Chapter Overview

This chapter describes theoretical efforts to integrate macro-level theories that deal with the structures and institutions of society with micro-level theories of everyday life. These integrative theories aim to overcome the limitations of either approach by balancing our understanding that individuals are free to interpret, influence, and act with our understanding of organizational and institutional constraints, power, and social reproduction. Richard Emerson’s exchange theory, Anthony Giddens’s structuration, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, and parts of feminist theory each have distinctive approaches to this central problem in social theory.

Building on the work of George Homans, Richard Emerson asserted that power was central to exchange, that actors are not entirely rational, and that social relations and networks could be used to explain both micro- and macro-level phenomena. Emerson’s exchange theory focuses on the rewards and costs of social interaction and takes social structure as a variable dependent on exchange. The theory assumes that people act rationally within the context of situations, thereby allowing the situations to occur. It also assumes that as people become satiated with the rewards they obtain from a situation, those situations will be of declining importance to them. Last, it assumes that benefits obtained depend on the benefits of exchange.

According to Emerson, social structure is produced and reproduced through exchange mechanisms. The exchange network is a web of social relationships that involves a number of individuals or groups. All individuals and groups have opportunities to exchange with others. These relationships interrelate with one another to form network structure. Each exchange relationship is embedded in a larger exchange network.

In exchange theory, power is defined as the potential cost that one actor can induce another to accept. Dependency is the potential cost that an actor is willing to accept within an exchange relationship. Mutual dependencies condition the nature of an interaction. When there is an imbalance of power and dependency between two actors, the one with more power and less dependence will have an advantage that can be used to collect rewards or distribute punishments. Exchange theorists argue that the relative power of an actor is determined by the position of an actor in an exchange network. The amount of dependence of the entire structure on the position will determine its power. This perspective can be used to examine both the social behavior of individuals and social structure. It can also be used to examine how changes in power-dependency at the micro-level affect macro-level phenomena and vice-versa.

Structuration theory focuses on the mutual constitution of structure and agency. Anthony Giddens argues that structure and agency are a duality that cannot be conceived of apart from one another. Human practices are recursive – that is, through their activities individuals create both their consciousness and the structural conditions that make their activities possible. Because social actors are reflexive (Chapter 4) and monitor the ongoing flow of activities and structural conditions, they adapt their actions to their evolving understandings. As a result, social scientific knowledge of society will actually change human activities. Giddens calls this dialectical relationship between social scientific knowledge and human practices the double hermeneutic.

Actors continually develop routines that give them a sense of security and enable them to deal efficiently with their social lives. While their motives provide the overall plan of action, it is these routine practices that determine what shape the action will take. Giddens emphasizes that actors have power to shape their own actions, but that the consequences of actions are often unintended. Structure is the rules and resources that give similar social practices a systemic form. Only through the activities of human actors can structure exist. While Giddens acknowledges that structure can be constraining to actors, he thinks that sociologists have exaggerated the importance of structural constraints. Structures can also enable actors to do things they would not otherwise be able to do. For Giddens, a social system is a set of reproduced social practices and relations between actors.

The concept of structuration underscores the duality of structure and agency. There can be no agency without structures that shape motives into practices, but there can also be no structures independent of the routine practices that create them. Margaret Archer has criticized the concept of structuration as analytically insufficient. She thinks it is useful for social scientists to understand structure and agency as independent, because it makes it possible to analyze the interrelations between the two sides. Archer also thinks that Giddens gives short shrift to the relative autonomy of culture from both structure and agency.

A major alternative to structuration theory is Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and field. Bourdieu sought to bridge subjectivism (the individual) and objectivism (society) with a perspective called constructivist structuralism. Structuralism focuses on the objective structures of language and culture that give shape to human action. Constructivism looks at the social genesis of schemes of perception, thought, and action. Bourdieu wants to examine the social construction of objective structures with an emphasis on how people perceive and construct their own social world, but without neglecting how perception and construction is constrained by structures. An important dynamic in this relationship is the ability of individual actors to invent and improvise within the structure of their routines.

The habitus is the mental structure through which people deal with the social world. It can be thought of as a set of internalized schemes through which the world is perceived, understood, appreciated, and evaluated. A habitus is acquired as the result of the long-term occupation of a position in the social world. Depending on the position occupied, people will have a different habitus. The habitus operates as a structure, but people do not simply respond to it mechanically. When people change positions, their habitus is sometimes no longer appropriate, a condition called hysteresis. Bourdieu argues that the habitus both produces and is produced by the social world. People internalize external structures, and they externalize things they have internalized through practices.

The concept of field is the objective complement to the idea of habitus. A field is a network of social relations among the objective positions within it. It is not a set of interactions or intersubjective ties among individuals. The social world has a great variety of semi-autonomous fields such as art, religion, and higher education. The field is a type of competitive marketplace in which economic, cultural, social, and symbolic powers are used. The preeminent field is the field of politics, from which a hierarchy of power relationships serves to structure all other fields. To analyze a field, one must first understand its relationship to the political field. The next step is to map the objective positions within a field and, finally, the nature of the habitus of the agents who occupy particular positions can be understood. These agents act strategically depending on their habitus in order to enhance their capital. Bourdieu is particularly concerned with how powerful positions within a field can perpetrate symbolic violence on less powerful actors. Cultural mechanisms such as education impose a dominant perspective on the rest of the population in order to legitimate their power.

Bourdieu’s anlysis of the aesthetic preferences of different groups can be found in Distinction. The cultural preferences of the various groups within society constitute coherent systems that serve to unify those with similar tastes and differentiate them from others with divergent tastes. Through the practical application of preferences, people classify objects and in the process classify themselves. Bourdieu thinks the field of taste involves the intersection of social-class relationships and cultural relationships. He argues that taste is an opportunity to both experience and assert one’s position in the class hierarchy. These tastes are engendered in the deep-rooted dispositions of the habitus. Changes in tastes result from struggles for dominance within both cultural and social-class fields as different fractions struggle to define high culture and taste.

Like Bourdieu, feminist social theorists are centrally concerned with how social life is patterned by conflict and domination. Feminists are particularly concerned with how individuals and groups respond to oppression through strategies like coping, challenging, witnessing, subverting, rebelling, and resisting. They argue that individuals and groups have standpoints – ways of understanding that are conditioned by positions in social structure and that serve as motivations for resistance to domination. Feminist theorists have their own vocabulary for describing the relationship between the micro- and macro-social order. Relations of ruling are the intricately connected social activities that attempt to control human social production. The local actualities of lived experience are the positions from which people experience the world and produce understandings. Texts are anonymous, authoritative, and general writings that translate individualized experience into a form acceptable to the relations of ruling. Each of these dimensions of experience has its distinctive internal dynamic that together produce gender and racial inequalities and allow for resistance.