Applied Linguistics as Social Science
Some key issues in social theory
Realist accounts of structure-and-agency
A fourth view of the agency-structure relation is also possible and it is the one that we shall be advocating here. It is derived from the recent work of authors who subscribe to a version of the philosophical tradition known as 'realism', and it claims that structure and agency possess distinct properties and powers. As we argue elsewhere (Sealey and Carter forthcoming), there are important distinctions to be drawn between different versions of realism, particularly as this philosophical tradition is better established in the natural and physical sciences than in the social disciplines. For the social realist, in direct contrast to the structuration model of Giddens, the terms 'structure' and 'agency' denote different types of things in the social world.
The claim, then, is that social structures are one particular kind of entity, whose properties are of a different kind from those of other entities. The distinctive properties of social structures include their anteriority: the fact that, for example, legal systems and property relations precede us, are always already features of the world into which we are born. This points to another distinguishing property of social structures: they are relatively enduring. Amongst the powers possessed by social structures are those of enablement and constraint: structures of discrimination will constrain the discriminated-against and enable the discriminators; inegalitarian distributions of wealth and income will constrain the poor and enable the rich.
Amongst the distinguishing properties and powers of agency are self-consciousness, reflexivity, intentionality, cognition, emotionality and so on. As reflexive beings capable of highly sophisticated symbolic communication, people are able to formulate projects, develop plans, have ambitions, pursue interests. This ontological endowment means that it is people who make history, not least because they are the only denizens of the social world able to reflect upon, and so seek to alter or reinforce, the fitness of the social arrangements they encounter for the realization of their own interests. This cardinal power of agency- the power to maintain or modify the world- is not only dependent on the property of self-consciousness. People collectively can exert an influence simply by virtue of their numbers, a property we might call demographic agency. Thus the unemployed or the homeless, if their numbers reach a threshold of political or social visibility, can prompt changes in economic or housing policy (or, of course, changes in policing policy). The point is that such effects do not rely on the homeless or the unemployed knowing about or reflecting upon their condition and formally organizing as the homeless or the unemployed. (Although, of course, they may arrive sooner at the threshold of political visibility if they do so.)
The distinct properties and powers of structure and agency thus entail their irreducibility to each other. This undermines the mutually constitutive, structurationist view of the relationship between structure and agency we summarized above. It also entails a rejection of the 'structuralist' view, since without an active notion of agency, that is, without being able to enquire about who is doing what to whom and why, we cannot arrive at a convincing explanation for structures at all. Once we recognize the powers and properties of agency, it becomes difficult to see people as passive puppets, cultural dopes or discursive effects.
However, a corresponding recognition of the enduring and anterior properties of social structures, and the consequent patterns of constraint and enablement that they generate, undermines the second view of structure and agency summarized above. If social-structures are ineffectual in their own right because they are at any given moment nothing more than the product of the conversations or interpretive strategies of currently existing people, then the social theorist is hard pressed to explain how human agency is shaped by social contexts. The realist view that we are advocating, on the other hand, is committed to an explanatory model in which the interplay between preexistent structures, having causal powers and properties, and people, possessing distinctive causal powers and properties of their own, results in contingent yet explicable outcomes.
