Essay On Giddens, To. “Elements Of Structure Theory”

Essay on Giddens, to. "Elements of structure theory"

Contextualization of the text

Giddens is a British whose parents were middle class. His father worked in British transport and thanks to the welfare system he was the first child to go to the University, getting the degree in 1959. Subsequently, he achieves the specialization in Economics and Political Science and in 1974 he gets doctorate. In 1961 he teaches social psychology and in 1969 he had a position from the University of Cambridge where participation in the creation of a group specialized in social sciences. In 1985 I founded a political research editorial called Polity Press. From 1997 to 2003 he was in charge of the Directorate of the School of Economics and Political Science in London.

Giddens created a theory called "the third way" where Tony Blair use to take ideas for his mandate as prime minister. It belongs to the Labor Party, where it has frequently appeared in public events and also writing for leftist newspapers. In 2002 he was awarded the Prince Asturias Prize for Social Sciences and in 2004 he received in Baron de Southgate.

We can find three different times: the first is that when it gives a new meaning to sociology, where it provides a new method based on interpretation;The second is when it develops the structuring theory;And the third is when it already makes references to more current issues such as postmodernity, politics and globalization, being very marked by his theory the third via.

In the historical context, we find in a context of debate at the macro intersection with subject intersection and with the intention of the social system. Three theories will arise that will have the same objective of overcoming the state of nature with the legal sciences.

When Giddens begins to elaborate this theory of structuring is in a context of limits that are treated by Melton’s functionalism. This theory does not solve anything, since the changes are not always systematic. Within this context of Great Britain, new processes arise in which new theories must be raised. And not new theories such as Neakeynesianism or Marxism that at that time would try a solution to the redefinition of the idea of structuralism and especially of action. At that time the new structuring theory arises.

Main ideas and their arguments

This serves to analyze the ways in which we produce reproduce and transform society. To do this, you will review three axes or critical bases in three of its approaches: the first will be the approaches made by the founding parents. Whether Marx, Durkheim or Weber … then you will review the systematic (an artificial system). From Parsons in functionalism and then it will rethink, the meaning or evolution of economic sciences. Apart for Giddens there is a unilaterality context of two approaches the first will be the structural approach, which encompasses the finalism, Marxism and structuralism because they say they are strong in structures, but they are weak in action and then in criticism in theFramework of interpreting the interpretive framework that are the Weberian sociologies.

Phenomenology, methodology and symbolic interactionism claim are strong in action, but they are weak in structure, there is also no correlation between the two. What they want to do once in life is to put the intentions and the reasons why the actors work at the same level. And they also want to put the structures and functional determination of the actions at the same level.

And then he also adds that there are a number of weaknesses in the interpretive schools of the time that are these four points that would be to treat actions with a meaning and not a praxis, incapacitates the recognition of the centrality of power in social life;The limitations norms and social rules are susceptible to preferential interpretation by the actors and also the rejection of relativism.

For all this. According to a theory of structuring, the basic domain of the study of social sciences is not the experience of individual action and the existence of any form of social totality but social practices ordered through time and space. In this way the concept of social practice for Giddens arises here as a product and mediation that allows the integration and interaction between action and structure.

However, it defines this social practice as recurring, that is, these are created are not created by social actors, but are continuously recreated. For them through the various means by which they express themselves as actors. That is, through their activities, agents produce the conditions that make those same activities possible. However, in their profession as actors, people are involved in the same way in the practice they carry out and through that practice they produce so much. Consciousness as structure.

Thus, this decision such as the object of study, also raises its main concern that is the dialectical process through which the practice is produced and therefore the structure of consciousness and all this attacks from a historical dynamic approach. To do this, part of a very complex ontological budget established by Marx in the 18 Bonaparte Brumapast.

Thus starting with the agents, that is, in the first part of that ontological principle of men they make their own history, Giddens thus begins to affirm that the agents continually control their own thoughts and their activities, as well as their physical and social contexts. That is, agents have rationalization capacity that involves Giddens that are able to develop routines that serve ontological security in those subjects.

The actors also have certain motivations to act that for Giddens operate at the level of consciousness. These implications and their motivations in turn imply desires that drive action. They are essential to the point of determining human behavior. But Giddens assumes that most of the action is not intentional. It is governed by unconscious motivations.

Within consciousness there is a distinction between practical awareness and discursive consciousness. It could resemble the dualism that Goffman also expressed expression emanating from people and art expression. In the sense that discursive consciousness implies the ability to express things with words while practical awareness implies only what the actors do. The ability they have to express but the action that entails. In this way, Giddens prioritizes the first over the second is to say the practical awareness of discursive which allows in its theory to make a displacement.

Of the central axis of the analysis from the agent to the action. That is, from recurring practices. All this allows Giddens. In this way, enter the fourth level of consciousness here that is the one that calls monitoring that is the one that allows the agent to give a flexible response to the context. Directly affects his ability to action and that enables and defines his realism his self-reflexivity and therefore his ability to introduce internal changes.

This results in a greater degree of relevance even than the subjectivity of the agents. And therefore, those theories that assign more importance to the intention of acts such as phenomenology and structuralist that directly give that capacity to structures would be opposed to the problem.

Structure is defined as a set of issues and resources that actors will use to produce and reproduce their activities in society. The rules are also understood as formulas that will guide agents to continue in social situations. While resources are going to be a type of power that will support people’s lives to make changes in circumstances. Of these two types: there are distributive resources (such as money) and then there is the position of a person’s social position.

Giddens establishes that structures exist alone, which are only possible through the rules that give importance to the construction of a structure. But he admits that actors can lose control of the structural properties of social systems. In a social system it has no structure, but exhibits it.

Within a social system the structures will manifest as practices that are reproduced and the structures are specified in a social system where they will manifest as memories that will guide the behavior of human agents.

The duality of the structure for Giddens within this assumption there is a problem and that is that sociological theory is a form inadequately analyzes. What has been intended to address between the connection between structure and action. For this, Giddens will propose a structure modality to overcome the figures in society among them because it would be the individual or society, the subject and the structure in the macro and micro dimensions. What the duality of structure means is a re-conceptualization of the object of study, which to that this concept.

It means simultaneously considering the feelings and emotions of the changing for Giddens is to think in terms of duality is to assume that the structure has a dual nature. Then that is that the structure is as intrinsically related to the action as the action is intrinsically related to the structure. Also to its relations quality that allows the relationship between production and social reproduction for social production would be the way in which life is produced while social reproduction would be as social life becomes part of greater routines.

All this theory of the situation also has certain methodological implications that govern the research program that derives from it by beginning some aspects of the social can be susceptible to causal knowledge.

Neither the permanent and predictable structure is the decisive nor can general principles be formed. Referred to the changes derived only from this is that the proposal of Giddens is a flexible and open theory. That works with concepts that must be as open and indeterminate as possible in their actions themselves, so that the context is that determines how these concepts are interrelated and that does not refer plaster, it makes no more relationship than to nature itselfobject contingents.

Giddens also puts the existence of the hermeneutical folds that exist to the object and therefore, the limits of knowledge that implies. Taking into account that social experience is largely a linguistic experience of meaning, although it does not exclusively imply that it has to do has the awareness of the limits of knowledge against the object as long as. It is in continuous process of construction and constitution construction.

The existence of a hermeneutic of two hermeneutical circles. The first is the scientific observer in this case. Of sociological discipline. And the other that of the social agent itself immersed in the world of action that in continuous change. Giddens introduces what could be called a theory.

He puts his theory’s commitment as he understands that as part of the social reality and coexistence of the two hermetic circles. Work sociological discipline influences and determines the object that is in turn in a changing world.

These are the four elements that would make.

Personal reflection and criticism

During the entire content of the text, Giddens focuses mainly on his theory of structuring, where he recreates a social theory about the actor the act. In this sense, we can see Giddens adopts the theory of action to a more open where the structure causes such social acts, that is, one where the cause-effect occurs.

Even so, the element of the Giddens structure still maintains a rigid nature that causes the subject and the action to not change. At the same time, nature itself still causes the subject’s dictum/action or structure/action, since the structure itself is permanent within the subject and consequently cannot flee from this same.

What would a subject happen to overcome such social-structural guidelines? That is, it exceeds the subject/object dichotomy. Perhaps the most logical way to do so be as much as possible from the system and be in a pole of both, that is, to the most extreme of subject and action. Such "element" would allow us to be out of the nature of the system and consequently be free from it.

Even so, this state will still be within the same system, since your decisions marches to an extreme pole is that you have decided, that is, the act. An act of rebellion where you go against the same system and if the system was not against yours, you would not have decided to go against it. It is like Uróboros, a mythological snake that bites itself, where the subjects cannot escape the final destination.

Perhaps to explain such circumstance we have to go to Merton to his theory of the notion of unexpected consequences. In it he affirms that there will be acts that the subjects themselves cannot imagine or wait. Or can such an act be desired by the system? More specifically of the capitalist system? Where the institutional superstructure has evaporated for social control where everything is directed towards the same capital? This same hypothesis is worth the policy where Naomi Klein’s shock doctrines will affirm that terror is part of social control. An example of this is clearly the triumph of Trump or Brexit, where fear about an enemy declared from above causes the triumph of the right.

Bibliography

• Giddens, a. “Elements of the theory of the structure” in Giddens, 1994, the construction of society, Amorotu, Madrid
• End of the century sociology. (April 26, 2011). Anthony Giddens Biography. 12/02/2018, of Sociology of the End of the Century Website: http: // sociologiadefindosiglo.Blogspot.com/2011/04/Anthony-Giddens-Biography.HTML