Human agents and social structures

The structure/agency debate has been among the central issues in recent discussions of social theory. It has been widely assumed that the key theoretical task is to find a link between social structures and acting human beings – to reconcile the macro with the micro, society and the individual.

The contributors to this book reject this solution to the problem. For them, both the concept of ‘society’ as an entity and the freely-acting ‘individual’ are theoretical fiction. Rather, the immediat...