If we take the Agency-Structure Dualism, this
is a dualism that has been the heart of much
social science and social psychological work.
And basically, it’s about the ways in which
we
think people either determine their own life
courses, what happens to them, or they’re
determined by social structures. So the structure
of society; the structure of the groups that
they’re within; the structure of their families.
But also it sees the social context as broader,
to
do with wider social processes, to do with
social class, gender, race.
The challenge is to try and think about ways
in which we can be agents within the context
of
all these social influences and pressures,
which themselves are multiple and conflicting
and
not just one thing. So I think we can’t
just talk about social structures, but we’ve
actually got
to talk very much more carefully about what
sort of pressures there are at what levels
and
how they impinge together.
Quite often these two things have been polarised.
One of the things that we want to get over
very strongly in this course is that we can’t
polarise them, that we have to have both a
view of
agency being important to the way in which
we understand the social world, and structure.
That they always and ever operating together,
that we can’t separate them. That people
always have some agency, they’re never totally
determined whatever the situation. And that
they always are partially determined by the
structures in which they are. So that it’s
not one
or the other.
I think a good example is the way very recently
we’ve gone from a situation where
homosexual couples, whether they’re male
or female, did not have the ability to get
married,
and so the law was agentic to them. They had
no agency. They couldn’t suddenly decide
that they’d go and get married because that
wasn’t legally possible. Whereas now we
have
civil partnerships, they can’t get married
but they can get most of the legal advantages
of
being married.
And so in a sense to be gay
is slightly more
agentic these days
than it was even a couple of
years ago.
