subject’s knowledgeability in her creation of society, while also keeping in mind that the subject is aware that they employ societal processes in this process, thus transcending the subject/object dualism. Thirdly, he rejects theories that separate static and dynamic treatments of time, thus transcending the synchrony/diachrony dualism. Structuration is mainly concerned with, “…amalgamating the two sides of each divide” (457).
“’Morphogenesis’ is also a process, referring to the complex interchanges that produce change in a system’s given form, structure or state…, but it has an end-product, structural elaboration, which is quite different from Gidden's social system as merely a Visible pattern” (458).
“Emergent properties which characterize socio-cultural systems imply discontinuity between initial interactions and their product, the complex system. In turn this invites analytical dualism when dealing with structure and action” (458). There are infinite patterns of interaction between structural conditioning/social interactions/structural elaboration (458).
“Hence Giddnes’s whole approach turns on overcoming the dichotomies with the morphogenetic perspective retains and utilizes—between voluntarism and determinism, between synchrony and diachrony, and between individual and society” (458).
“The morphogenetic argument that structure and action operate over different time periods is based on two simple propositions:
-that structure logically predates the action(s) which transform it,
-that structural elaboration logically postdates those actions, which can be represented as shown in Figure 1” (468).
(468).
