Structure and agency: towards a dialectical approach
Marsh (1995) argued that, to an extent, pluralism has increasingly acknowledged the role of structures and structured privileged. He also suggested that, in contrast, Marxism has moved away from its structuralist roots to acknowledge an increased role for agency.
Smith’s chapter in this volume confirms this analysis of pluralism, while emphasizing that pluralism’s focus is upon political structures; hence, the interest in policy networks and iron triangles. Hay’s chapter on Marxism charts the move away from economism and determinism and makes clear that this move leaves space for the role of agents and sees outcomes from the process as contingent - a point discussed above.The key point here is that it is now widely acknowledged that any analysis of state/civil society relations has to recognize the role of structures and agents. Of the positions considered here, only poststructuralism would probably dissent from this view, given that, to them, the distinction between structures and agents is of little utility as it make no sense to talk of structures, and indeed agents, outside of a discourse. At the same time, there are still clear differences in the way that the other theoretical positions considered here view the struc- ture/agency problem. So, pluralists still tend to privilege agency, as does public choice theory. However, it is increasingly common to see the relationship between structure and agency as dialectical; that is interactive and iterative. In this view, structures may constrain or facilitate agents, but agents interpret structures and, in acting, change them. This type of conceptualization is common in modern Marxism, in Weberian-inspired elitism and in historical and discursive institutionalism. We return to this issue in the second section of this conclusion.
More on the topic Structure and agency: towards a dialectical approach:
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- Mandatum (Mandate, Commission or Agency)
- Structure and scope
- Structure of the book
- Sentence structure
- Elite governance at the macro level: the statecraft approach
- 7.2 BENTHAM: AN IMPERIAL GLOBAL STRUCTURE
- My Preferred Approach
- A structural approach to the distinction
- The Paradigmatic Structure of the Warlord Myth: The Myth of the State
- 2.3 Dogmatic approach and comparative method: Koschaker’s two souls?
- A structural approach
- Elite governance at the international level - the epistemic community approach
- A functional approach: Power-conferring rules as reasons for action
- We will approach our topic by, first of all, excluding a few things, that is, we will begin by explaining what, in our view, power-conferring rules are not.