p rr * i h ' B l y B r ilis i W'S'L^b^ ‘Dualism and Duality: An Examination of the Structure- Agency Debate’ by Shaun Le Boutillier Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, The London School of Economics and Political Science Ph.D Thesis UMI Number: U525503 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U525503 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Abstract Within the structure-agency debate the works of Margaret Archer and Anthony Giddens represent opposite opinions of the society-person connection and the status of social types. Their views are defined, respectively, by an adherence to dualism or duality. Whilst Archer’s theory requires ontological proof that social structures, as emergent phenomena, exist sui generis Giddens’ argument, based on a commitment to hermeneutics and pragmatism carries no such ontological baggage. I argue that the demands of Archer’s and Bhaskar’s realism are unmet and that duality is the most plausible position to hold in the structure-agency debate. In Chapter One I set out Giddens’ theory and note his rejection of relativism in favour of pragmatism. In Chapter Two I argue that the bedrock of Archer’s theory, Bhaskar’s naturalism, when carried to the social sciences, is flawed by the inability to ‘close’ systems. In Chapter Three I show how realists have modified Bhaskar’s realism in order to separate structure from agency. However, as with past attempts at basing realism on the concept of emergence this raises the spectre of reification. In Chapter Four I discuss and demonstrate the ways in which the concept of supervenience may or may not be helpful in proving the sui generis status of social facts. In the first half of Chapter 5 I make a distinction between morphological and cultural types and demonstrate that separating ‘ideas’ from those individuals who hold them is nonsensical and therefore dualism is fundamentally flawed. In the second half of the chapter I argue that there are logical grounds for rejecting the transposition of realism from the natural to the social sciences. In Chapter Six I defend Giddens’ thesis against criticisms concerning voluntarism, the clarity of the notion of social structure and its relationship to system. 2 Table of Contents Chapters Introduction 4 1. Structuration Theory: An Overview 22 2. The Possibility of Naturalism(?) 53 3. Margaret Archer and the Limitations of Naturalism 79 4. Supervenience & Social Realism 99 5. Realism, Emergence and Social Kinds 121 6. Structuration Theory and its Critics 151 Conclusion 185 Bibliography 199 Figures Figure 1. The Stratification Model of Action 24 Figure 2. A Comparison of Structural-Functionalist Theory and the Theory of Structuration 30 Figure 3.The Duality of Structure 34 Figure 4. The Logic of Scientific Discovery 56 Figure 5. The Transformational Model of the Society/Person Connection 65 Figure 6. The Basic Morphological Cycle 91 Figure 7. A Reductionist Model of Pain 104 Figure 8. A Physical Supervenient Model 104 Figure 9. The Causal Relationship between Demography and Pensions’ Policies 107 Figure lO.Healy’s (Supervenience) Relationship between 107 Demography and Pensions’ Policies Figure 11 .A model of Demographic Trends 1930-2040 111 Figure 11 .A Subvenient-Supervenient Model of Action 114 3 Introduction One primary concern of this thesis is, to alter a chapter heading from Margaret Archer’s (1995) text, the vexatious problem of social facts1. This issue is never far from the agenda as it is central to what has come to be known as the structure-agency debate in sociology. Social facts are fundamental because they are analytical to the definition of social structure. Social structures are just social facts but the question that commentators both old and new have asked is: just where are they to be located? Answers to this question are as old as the subject- matter itself. Mainly these have focused on the connection or relationship between individual(s) and society and taken the title of the ‘structure-agency debate’. In recent years the structure-agency debate has, inter alia, centred around two very ambitious theoretical projects of the social sciences: Anthony Giddens’ (1976,1977,1979,1984) structuration theory and Margaret Archer’s (1982, 1988,1995, 2000) morphogenetic realism2. Each is responsible for a radical re­ conceptualisation of the key terms in the debate and each has, at its heart, a particular way of interpreting social facts and their relationship to agents. For Giddens the relationship between structure and agency or the connection between individual and society is that of a ‘duality’; structure is both medium and outcome of social action. For Archer, and realism in general, social facts, and the society-person connection, are to be understood in terms of a dualism; social structures exist in separation from agents and represent the pre-conditions o f individual actions. As such, Archer’s theoretical work is premised on the notion of emergent properties. ‘Emergent properties’ (in short ‘emergence’) are read by social scientists not as empirically given or situated phenomena, but in a post-empiricist manner as the ‘capacities’ or ‘generative mechanisms’ of a social object. Social objects, or what Archer refers to as the stratified parts of society, exist, sui generis, in ‘relative autonomy’ from the people that make up society. And, it is in this sense that her version of realism might be described as a dualist response to the structure-agency or person-society connection. Thus 4 dualism, as opposed to duality, suggests that the stratified parts of society and the agents that exist as a part of society exist in relative distinction. Anthony Giddens holds an opposite, or antithesis position. For him, social facts, and the agent-structure relationship, cannot be explained in terms of emergent properties. Emergence implies a mechanistic relationship between social structures and actions or agents. Instead, social structures ultimately reside in the minds of agents as memory traces that tell us, as actors, ways of ‘going on’ or how to act in social circumstances. That we, as actors, cannot escape or are indeed constituted of social structures, suggests that the relationship between agent and structure is that of a duality: analytically distinguishable but ontologically inseparable. Thus, duality provides two faces on the same coin. Social structures exist in a virtual realm but as actors we are nothing more than the intelligent beings that are socialised and re-socialised through a nexus of social structural interactions. Each of these authors has been influenced by different sources and each has different concerns (see below) beyond the main objective of the structure- agency debate which aimed to overcome the obstacle of the so-called subject- object divide in social science. This divide, as it was presented until relatively recently, pitted structuralist’s theories of society against theories of individual or subjective actions. The resulting reduction on one side or the other (structure or agency) has been described, by Archer (1995:6), as ‘conflationary thinking’ or ‘one-dimensional theorizing’. Most contemporary theorists would now agree with Archer on this point. The result of this kind of theorizing is, on the one hand, and typified in the early works of Emile Durkheim3, and, inter alia, both structural-functionalism4 and French structuralism5, the absence of agency or free will or, as Giddens’ (1976:22) observes, ‘the conceptual blotting-out of the active subject’. On the other hand, both methodological individualism6 and action theories, and theories that focus upon the subjective interpretation o f the social world lacked an adequate theory of institutions, institutional change, or, more generally, an account of how social structures may influence and/or constrain individuals’ actions, wants, and purposes. The aim of both structuration theory and Archer’s realist morphogenetic account was to 5 overcome the problem of thinking and explaining, exclusively, from one side (social structure) or the other (subjective or interpretive accounts of action). With regard to this, both theorists approvingly recall and cite Marx’s dictum that: ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past’ (Marx, 1977:300). At the same time, both theorists agree that agency is the driving force of history. Equally, for Archer and Giddens history provides a ready made social world into which the agent is absorbed. However, the post-Bhaskarian realist conception of this is to view history in terms of social structural properties which are external to the individual and provide pre-conditions of action. Thus, social structures are externally ‘real’ to the individual who must fashion or re-fashion them according to the parameters that they provide. For Giddens, whilst socialisation runs throughout an individual’s life, and social life is he says, an ‘on-going process’ which cannot be dissected into discrete acts, social causes (or social facts) cannot be separated from individuals’ actions in this way. Giddens views the problems of past social theorising as a consequence of the dualisms of structural and subjectivist sociologies. Ultimately, history enters into the social realm through the memories of those individuals who constitute society.