Giddens and structuration

Practice, consciousness and structure are simultaneous creations—part of the process of structuration

Implications? Structures have plasticity

• Rationalization—process of developing routines
• Discursive consciousness (symbolic interactionism?)—ability to express actions in language
• Practical consciousness—more habitual, taken for granted actions (Berger and Luckman?)
• Structuration—at the moment of action, people are producing and reproducing structure
• Agency and structure have duality
• Margaret Archer’s theory, critique—structure and agency are not two sides of the same coin, can’t adequately be explained and understood unless they can be thought of as dualistic

Bourdieu

• Structure over agency—there is agency, there are agents, but they’re conditioned
• Reflexive sociology (infinite regress?)
• Habitus
  • cognitive apparatus for dealing with social world; product of internalizing structures
  • importance of time—usually takes time occupying a certain position
  • internalization of external structures; externalization of internal ones—dialectic
  • habitus is like ideal type for individual—who ultimately chooses (superego?)—but the choices turn out to be structured
  • practice—the logic of practice replaces the rational selfish actor
  • Plasticity—the social world is complex and changes

• Field—network of relations (e.g., higher education, sports, medicine)
  • Arena of struggle among people, organized in various ways
  • Defend present position or improve
  • Types of capital—economic, cultural, symbolic, social
  • Symbolic violence (e.g., education system’s role in reproducing status quo)
  • Habitus drives strategies used
  • Field conditions the habitus, but the habitus recognizes value in the field
  • Taste as a matchmaker (think of it as a field)