Anthony Giddens This book provides an introduction to the work of Anthony Giddens, and a critical discus- sion of his ideas. It sets out the background to and sources for Giddens’s development of structuration theory and describes the main features of this theory. The author also dis- cusses the substantive contributions that Giddens has made to the theory of social class and his historical sociology, including his conception of modernity. The book is intended to provide an accessible introduction to Giddens’s work and also to situate structuration theory in the context of other approaches. It is argued that while Giddens has made some important contributions to social theory, structuration theory is not the transcendent grand theory that it is sometimes claimed to be. It does not replace other approaches nor does it incorporate some of the more important insights of modern philosophy and psychotherapy. It is the only book (so far) to deal with Giddens’s work as a whole which avoids the vexing extremes of hagiography and facile criticism. Judicious, crisply argued and highly readable, the book will be of interest to students of Sociology and those working in the other Social Sciences. Ian Craib lectures in Sociology at the University of Essex and works as a group psycho- therapist. Anthony Giddens Ian Craib London and New York First published in 1992 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2011. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1992 Ian Craib All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Craib, Ian 1945– Anthony Giddens. 1. Sociology I. Title 301.092 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Craib, Ian 1945– Anthony Giddens/Ian Craib. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Giddens, Anthony. 2. Sociology-Methodology. 3. Social structure. 4. Sociology-Great Britain. I. Title HM22.G8G5434 1991 301′.01–dc20 91–12147 CIP ISBN 0-203-82953-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-07072-4 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-02814-0 (pbk) For Fiona, Ben, Chris, Penelope and Theo: without whom this book would have been fi nished six months earlier, and the author’s life impoverished beyond imagination. Contents Preface vi 1 Out of chaos? 1 2 The theoretical omelette 9 3 Structuration theory 22 4 Giddens’s substantive sociology 49 5 Empirical sociology and critical theory 73 6 The trouble with syntheses 79 7 The problem with structures 98 8 The problem with people 112 9 The problem with modernity 120 10 The importance of structuration theory 128 Bibliography 132 Index 138 Preface I have found this a very diffi cult book to write. I do not think in the same way as Anthony Giddens, and have had to spend much time thinking against myself. I hope the result is at least fair to its subject. I suspect that more people than I would like to acknowledge have had to tolerate me whilst I have been writing; those I would like to acknowledge include David Lee, of the Sociology Department at Essex, who read and discussed a long and remarkably tedious first draft; Professor Christopher Bryant, of Salford, for some generous comments on the same draft, and Rob Stones, also of the Sociology Department at Essex, for reading a later draft, arguing with me, and making me think. Chapter 1 Out of chaos? THE GIDDENS PROJECT Anthony Giddens is certainly a phenomenon amongst British sociologists : a major ‘grand theorist’. Increasingly, he has come to see himself as a social, rather than just a sociological theorist, concerned with ideas relevant across the range of social sciences and breaking down the barriers amongst the disciplines. The volume of secondary literature now appearing—four substantial books alone in the year around my writing these words1—is a tribute to his importance in modern sociology. He is the main interpreter of modern social theory, and not only in the English-speaking world. This demands both an accessible account of his work and a critical discussion, and this book attempts both. This chapter will be concerned with an initial characterisation of his enterprise and an outline of the central threads of my critical discussion. His project has unfolded in a consistent way since Capitalism and Modern Social Theory was published in 1971. What strikes me about this book now, looking at it from nearly twenty years on, is that it is possible to pick out two strands of Giddens’s thought which interweave throughout his work: the nature of a general social theory on the one hand, and understanding the development of modern industrial society on the other. Marx, Weber and Durkheim were, he argues, primarily concerned with what distinguishes capitalism from other preceding forms of social organisation, and his comparison of the three emphasises the centrality to each of changing social relationships. It is misleading to treat them as if they were producing general, universally applicable theories of society: doing so has left sociology in a strait-jacket. The central object of sociology should be modern society and the changes it is undergoing. Instead of taking each theorist as providing a theoretical paradigm, we need to subject them to criticism, keeping what is useful to this task and abandoning the rest. In particular, we should sort out what it was in their work which was a result of and a response to conditions that no longer exist. Social theory has to be radically restructured if we are to understand the modern world. Giddens’s next important book, The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies in 1973, was concerned with modern social change, but from then through to the first volume of A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism in 1981, his work was almost entirely of a theoretical nature, and while much of his output remains theoretical, there has now been a return to understanding the nature of modern society and social change. It is difficult to characterise his enterprise in any easy way. It is a radical revision of social theory and of sociology itself, which increasingly extends to the other social sciences, as he writes about history, geography and economics. It is a work of synthesis, bringing 2 Anthony giddens together insights from many different disciplines and thinkers; it is, I think, symptomatic that one of his most recent publications has been a text book, which carries implications of an established body of knowledge and research, a solid discipline, which up to now very few people have thought sociology to be. For the time being, however, I will concentrate on the radical reconstruction of social theory: that is the centre of his work. Giddens has often catalogued the situation from which this project appeared. There was after the Second World War a period of twenty years or more when sociology was dominated by what he calls an ‘orthodox consensus’, when the dominant theoretical framework was Parsons’ structural-functionalism. During the late 1960s, this began to break down under the impact of external political events and there was a period, the effects of which are still very clearly with us, when sociology fragmented, searching through politics and philosophy in particular for the means to grasp what seemed a rapidly changing world. Giddens, whose main work began to appear well into this period, offers a way out of the chaos. In addition to the revision of the classic sociological thinkers, he offers a rewriting of the history of sociology, criticising what he often calls the ‘myths’ of sociology: that social science can model itself on the natural sciences; that it has its origins in conservative thought; that sociology can be seen as a debate between ‘consensus’ and ‘conflict’ approaches and others. The last of these is particularly important. On a much deeper level Giddens is offering a solution to divisions which have plagued sociological thought, especially that between ‘structure’ and ‘action’. It has always been common, with justification, to distinguish between those approaches to sociology which concentrate on identifying and understanding enduring patterns of human relationships—often seen as independent of our perceptions and as determinants of our actions—and those which look at individual and collective human actions and concern themselves only with the way people think about, see and act in the world. In place of this he offers structuration theory, which tries to approach both structure and action within one coherent theoretical framework. This theory has been formulated in different ways, but increasingly by Giddens himself and by those who find his work most useful, as involving a change in our conception of what sociology is and what it studies. In The Constitution of Society (1984), his most systematic statement of structuration theory, he identifies his concern with a shift from epistemology to ontology. The former is concerned with the grounds of our knowledge, and Giddens is implying that sociology has concerned itself too much with the issue of producing adequate knowledge, at the expense of looking at the real nature of the social world and what it is studying, i.e. ontology. Placing his theory in the context, not of action and structure, but the individual and society, he argues that these are in fact secondary concerns: The basic domain of study of the social sciences, according to the theory of structuration, is neither the experience of the individual actor, nor the existence of any form of societal totality, but social practices ordered across space and time. (Giddens 1984:2) The old dualisms—action/structure, individual/society, determinism/voluntarism—should be reconceived as dualities; in other words, instead of separate and opposing things in the world or as mutually exclusive ways of thinking about the world, they are simply two sides Out of chaos? 3 of the same coin. If we look at social practices in one way, we can see actors and actions; if look at them another way we can see structures. This theory of structuration is built up through a long process of critique and synthesis. Several targets stand out: positivism, functionalism and evolutionary theory are unreservedly attacked, but often criticisms take a positive form. Modern linguistic philosophy, structuralism and post-structuralism, critical theory, Marxism, modern human geography and many other approaches are criticised, but in each case ideas and concepts are taken from them to contribute to structuration theory. Giddens recognises that often he employs concepts in a very different way to their original use, but seems to think that the advantages of doing this outweigh the disadvantages. One of the beneficial effects of this is that he has introduced and given respectability to many important theorists and ideas that were, twenty years ago, only on the fringes of sociology. A sense of how radical his introduction of these ideas seems can be gleaned from the less than enthusiastic comments of sociologists from the ‘old’ mainstream of British sociology: John Rex (1983), Peter Worsley and Mick Mann (see Mullan 1987). THE DIFFICULTY OF READING GIDDENS This has not been an easy book to write. At times, it has left me irritable, frustrated and disoriented. Having long been accustomed to the chaos of sociology, I have found the same chaos intensifi ed to an exquisite and almost unbearable degree in Giddens’s attempts to organise it. At other times, it has been exciting, thought provoking, and immensely stimulating. I have come out of it knowing much more than when I started. Similar reactions are reflected in other commentaries on his work: he is described as ‘foxlike’, a ‘honey-bee’ flitting from theory to theory, and ‘quintessentially post-modernist’; reading his work is like ‘trying to catch quicksilver’. There are debates about whether his work is systematic, eclectic or simply syncretic (a nasty word, meaning accepting incompatible positions). Some years ago, I published a paper (Craib 1986) criticising Giddens as if he were a systematic theorist. It is only recently that I have realised that he is not, or rather, not quite. There are certainly systematising aspects of his work, not least in the constant series of classifications and diagrams that fill his books. Yet his synthesis of approaches is not bound together through a logical or rational system, as we have come to expect from theorists such as Parsons and many modern Marxists. Concepts are added and developed because they fill gaps in the description of the world, not because they derive from each other and identify causal mechanisms. I think it is the peculiar way he builds up his synthesis, through a range of borrowings and changes of meaning, that makes him difficult to read and gives rise to the debate. Zygmunt Bauman describes him correctly, and pointedly, as being ‘non-partisan in his partisanship’: he sees himself most often as not arguing for a particular position but drawing all positions together. I often find myself lost in the ingredients, reacting as I would perhaps if I found custard on my lamb chops. The result is that when reading his work, I am constantly impressed. His summaries and discussions of other thinkers are clear, precise and acute and I often find myself referring students to them as one of the best possible secondary sources. As he builds up his own position, he makes many stimulating and intelligent points. Yet at the end, I do not quite know where I am, or what I am left with. The answer is a range of concepts that can be