Theorists such as Karl Marx, by contrast, emphasize that the social structure can act to the detriment of the majority of individuals in a society.
Theoretical systems aligned with this view include: All of these schools in this context can be seen as forms of holism – the notion that "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts".
Theoretical systems aligned with this view include: Lastly, a third option, taken by many modern social theorists,[2] attempts to find a point of balance between the two previous positions.
[citation needed] Theorists saw unique aspects of the social world that could not be explained simply by the sum of the individuals present.
Norbert Elias (1897–1990) was a German sociologist whose work focused on the relationship between power, behaviour, emotion, and knowledge over time.
Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) was an American sociologist and the main theorist of action theory (misleadingly called "structural functionalism") in sociology from the 1930s in the United States.
His works analyze social structure but in terms of voluntary action and through patterns of normative institutionalization by codifying its theoretical gestalt into a system-theoretical framework based on the idea of living systems and cybernetic hierarchy.
His development of Max Weber's means-end action structure is summarized in Instrumental and value-rational action Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002) was a French theorist who presented his theory of practice on the dichotomic understanding of the relation between agency and structure in a great number of publications, beginning with An Outline of the Theory of Practice in 1972, where he presented the concept of habitus.
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their Social Construction of Reality (1966)[4] saw the relationship between structure and agency as dialectical.
Central to the theory is the life-long interaction between the individual and his/her longing for freedom and autonomy, and society with its pressure of order and structure.
The human being as an autonomous subject has the lifelong task to harmonize the processes of social integration and personal individualization.
[10] The social theorist and legal philosopher Roberto Mangabeira Unger developed the thesis of negative capability to address this problem of agency in relation to structure.
Unlike other theories of structure and agency, negative capability does not reduce the individual to a simple actor possessing only the dual capacity of compliance or rebellion, but rather sees him or her as able to partake in a variety of activities of self empowerment.
The TMSA has been further advocated and applied in other social science fields by additional authors, for example in economics by Tony Lawson and in sociology by Margaret Archer.
[22] While the structure–agency debate has been a central issue in social theory, and recent theoretical reconciliation attempts have been made, structure–agency theory has tended to develop more in European countries by European theorists, while social theorists from the United States have tended to focus instead on the issue of integration between macrosociological and microsociological perspectives.
George Ritzer examines these issues (and surveys the structure agency debate) in greater detail in his book Modern Sociological Theory (2000).