Morphogenesis versus Structuration: On Combining ... - Moodle

Morphogenesis versus structuration 459
(which has more voluntaristic connotations). Condensed in the brief
statement that 'structure is both medium and outcome of the reproduction
of practices'l6 is his method of bridging this dichotomy. The
central notion of the 'duality of structure' makes up the bridge by
dropping two planks from opposite banks so that they lie juxtaposed.
First he advances the essential contribution made by knowledgeable
actors in generating/transforming recurrent social practices-which in
turn creates the 'visible pattern' that constitutes the social system for
Giddens. Simultaneously, he lays down the fundamental proposition
that when actors produce social practices they necessarily draw upon
basic 'structural properties'-these essential factors being viewed as a
matrix of rules and resources.
Ideally what he wants to integrate is the way in which the active
creation of social conditions is itself unavoidably conditioned by
needing to draw upon structural factors in the process. Perhaps this
is clarified by consulting the kind of practical images Giddens has in
mind. The references to agents producing recurrent social practices
summon-up a picture of the 'ruttedness' of routine action-in
bureaucracy, for instance, where life is constantly breathed into inert
rules which then deaden their animators through routinization.l7 But
this is not the only picture he invokes. There is also metamorphosis,
the generation of radically new practices when agency rides on the
coat-tails of structural facilitation to produce social change of real
magnitude. Although the 'duality of structure' spans both images, it
provides no analytical grip on which is likely to prevail under what
conditions or circumstances. The theory of 'structuration' remains
fundamentally non-propositional.
In other words the 'central notion' of the 'structuration' approach
fails to specify when there will be 'more voluntarism' or 'more determinism'.
In fact, on the contrary, the 'duality of structure' itself
oscillates between the two divergent images it bestrides-between (a)
the hyperactivity of agency, whose corollary is the innate volatility of
society, and (b) the rigid coherence of structural properties associated,
on the contrary, with the essential recursiveness of social life.
(a) Hyperactivity is an ineluctable consequence of all rules and
resources being defined as transformative, in contradistinction to the
rigid transformational grammar of linguistics. Resources are readily
convertible, rules endlessly interpretable; the former providing
material levers for transforming the empirical domain, the latter
transfiguring codes and norms. Consequently the spatio-temporal
constitution of society is ordered in terms of the mediations and
transformations made possible by these two structural properties,
as manipulated by agents. However it follows that if structural
properties are inherently transformative then actors generically enjoy
very high degrees of freedom-at any time they could have acted
otherwise, intervening for change or for maintenance. Hence the