Giddens: Structuration Theory

Whilst we have already seen that structuration is a general way of talking about the relationship between agency and structure. Giddens, as with other writers gives the term a specific meaning.
Although some writers emphasise agency and others structure and that which ever of these they give importance to they see both as separate things, Giddens contribution is to argue they are not separate things. Think of a Gestalt process here- the two faces/wine glass or duck rabbit diagrams. For Giddens then structure and agency are two different ways of looking at the same thing -social activities or practices. We can see how Garfinkel’s emphasis on routines provides a way of understanding this. Routines are things that we do i.e. actions but at the same time they structure what we do. (Influence of Garfinkel on Giddens).
Another way of looking at this which Giddens adopts is to refer to routines as rules and resources i.e. routines provide rules for our social lives but they are also resources in that they enable us to get things done...to generate a sense of social order (be organised).
We also organised ourselves through time and space (time-space distantiation). We engage in activities that have a definite life cycle whether this is a short term contract or a relationship or the working week. Hence our sense of time and place is essential to the construction of our sense of self. There is a geography to our activities they take place in what Massey has called activity spaces.
Hence our sense of time is not just as clock or chronological time but time as experienced and constructed by us in terms of the continuous present, the past and the future. The nature of routine is that tomorrow will be like today hence we experience time as a sense of security or orderedness to our existence . When routines come to an end we classify them as the past- ‘that is all over now’ etc.
Giddens again draws on Garfinkel to show what happens when routines are disrupted. This causes disorientation and anxiety and has consequences for what Giddens calls ego psychology but could also be described as existential phenomenology i.e. the way we experience ourselves as continuing to exist into the future, our sense of ontological security.
Other writers e.g. Debord, Lefebvre have described this process of disruption of everyday routine as also insightful as it forces us to start thinking through the consequences of our actions and can reveal to us just how much our unattended/unthought activity is actually going in a direction we don’t really wish to travel in (’The everyday is the measure of all things‘- Debord).
Problems exist with Giddens’ approach to structuring of activities because, as in his examination of school and academic failure Giddens sees ’the lads’ as learning skills which will be transferable to other areas of life e.g. work. Hence we don’t get a sense that there are constraints on people’s agency because their knowledgeability solves all their problems. Giddens’ idea of self-monitoring is influential here: our reflexive awareness helps us to cope with a changing world, but it is not shaped by events itself- there is no outside to our awareness, nothing that shapes us that we do not know and can deal with. Merleau-Ponty’s study of the body however clearly shows that we respond to things without a full awareness of them (reaction to others’ presence in body language etc.).