Morphogenesis versus Structuration: On Combining ... - Moodle

Morphogenesis versus structuration 457
actors in producing and reproducing their society, whilst acknowledging
that they necessarily employ societal properties in the process.
Thus structuralism and functionalism are criticized for subordinating
the individual to society and Giddens aims to transcend the subject/
object dualism by elaborating on common elements in the work of
Marx and the later Wittgenstein which construe the generation of
society as the outcome of praxis.
(c) Finally he rejects any theory which represses time by separating
statics from dynamics and analysing the two separately. For to
Giddens, any theory embodying the interdependence of structure
and action is predicated upon grasping the temporal and spatial
locations which are inherent in the constitution of all social interaction.
Thus the division between synchrony and diachrony must also
be transcended in order to capture the temporal release of unintended
consequences and their subsequent influence on later action.
Because of this rejection of the three dichotomies, 'structuration'
is quintessentially concerned with duality not dualism, with amalgamating
the two sides of each divide. This is to be achieved through
the central notion of the 'duality of structure' which refers to 'the
essential recursiveness of social life, as constituted in social practices:
structure is both medium and outcome of the reproduction of
practices. Structure enters simultaneously into the constitution of the
agent and social practices, and "exists" in the generating moments of
this constitution'.l2 This involves an image of society as a continuous
flow of conduct (not a series of acts) which changes or maintains a
potentially malleable social world. In turn it obviously proscribes
any discontinuous conceptualization of structure and action-the
intimacy of their mutual constitution defies it. 'Structuration' is
predicated upon the 'duality of structure': analytically it disengages
continuities or transformations in the reproduction of social systems.
Because of the dynamic interplay of the two constituent elements,
'structuration' does not denote fixity, durability, or even a point
reached in development. 'Structuration' itself is ever a process and
never a product.
In elaborating his theory of 'structuration', however, Giddens
completely ignores existing efforts to perform the same task of
re-uniting structure and action from within general systems theory.
Morphogenesis This perspective has an even better claim than the
former to call itself a 'non-functionalist manifesto';13 since a major
part of its background was the growing disenchantment on the part
of neo-functionalists with every remnant of the Organic Analogywith
the over-integrated view of social structure and the over-socialized
view of man; with the assumption of immanent equilibration unrelated
to human decision-making; with its failure to incorporate time-a
double failure involving the absence of an analytical history of