by Julian Salisbury

Created on: May 17, 2008

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

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>