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Giddens is perhaps Britain’s leading sociologist, renowned especially for his theories of structuration and late modernity. He formed Polity Press in 1985 and became director of the LSE in 1997. His growing status as the most visible intellectual proponent of ‘Third Way’ politics drew him into the inner circle of British prime minister Tony Blair. In 2004 he was given a life peerage as Lord Giddens of Southgate.
Giddens was influential in establishing the canonical trilogy of Marx, Weber and Durkheim as the basis of social theory. His early work focused on the exposition of the classical tradition of European sociology. The third phase of his career developed these theoretical and temporal insights into a more substantive analysis of the contours of modernity. This prepared the way for the most recent phase in his work, in which he moved from sociology to more directly political-theoretical concerns.
He synthesized the ideas of Marx, Weber and Durkheim with those of Rousseau and Foucault to produce a new approach to social analysis. His most significant contribution was an attempt to overcome the division between sociological approaches that emphasize agency and those that emphasize structural constraints.
The agency/structure. dualism is the tension between theories that place more emphasis on the social determination of the self and the invisible forces and emergent dynamics that shape individuals’ actions, perceptions and ‘second nature’. Advocates have included phenomenology, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism and rational choice theory. It runs through a series of related perspectives and tensions that plague the discipline: individual versus society, micro versus macro and subjective versus objective.
Structure and Agency
In social science, agency is the capacity of individuals to have the power and resources to fulfill their potential. For instance, structure consists of those factors of influence (such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, ability, customs, etc.) that determine or limit agents and their decisions.
In his theory of structuration, Giddens argues that the agency/structure dualism can be overcome only by synthesizing insights from a variety of otherwise flawed perspectives. He discerns a very different understanding of ‘structure’ in Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism. Structure here refers to abstract models in the form of binary oppositions and dual relations that do not exist in time and space but as relations of presence and absence.
Structures, like languages, are ‘virtual’ since they exist ‘outside time and space’, are ‘subject-less’ and are, for the most part, unintentionally reproduced in practices. By identifying structure with language, Giddens hoped to effect a dynamic juxtaposition between the speech or action implemented by an agent and the structure that forms the condition for generating this speech and action.
For Giddens, structure and agency are inseparable dimensions of the flow of activities in which individuals participate during the course of their day-to-day lives. Specifically, he sees structures as comprised of rules and resources. Rules may be explicit or tacit, intensive or shallow, formal or informal, strongly or weakly sanctioned, but should be understood, in Wittgenstein’s sense, as practical forms of knowledge that ‘allow us to go on’ in novel circumstances.
Giddens argues that an actor’s consciousness has three aspects: discursive consciousness, practical consciousness and unconsciousness. Discourse is the tacit or ‘mutual’ knowledge that provides agents with the ability to ‘go on’ in relation to rule-bound social life. Practical consciousness and its rationalization are most significant for understanding social life, he argues. Although free to choose, agents follow routines in order to avoid ontological insecurity and any disruption of the security system internalized during childhood.
Giddens argues that there exists a ‘dialectic of control’ built into the very nature of agency and that a total loss of agency is rare. He developed his theory of structuration in parallel with his critique of Marx’s historical materialism. Giddens argued that an individual’s intentional acts often produce unintended consequences that then become the unacknowledged conditions that structure subsequent action.
Modernity
In Nation-state and Violence he explores the complex symbiotic co-development of capitalism, industrialism and the nation-state. For Giddens these three spheres provide the basis for the four irreducible, though connected, ‘institutional clusterings’ that characterize modern society: capitalistic enterprise, industrial production, heightened surveillance and centralized control of the means of violence. In The Consequences of Modernity, he argues that the critical feature of the dynamic social formation that began to develop in Europe from about the seventeenth century was its sharp discontinuity from the previous, traditional social order.
Time Space Distanciation refers to the process through which cultural assumptions about the relationship between time and space change attributable to technological, economic, and social structural transitions. For example, consider how releasing satellites into space totally revolutionized the relationship between time and space – it now became possible to send and receive messages instantly rather than by physical travel.
Modernity is inherently globalizing so that time–space distanciation links the local with the global through disembedding, although there may also be processes of ‘re-embedding’ in which disembedded social relations are again pinned down. Disembedding refers to the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from their local contexts of interaction, which permits their restructuring across larger spans of time and space. The two major types of disembedding mechanism are ‘symbolic tokens’ and ‘expert systems’.
Symbolic tokens are media that can be exchanged, regardless of who uses them; expert systems are systems of technical accomplishment and professional expertise such as those of doctors, lawyers, architects and scientists. Fundamental to both mechanisms, as well as to the reflexivity of modernity more generally, is the concept of trust. A sense of trust in processes, people and things is a crucial factor in maintaining a sense of ontological security in the modern world since its absence results in existential angst or dread.
In modern society, the pervasiveness of socially organized knowledge in the form of abstract systems means that risk becomes the defining parameter of modern culture and life, even replacing the preoccupation with wealth. In pre-modern societies, trust and risk were anchored in the local circumstances of place, rooted in nature and characterized by hazards from the physical world or violence in social life, whereas in modernity there is a new ‘risk profile’ characterized by ‘manufactured risk’.
In his structuration theory reflexivity is a fundamental feature of social action, but it takes on a special meaning in Giddens’ theory of modernity. Under emerging conditions of ‘wholesale reflexivity’ everything (including both individuals and institutions) becomes open to reflection and self-monitoring, including reflexivity itself.
The possibility of nuclear war, ecological calamity, population explosion and the collapse of global economic exchange provide an unnerving horizon of dangers for everyone.
Social practices are continually examined and re-examined in the light of incoming information and processes of self-evaluation. This leads Giddens to consider the transformation of the intimate and personal features of day-to-day existence in modernity. Increasingly, the pressures of work and domestic life push individuals towards the continual reconstruction of self-identities as part of a reflexive project. In this increasingly unavoidable autobiographical project, individual choices are made in the context of an array of trajectories and options engendered by abstract systems. Modernity involves both a transformation of lifestyle and a ‘transformation of intimacy’ in which personal and erotic ties are formed as ‘pure relationships.’
In Beyond Left and Right and The Third Way Giddens considered how radical politics might be rethought, both theoretically and in practice, in the context of a changing modern world. He argues that the collapse of communism has made the distinction between the political ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ superfluous. The idea of a fixed left/right binary for Giddens needs to be supplanted by the notion of a radical centre or ‘active middle’.
The fostering of an active civil society became a central focus for Third Way politics. Echoing Beck’s discussion of the importance of ‘sub-politics’ in an era of risk society, Giddens argues that increasing individualization and reflexivity have led to new forms of democratization. Widening democracy also requires a decentralization of the state, or what he calls ‘double democratization’ and a move away from the paternalism of the welfare state.
‘Reflexive individualization’ has led to a re-evaluation of traditional left-wing understandings of emancipation as pertaining to ‘life chances’ and freedom. Such emancipatory politics must now be supplemented with a ‘life politics’ that breaks out of the restrictive cast of class politics. Giddens argues for a ‘new mixed economy’ that would correspond to the realities of ‘post-scarcity society’ in which a production orientation is replaced by ideals of self-actualization.
Between Immortality and Armageddon
In his talk, Between Immortality and Armageddon, Giddens discussed yet another dichotomy that faces man. We imagined in the past, that our mastery of technology would enable us to master the world. But that is not how things turned out. Our increase in power through the development of technology places us in a highly uncertain position. It is true that humans have colonized nature (which is why anthropologists refer to this era as the “Anthropocene”) but we have also turned our technologized inwards, towards our own bodies and minds.
The colonization of nature has led to ecological dangers, and the use of technology inwards has disrupted social and personal relations. We are now essentially at a radically new moment in history. Past civilizations have resembled each other in most ways, and have dealt with similar problems, but modern civilization is faces with extreme prospects that have never been experienced.
Through technology, we have obtained God-like capabilities that can either lift humanity into a utopian world or plunge us into apocalypse through war or climate change. We have essentially raised the stakes to the very limit – all or nothing.
Major works
- Capitalism and Modern Social Theory. 1971. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies. 1973. London: Hutchinson.
- Studies in Social and Political Theory. Essays 1966–76. London: Hutchinson, 1977.
- The New Rules of Sociological Method. 1976. London: Macmillan.
- A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism. 1981. London: Macmillan.
- Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory. Essays 1975–82.
- The Constitution of Society. 1984. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Social Theory and Modern Sociology. Essays 1982–6. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- The Nation-State and Violence. 1985. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- The Consequences of Modernity. 1990. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Modernity and Self-Identity. 1991. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- The Transformation of Intimacy. 1992. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- Beyond Left and Right. 1994. Cambridge: Polity Press.
- The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy. 1998. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Further Reading
- Giddens’ Theory of Structuration. London: Routledge. L. B. Kasperson. 2000.
- Anthony Giddens: An Introduction to a Social Theorist. Oxford: Blackwell. David Held and John Thompson, eds. 1989.
- Social Theory of Modern Societies: Anthony Giddens and His Critics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steven Loyal. 2003.
- The Sociology of Anthony Giddens. London: Pluto.
Source:
- Fifty Key Sociologists: The Formative Theorists, John P. Scott
- Between Immortality and Armageddon, Anthony Giddens