Sociology: The Key Concepts

John Scott, John Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134288229
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Research & Methodology
• Index: Social Sciences

An essential A-Z guide to the full range of sociological thought, Sociology: The Key Concepts is an important addition to the established and successful Key Concepts series.

Fully cross-referenced with an extensive glossary, this accessible text also includes:

• alphabetical listings of key concepts for ease of use
• suggestions for further reading to enhance understanding of areas covered
• entries on 'traditionalism' 'race and racialization' and 'modernity'.

Bringing together an international range of highly regarded contributors from the full spectrum of disciplines, this useful reference guide is the ideal resource for those studying or interested in this popular area.

SOCIOLOGY

The Key Concepts

ACTION AND AGENCY

At the most elemental level, action refers simply to the practices of human beings: to what they do. At a more complex level it can refer not just to individuals but also to the practices of collective actors, those sharing characteristics, such as being members of a particular class, age group, gender, or other social categories such as the homeless, the unemployed and so on. Collective actors can, in turn, be distinguished from what Margaret Archer in Realist Social Theory calls corporate agents. These are groups of actors who have organised themselves around certain interests in order to pursue strategic interests. They typically articulate shared interests, organise for collective action and can often command serious attentions in decision-making arenas. No matter which category they belong to, actors possess a capacity for action. Agency is the dynamic element within an actor that translates potential capacity into actual practice.

Action and agency are typically contrasted with social structures that are seen as the constraining and/or enabling social conditions in which action takes place. Much debate revolves around this relation. From the early days of sociology, however, there has also been a close interest in the constitution of actors and action per se. Weber, for example, distinguished between four different types of social action: instrumentally rational action geared towards ‘the attainment of the actor’s own rationally pursued and calculated ends’; value-rational action pursued for reasons of personally held values, irrespective of the prospects for success of that action; affective action determined by the actor’s emotional states and orientations; and traditional action ‘determined by ingrained habituation’. Later theorists have elaborated on, connected and developed these different forms of action.

In an influential account of theories of social action, Alan Dawe had noted a theoretical tension between those theories that emphasised social order, and hence the structural or systemic constraints on actors, and those that stressed the elements of creative and dynamic agency. To account for the reproduction of relatively stable social circumstances major theorists such as Talcott Parsons ultimately allowed their concern with action and agency to be drowned out by more structural concerns with the effects of social norms, sanctions and regulations. This was a tendency also associated with French structuralism: structures were presented too much as if they moulded, constrained and determined action. In the late 1960s and 1970s, critiques began to emerge of the excessive emphasis on order as theorists placed more emphasis on how actors played a creative and active part in social life. Dennis Wrong criticised the Parsonian emphasis on the power of structures by labelling it an ‘oversocialised conception’ of actors that overstated their relative autonomy. This is a theme that has been rigorously elaborated recently by Archer, most extensively in Being Human (2000). This argument was pursued in discussions of roles and role behaviour.

Two overlapping approaches to action and agency emerged. The first, that of pragmatism and symbolic interactionism, includes George Mead, Herbert Blumer, and Erving Goffman. The second, that of neo-Kantianism and phenomenology includes Weber, Alfred Schütz, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, and Harold Garfinkel. Mead and Blumer emphasised the reflection, reflexivity and creativity inherent in the very process of interaction itself, and in the making of selves. Schutz, and also Berger and Luckmann, drew attention to the storehouse of preconceptions, including typifications of objects and people, and the various recipe knowledges of standard types of practices that actors carry around with them and draw upon in appropriate circumstances. Garfinkel highlighted the array of competencies, skills and moral commitments that are intrinsic to the routine accomplishments of actors. Goffman, like Garfinkel, emphasised the part played by tacit knowledge in the production of social practices.

The phenomenological and symbolic interactionist traditions also came under criticism, however, on the grounds that they neglected structural pressures on action. Many theorists sought a middle way of some kind. Rational action theorists, for example, although often criticised for paying too much attention to actors’ instrumental purposes and intentions, have increasingly stressed the influence on action of structural constraints related to resources and institutional norms. These emergent critiques have since led to an increasingly sophisticated middle way conception of actors, action and agency in the works of Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu. This emphasis on ‘structuration’ has further elaborated the internal constitution and dynamics of actors and has focused on the profound but subtle ways in which the external world affects these.

It is most productive to think of these developments, however, within a frame also inhabited by two other emphases that have matured over these years. The first is the emphasis on networks. For network analysts themselves, the focus is on regularities in how people and collectivities behave and on patterns of ties linking the members of social structures together. The essential wider point is that all actors are caught up in a web of relationships that can be facilitating or constraining depending on circumstances. Action takes place in the midst of social relations, practices and structures. The second part of the frame involves the conceptualisation of ‘actants’, in which individual actors are no longer seen as bounded by the human body. Writers such as Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour have insisted that machines, from automobiles to computer networks, are vital and significant functioning parts of actors, and increasingly so, hence the coining of ‘actants’ to capture this. Actors, it is said, are parts of human-machine networks of social flows, of communication, money, fluids and so on, that radically challenge what it means to be an actor.

This is the frame within which we should ideally now read the middle way conception of actors that was developed most prominently by Giddens and Bourdieu in the first instance. Both, in turn, are heavily influenced by phenomenology in general, and by Alfred Schütz, Harold Garfinkel and Erving Goffman, in particular. The latter’s insightful cameos prefigured their work by drawing attention to the ways in which agential knowledge was permeated by external social norms. All of these writers stress the powerful sense individual agents have that others expect them to behave in manners appropriate to the immediate social context. Bourdieu, Giddens, and also Jürgen Habermas, each combine a concern with the stocks of knowledge possessed by agents with an emphasis on the social origins and grounding of agents’ knowledgeability and generalised dispositions. The key mediating concepts are habitus for Bourdieu, ‘practical consciousness’ for Giddens and the phenomenological ‘lifeworld’ for Habermas. Social relations ‘out-there’ are seen as having entered ‘in-here’ into the actor. Giddens refers to this as a ‘duality’ of structure and agency, and a large part of what he means by duality is that the internal constitution of actors themselves already involves the imprint, phenomenologically mediated, of external social structures. Actors are seen as having internalised notions of the power relations and normative sanctions that exist in the immediate social context in which they will act. They also possess a set of more generalised practical and ideological dispositions and orientations, inherited from the past, that provide them with the phenomenological frames of meaning that guide their actions in those more specific immediate situations.

Most recently there has been something of a backlash against what was seen as too exclusive an emphasis on the inextricable links between the ‘out-there’ of social structure and the ‘in-here’ of actors. Archer and Nicos Mouzelis insisted that one should be able to create a stronger conceptual distinction between external structures, on the one hand, and actors, agency and action, on the other. It is possible, however, to accept this whilst still accepting the essential points about duality. Refinements elsewhere have converged in emphasising the inner temporality and phenomenology of agency and actions, and the significance of the empirical level. In France Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot have shown how actors can switch between different frameworks and principles of justification within the very same social setting depending upon how a given situation is defined. In parallel, Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mische’s highly influential article ‘What is agency?’ was a synthesis that drew on a combination of pragmatism, phenomenology and a wide range of empirical studies to distinguish three major constitutive elements of human agency. These were: first, the ‘iterational’ element of agency, which is very close to Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, in which past patterns of thought and action are selectively and tacitly reactivated in relevant circumstances and are routinely incorporated into practical activity; second, the ‘projective’ element, which encompasses actors’ use of creativity and invention to imagine a range of possible future trajectories of action; and third, the ‘practical-evaluative’ element which involves situationally based judgements about how to act ‘in response to emerging demands, dilemmas, and ambiguities of presently evolving situations’. This approach overlapped, in turn, with many of the concepts developed in debates over structuration theory in Europe and the US during the last fifteen years. Whilst the emphasis on imagination, play and the temporal positing of possibilities – extending the work of authors such as Hans Joas and Jeffrey Alexander – is very distinctive, the creative distancing from the routine expectations of habitus that is emphasised in the ‘projective element’ of agency echoes Mouzelis’s explication of a continuum in which actors can have a more or less critical distance from their situation and from the routine dispositions they bring to it. Also, Mouzelis’s distinctions between the dispositional (habitus or iterational element), the positional (roles and role-relationships) and the situational-interactional (the practical-evaluative arena), overlap in a mutually enriching way with the concepts presented by Emirbayer and Mische.

Further reading

Archer, Margaret (1995) Realist Social Theory: A Morphogenetic Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Boltanski, Luc and Thévenot, Laurent (1999) ‘The sociology of critical capacity’, European Journal of Social Theory, 2, 3: 359–77.

Dawe, Alan (1978) ‘Theories of social action’, in T. Bottomore and R. Nisbet (eds) A History of Sociological Analysis. New York: Basic Books.

Emirbayer, Mustafa and Mische, Ann (1998) ‘What is agency?’ American Journal of Sociology, 103, 4: 962–1023.

Mouzelis, Nicos (1991) Back to Sociological Theory: The Construction of Social Orders. London: Macmillan.

Stones, Rob (2005) Structuration Theory. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Rob Stones

ALIENATION

The term alienation entered philosophy with the work of Hegel, and social thought with that of Marx. Marx transformed Hegel’s idea into a description of a state and a process whereby men lose themselves and their labour in capitalism. Marx takes the term principally from the philosophical debates of the Young Hegelians, though he would certainly have been aware of an echo from legal theory where a similar term describes the transmission of property from one person to another in a legally sanctioned contract of simultaneous loss and gain.

For the Young Hegelians, religion was the quintessential expression of alienation because men created and sustained the world of religious belief and authority but then saw it as something external or alien to themselves. Young Hegeli...

Table of contents

• Also available from Routledge
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF KEY CONCEPTS
• CONTRIBUTORS
• INTRODUCTION
• The Key Concepts
• GLOSSARY OF THEORETICAL APPROACHES
• INDEX