LIVING THEORY: WRITE A 2000 WORDS IN THE FORM OF CASE STUDY OF AN EVERY DAY SITUATION: ATTENDING A SCHOOL BY GIDDENS ON - Essay Example

Download file to see previous pages... tructuration which has explored the connection between individual and their social systems. He is the most prominent contributor to the field of sociology and has published almost thirty four books in almost twenty eight languages. He has also developed the third way political philosophy which seeks to redefine social democracy for the globalized era (Giddens, 1991) Anthony Giddens was born on the day of January 18th, 1938. He completed his Bachelor degree in sociology and psychology in 1959 at the University of Hull. He attained his master degree at the London School of Economics in Economics degree and his PhD at Cambridge University. Structuration refers to the claim that action and structure are not opposed but mutually dependant to Parsons. The purpose of sociology is to show how structured settings both maintain and is maintained by particular sets of actions. However, it is important to note that Giddens rarely refers to action, preferring instead the term agency meaning, the continuous flow of conduct. The emphasis on flow of conducts indicates that agency is not to be equated with the activities of particular individuals but with the developing totality of activities over both time and space. What we call 'structure' is the "objectification", the institutionalisation, of past agency; again social reality is located in history (re Marx on the power of dead (past) labour; also Berger & Luckman on society as ‘objective reality’) (Durkhein, 2006) Application of structuration theory to the everyday situation Giddens seems to be drawing significantly on the work of Schutz (phenomenology), who argued that social action is, actually, interaction at one and the same time with Predecessors, Contemporaries and Successors. We 'inherit' a socially organised world from Predecessors which, together with our Contemporaries, we reproduce and modify and then hand on to our Successors as their received world "Men make their own history but not in situations of their own choosing" - Marx. Therefore, social reality is a process; it is neither a fixed institutional structure nor a set of discrete actions but the ongoing interaction between these elements. Thus we are the agents of society; we act on its behalf, freely but within its constraints. We are not the puppets of the social structure nor are social reality whatever we wish it to be (Giddens, 1991). Therefore Giddens' synthesis achieves its goals insofar as it avoids a) prioritising either structure or action, b) the individualism of action theories (action is collective) and c) the determinism of structuralist theories (structure is negotiated and modified through agency). However, at one point, (I think it’s in ‘The Constitution of Society’) Giddens states that sociological research can be conducted from either the ‘agency’ or the ‘structure’ side of the process. This may be just a slip of the pen but, if not, it would seem to undermine the claim that structuration the ...Download file to see next pagesRead More