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Social Structure, Human Agency, and Social Policy
by Gil Richard Musolf, Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, Central Michigan University
The following essays illuminate excellent work incorporating structure and agency into analyses of everyday life, with an emphasis on social policy. Let me state a few introductory remarks concerning the relationship between social structure, human agency, and social policy.
The problem of bridging the gap between microsociological and macrosociological levels has not been satisfactorily handled by any known theory. The result is that most theorists shift gears radically when they move from one level to the other. For example, many macrosociologists adopt a voluntaristic stance for micro-level analysis and a deterministic stance for macro-level analysis. They are willing to grant that actors interpret the situation in interpersonal relations, but they convert actors into mindless robots on the societal/aggregate level. The challenge is both to avoid reification of social structure and to develop a consistent image of human beings. In any case, social structure must be taken into account. However, social structure is maintained and changed by what people do; it is not autonomous or self-regulating.^sup 1^
Structure refers to the innumerable social facts over which the individual, qua individual, does not have much control and which he or she cannot escape. Race, class, sex, ideology, institutions, organizational hierarchy, groups, geographical location, period of history, mode of production, generational cohort, family, culture, roles and rules are all examples of social facts, the structural dimension of social life. We are born into situations that have existed before us and that will exist after we are gone. In general, structure refers to social arrangements, social relations, and social practices which exert enormous power and constraint over our lives. Social is repeated to emphasize that arrangements, relations, and practices are constructed, maintained, and altered by human beings. Structure can refer to-among other things-one's social location/status in class, race, gender and other hierarchies so that the higher one's status the more power one has within any institution. Thus, structure organizes social positions hierarchically in all institutions so that power emanates from those who control the means of administration to make, and the means of violence to enforce, policy. Policy constrains everyone; subjects/citizens usually conform, though, of course, many do...