The theory was proposed by sociologist Anthony Giddens, most significantly in The Constitution of Society,[1] which examines phenomenology, hermeneutics, and social practices at the inseparable intersection of structures and agents.
"[1]: 189 His focus on abstract ontology accompanied a general and purposeful neglect of epistemology or detailed research methodology, consistent with other types of pragmatism.
Giddens used concepts from objectivist and subjectivist social theories, discarding objectivism's focus on detached structures, which lacked regard for humanist elements and subjectivism's exclusive attention to individual or group agency without consideration for socio-structural context.
He critically engaged classical nineteenth and early twentieth century social theorists such as Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Alfred Schutz, Robert K. Merton, Erving Goffman, and Jürgen Habermas.
"[4]: viii Structuration drew on other fields, as well: "He also wanted to bring in from other disciplines novel aspects of ontology that he felt had been neglected by social theorists working in the domains that most interested him.
Thus, for example, he enlisted the aid of geographers, historians and philosophers in bringing notions of time and space into the central heartlands of social theory.
"[2]: 16 Giddens hoped that a subject-wide "coming together" might occur which would involve greater cross-disciplinary dialogue and cooperation, especially between anthropologists, social scientists and sociologists of all types, historians, geographers, and even novelists.
Unlike post-structuralist theory, which put similar focus on the effects of time and space, structuration does not recognise only movement, change and transition.
Structures exist both internally within agents as memory traces that are the product of phenomenological and hermeneutic inheritance[2]: 27 and externally as the manifestation of social actions.
[1]: 17 His theory has been adopted by those with structuralist inclinations, but who wish to situate such structures in human practice rather than to reify them as an ideal type or material property.
Gregor McLennan suggested renaming this process "the duality of structure and agency", since both aspects are involved in using and producing social actions.
"It can be understood as the fitful yet routinized occurrence of encounters, fading away in time and space, yet constantly reconstituted within different areas of time-space.
"[1]: 87 Routine interactions become institutionalized features of social systems via tradition, custom and/or habit, but this is no easy societal task and it "is a major error to suppose that these phenomena need no explanation.
On the contrary, as Goffman (together with ethnomethodology) has helped to demonstrate, the routinized character of most social activity is something that has to be 'worked at' continually by those who sustain it in their day-to-day conduct.
Social stability and order is not permanent; agents always possess a dialectic of control (discussed below) which allows them to break away from normative actions.
"[1]: 165 The use of "patriot" in political speech reflects this mingling, borrowing from and contributing to nationalistic norms and supports structures such as a police state, from which it in turn gains impact.
"[1] Giddens divides memory traces (structures-within-knowledgeability[2]) into three types: When an agent uses these structures for social interactions, they are called modalities and present themselves in the forms of facility (domination), interpretive scheme/communication (signification) and norms/sanctions (legitimation).
"[5]: 5 "Structures exist paradigmatically, as an absent set of differences, temporally "present" only in their instantiation, in the constituting moments of social systems.
Examples include: Agents are always able to engage in a dialectic of control, able to "intervene in the world or to refrain from such intervention, with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs.
"The works applying concepts from the logical framework of structuration theory that Giddens approved of were those that used them more selectively, 'in a spare and critical fashion.
He looked for stasis and change, agent expectations, relative degrees of routine, tradition, behavior, and creative, skillful, and strategic thought simultaneously.
Duality of structure works when agents do not question or disrupt rules, and interaction resembles "natural/performative" actions with a practical orientation.
[16] Equally, Robert Archer developed and applied analytical dualism in his critical analysis of the impact of New Managerialism on education policy in England and Wales during the 1990s[17] and organization theory.
Thus rules—in this case, restrictions—"operate differentially, affecting unevenly various groups of individuals whose categorization depends on certain assumptions about social structures.
Some "rules" are better conceived of as broad inherent elements that define a structure's identity (e.g., Henry Ford and Harold Macmillan are "capitalistic").
Ultimately, Thompson concluded that the concept of structure as "rules and resources" in an elemental and ontological way resulted in conceptual confusion.
"[22]: 16 Originally from Bourdieu, transposable schemas can be "applied to a wide and not fully predictable range of cases outside the context in which they were initially learned."
After analyzing four countries framework, Oliver and his research team concluded "All our case studies show a number of competing information sources – from traditional media and official websites to various social media platforms used by both the government and the general public – that complicate the information landscape in which we all try to navigate what we know, and what we do not yet know, about the pandemic."
One example in the research is that "theory of structuration and agency point to situations when individuals and groups of people either in compliance or defiance of community norms and rules of survival adopt certain practices."
The authors recommended measuring long-term adaptations using ethnography, monitoring and other methods to observe causal relationships and generate better predictions.