[Author’s Name]
[Institution’s Name]
Essay on Structuration Theory
Behavior and structure are intertwined; people go through a socialization process and become dependent of the existing social structures, but at the same time social structures are being altered by their activities. Put in different words, this means that social structures are the medium of human activities as well as the result of those activities. Social structures not only restrict behavior but also create possibilities for human behavior. The point is, it is not all about the restrictions people encounter in unrolling their behavior in space and time, but people also contribute to the creation of a certain time-space-structure.
Structuration theory is based on the premise that the classic actor/structure dualism has to be re-conceptualized as a duality - the duality of structure. The structural properties of social systems exist only in so far as forms of social conduct are reproduced chronically across time and space.
The structuration of institutions can be understood in terms of how it comes about that social activities become 'stretched' across wide spans of time-space. Incorporating time-space in the heart of social theory means thinking again about some of the disciplinary divisions, which separate sociology from history, and from geography. In structuration theory 'structure' is regarded as rules and resources recursively implicated in social reproduction; institutionalized features of social systems have structural properties in the sense that relationships are stabilized across time and space. 'Structure' can be conceptualized abstractly as two aspects of rules -- normative elements and codes of signification. Resources are also of two kinds: authoritative resources, which derive from the co-ordination of the activity of human agents, and allocative resources, which stem from control of material products or of aspects of the material world (Giddens, 1984).
Giddens’ main claim for his theory is that it draws together the two principal strands of social thinking.................
