The Individual as Product and Producer

Anthony Giddens

Every research investigation in the social sciences or history is involved in relating action to structure, in tracing, explicitly or otherwise, the conjunction or disjunctions of intended and unintended consequences of activity and how these affect the fate of individuals…. For the permutations of influences are endless, and there is no sense in which structure ‘determines’ action or vice versa. The nature of the constrains to which individuals are subject, the uses to which they put the capacities they have and the forms of knowledgability they display are all themselves manifestly historically variable. (p. 219)

Giddens makes an important point here, one frequently overlooked by scholars who emphasize either agency or structure in their work, and thereby failing to understand the two as heads and tails of the same situated, historical complex. Continue reading “The Individual as Product and Producer”

Structure and Agency

a video of a women going up stepsI saw an interesting video the other day, of a woman, Amy Tso, who has climbed the “Grouse Grind” over 900 times — a challenging 3 km hike up a mountain in British Columbia that includes nearly 3,000 stairs and which takes about two hours to climb.

At the 58 second point of the video she comments, “Usually we go around this step,” while we see her walking by a rock ledge that’s just a little higher than most tired hikers would like — “save more energy,” she then adds. Continue reading “Structure and Agency”