Critique of Historical Materialism (1981), and The Constitution of Society (1984). A recent and welcome aspect of these debates has been the beginnings of a ...
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1987, volume 5, pages 73-91
Structuration theory: some thoughts on the possibilities for empirical research N Gregson Centre for Urban and Regional Development Studies, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, England Received 30 August 1985; in revised form 6 May 1986
Abstract. This paper is concerned with developing the current critical engagement in the social sciences with the structurationist writings of Anthony Giddens. Of particular concern here is the hitherto relatively neglected question of the relationship between structuration theory and empirical research projects. For reasons to do with (1) Giddens's arguments about the overall purpose of social theory, (2) the importance of the theory-empirical research question generally in social science, (3) the need to expand Giddens's audience, and (4) the necessity of assessing the degree to which structuration theory helps in the understanding of the social life, this issue is considered to be of the first importance. Several key questions of direct relevance to this concern are explored, notably, Giddens's comments on this score; the relationship of these comments to wider debate on the connections between theoretical and empirical work; and the possibility of locating structuration theory within the concept of hierarchies of abstraction. 1 Introduction In the course of the past ten years the contribution of Anthony Giddens to social theory has been considerable, not just in terms of his own prolific publishing record, but in terms too of the debates which have surrounded New Rules of Sociological Method (1976), Central Problems in Social Theory (1979), A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (1981), and The Constitution of Society (1984). A recent and welcome aspect of these debates has been the beginnings of a critical evaluation of several themes which appear within Giddens's work. For example, individuals have questioned his attempt to recast social theory as a series of dualities rather than dualisms (Archer, 1982; Gregson, 1986; Smart, 1982; Urry, 1982); his interpretation of critical social theory (Bleicher and Featherstone, 1982; McLennan, 1984); the eclecticism within much of his work (Gregson, 1986; Hirst, 1982; Thrift, 1984); his attempted 'deconstruction' of historical materialism (Bleicher and Featherstone, 1982; Callinicos, 1984; Wright, 1983); and his arguments concerning the importance of time and space to social theory (Carlstein, 1981; Gross, 1982). However, this by no means exhaustive or definitive classification of existing critiques can be seen as providing little more than a first step in the critical evaluation of Giddens's work; quite simply, such critiques represent the isolation and interrogation of particular themes which have been of recurrent interest to Giddens since 1976. What lies beyond is the future and infinitely more difficult task of using these critical comments to expand and develop Giddens's overall project. The concern in this paper is, in the main, still to do with the first of these steps, for reasons pertaining to the very nature of Giddens's work to date. Even after ten years it is generally agreed that the scope and content of Giddens's writing remains both extraordinarily broad and, often, programmatic; so much so that, rather than working on one or two major themes, Giddens seems to want to juggle with several at once, all of which are labelled as central to social theory. To try to isolate overall intentions from this sea of particularities is currently, as recent interviews and overviews show, almost an impossibility; although such articles and discussions provide ample evidence of the
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breadth and depth of Giddens's writing, they also demonstrate that his work is open to a number of widely differing general interpretations. For example, Gane, (1983) appears to see Giddens as an antihumanist and confused determinist (Gregory, personal communication; compare Callinicos, 1984; Layder, 1981), whereas Gregory (1984) interprets the same texts as indicative of a philosophical project closely linked to the realism of Bhaskar (1975; 1979; 1983), Keat and Urry (1981), Sayer (1984), and others (compare Giddens's response). Such differences of opinion suggest not only that Giddens's work is open to a number of possible, and at times opposing, readings, but that his work in its particulars contains, if not a number of contradictions, at the very least several conflicting 'loose-ends'. Given this situation, attempts to move to seeing Giddens's work as confined to any one, or a few, specific projects would seem not just premature, but, possibly, curtailing; particularly since so much of the attraction with Giddens, as well as the source of considerable controversies lies precisely in the diversity to be found within his work. It is this diversity which, I suggest, we need to continue to hold on to in our critical engagement with Giddens's writing; not just because diversity appears to be more sympathetic to the current character of Giddens's work than attempts to categorise and condense, but because I feel too that there is mileage still in the isolation and interrogation of particular themes. This paper is concerned with one such issue; the relationship between structuration theory and empirical research in the social sciences. This is a theme which very few commentators have explored in depth (although, see Bertillson, 1984; Gregory, 1982; Gregson, 1986; Smith, 1983; Thrift, 1983; 1985), and for a number of possible reasons. For example, it may be that this situation reflects the relative lack of space which Giddens himself has given over to this issue in his work, in contrast to, say, the problems of social structure and human agency, time and space, and theorising agency. Alternatively, it may be that the situation does little more than mirror the current shortage of empirical work informed by structurationist ideas. A third possibility also seems to exist. On this reading, this situation may be reflective of nothing more than the fact that Giddens's main audience is, almost certainly, likely to be dominated by those whose principal interests are theoretical, or indeed philosophical, rather than empirical. Whatever the reasons, and there may well be more, it seems to me that this is not an issue which can continue to be either marginalised or ignored by those intending to provide a critical evaluation of Giddens's work; indeed, if anything, it needs to be centralised. Two points indicate why. The first of these is, as Giddens says, because social science, whether written either as social theory or as empirically based studies, has the same primary objective, namely the illumination and explanation of the concrete processes of social life. Structuration theory then, as Giddens makes explicit, "will not be of much value if it does not help to illuminate problems of empirical research" (1984, page xxix). In other words, if it fails to enhance our understanding of what happens, and what has happened, 'out there' in the social world, it will have failed in terms of the main objective of social science. If this is indeed the principal task of social science, and I think that it must be if it is to be distinguished in any way from the philosophical issues which permeate and inform it, then we must surely examine structuration theory in the context of empirical questions and issues. A second point concerns the thorny question of the exact nature of the relationship between theory and empirical research and the increasing frequency of reference to this issue in the social science literature (for instance, see Massey and Meegan, 1985; Sayer, 1984). Two things seem to be relevant here. First, given the importance which Giddens himself attaches to this issue, through his definition of social theory (for instance, see 1984, page xvii) it
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would appear timely, as well as instructive, to look at his specific comments on the structuration theory - empirical research problem against the backdrop of this wider debate. Second, and very much following on from this, having considered the way in which Giddens appears to relate structuration theory to empirical research, we should be in the position of being able to say something about how Giddens might view the more general problem of relating theory and empirical work in the social sciences. Both points not only enable us to place Giddens's own ideas on this score in the context of other interpretations of the same general question, but, and perhaps more importantly, they may serve too to 'open up' Giddens's work to the vast majority of social researchers concerned with what is conventionally labelled as more empirical issues. This, I take to be a key problem. To be sure, as Giddens says, structuration theory will only be of value if it helps us to understand what is going on out there, but half the battle in this surely lies in convincing other researchers that it either is, or is not, of any use in understanding what is 'out there'. In my view, then, the importance of the structuration theory-empirical research issue seems to lie in two main things: in its centrality to Giddens's arguments about the overall purpose of social theory, and in its relationship to the more general and critical problem of tying theory and empirical work in social science. Furthermore, if we confront both of these points, we may be able to begin to tackle two further and related problems with Giddens's work, namely those of expanding Giddens's audience and beginning to assess the degree to which structuration theory helps in the understanding and explanation of social life. The remainder of this paper is divided into three main sections. In section 2, Giddens's comments on the relationship between structuration theory and empirical research are examined in depth and considered in terms of other arguments which seek to relate the theoretical and empirical in social science. Here too certain problems with structuration theory are made explicit; chief amongst which, for the purposes of this paper, is the level at which much of Giddens's argument is cited. This, it is argued, makes it necessary for us to try to locate structuration theory within the idea of hierarchies of abstraction, that is, within a conceptual framework which allows us to move freely between high and low levels of abstraction. Sections 3 and 4 are explorations of these possibilities, the first being an examination of the difficulties encountered in one of the few previous attempts to tackle this question; the second a consideration of whether these difficulties can in any way be overcome by integrating structuration theory with the realist method of rational abstraction. 2 Structuration theory and empirical research: a summary of Giddens's comments In a fairly recent interview Giddens makes the following comments, "The sense in which one theory is better than another has still to do, in my opinion, with the facts of the matter. I don't accept that theory is intractable to the facts, it seems to me that there is, as it were, a dialogue between theory and fact which is the basis of doing any kind of sociological analysis or political analysis or whatever" (Bleicher and Featherstone, 1982, page 74). More recently he has written, "Social theory has the task of providing conceptions of the nature of human social activity which can be placed in the service of empirical work" (1984, page xvii). Such remarks seem to indicate a strong commitment on Giddens's part to the importance of empirical research in social science. However, until the appearance of The Constitution of Society (1984), one of the major gaps in Giddens's writing had been his failure to expand on fragmentary comments such as these about both the relationship between theoretical and empirical work in social science and the possible connections between his own structuration theory and empirical research.
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It is for this reason that much of the discussion in this section focuses on the chapter in Constitution on structuration theory and empirical research, although references back to earlier work are made where appropriate. More specifically, the content of this section divides into three main aspects. Two are to do with the direct observations made by Giddens in Constitution and concern guidelines for empirical research in the social sciences and examples of the use of structuration theory, respectively (sections 2.1 and 2.2). A third section is a discussion of these remarks in terms of the more general question of how Giddens might see the relationship between theory and empirical research in social science. 2.1 Some guidelines for empirical research There are three guidelines which Giddens offers for empirical research in the social sciences. First, Giddens argues that all social research involves what he refers to as an "anthropological" or "ethnographic" moment (1984, page 284). Since social research is an activity conducted by some people (usually academics) about others, it necessitates the mediation of one set of concepts—for example, those drawn from sociology or geography—with those used by individuals in the course of their everyday lives. Part of the research process in social science, then, and a vital one according to Giddens, is the learning of what these individuals know, and have to know, in order to 'go-on' in the course of their everyday activities. It is this which constitutes the 'ethnographic' moment. The second guideline which Giddens offers relates to his arguments for the need to be aware of the complexity of skills which individuals exhibit in daily social life (1984, page 285). This is something which is seen as being of particular importance for institutional analysis; in which, Giddens urges, it is essential to see the reproduction of institutions as bound up in the flow between intentional acts and unintentional outcomes. Last, Giddens maintains that empirical research must recognise the "time-space constitution of social life" (1984, page 286): social life does not simply occur in time and space, it is produced and reproduced by the temporal and spatial structures of society. So, Giddens argues, instead of presenting time and space as the unproblematical dimensions within which action occurs, social researchers should use them as central to their analyses of the production and reproduction of social life. These guidelines, as we would expect from Giddens, are not ones which have been hatched out of thin air. Instead, as is shown here, they seem to reflect many of the themes which have recurred in his work since 1976. More specifically, their immediate origins appear to lie in, and are presented as lying in, the ten 'structurationist' points which Giddens isolates in Constitution, as impinging on the concerns of empirical research in social science (1984, pages 281-284). These ten points represent facets, but no more, of structuration theory and are an emphasis on (1) the knowledgeability of human agents (practical and discursive consciousness), and (2) the significance of the unintended consequences of action for the reproduction of social systems; the study of (3) day-to-day life in terms of the reproduction of institutionalised practices, and (4) routine activities; (5) situating social interaction within particular contexts which themselves are central to the process of social and system reproduction, and emphasising within this the importance of (6) socially sanctioned roles, and (7) various types of constraint; (8) isolating structural principles and considering the degree of 'closure' within societies; (9) the importance of the analysis of power struggles, and (10) trying to integrate sociological concepts within social life. Leaving aside for the moment any comment on these points, we can suggest that, as far as the three guidelines go, they are all implicated in some way or another with each of these ten points. This, in itself, is not problematical;
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what is more so is that Giddens argues that the guidelines are derived from, or suggested by, these ten points (1984, page 284). However, things appear to be slightly more complicated than this; for, rather than with these specific ten points— from which it seems to be possible to draw, at the very least, ten specific guidelines as well as the three general ones—it can be suggested that the source of these three general guidelines is to be more accurately located in Giddens's concern with ontological issues. This we can see from the following comments. One of the points which Giddens has made recently is that a primary objective in his work so far has been, and still is, to establish an ontology of human society (Gregory, 1984, page 124). In this, three issues have been central, although not Giddens's sole, concerns. These are working out the implications of the 'double hermeneutic' for social science; developing a theory of action which neither repeats the flaws of voluntarist theories of action nor, as in determinist theories, relegates action to the inconsequential; and considering how to put time and space in at the heart of social analysis from the start. It is with this objective that the ideas and themes expressed in the theory of structuration, particularly those concerning human agency, social structure, and time and space, are bound up, and it is this same objective, too, to which we can suggest that our three guidelines are connected. Although the guidelines themselves are, of course, manifestly not the same thing as Giddens's writing on the double hermeneutic, theories of action, and conceptualising time and space (in that they offer methodological and content-pointers for empirical research, rather than concepts specific to an ontological analysis of human society), they still seem to indicate a set of ideas which tie in very closely with these more ontological concerns. The ethnographic moment, for example, is a guideline which encourages individual social researchers to be sensitive in their empirical work to the preinterpreted status of the world with which they are concerned (that is to be sensitive to the double hermeneutic), and stresses, therefore, that individuals' own knowledge and understanding is to be not only acknowledged, but elucidated and disclosed in the course of empirical research projects. Furthermore, similar principles seem also to apply to those guidelines concerning the complexity of individuals' skills and the importance of time and space, in that both also suggest the need for the explicit recognition of ontological issues in empirical work. For instance, the first of these two guidelines is particularly indicative of certain of the ideas which Giddens expresses formally in his stratification model of human agency, a model which not only relates discursive consciousness, practical consciousness, and the unconscious, but ties this set to the unacknowledged conditions and unintended outcomes of actions (that is, to system reproduction). All this is implicated in the phrase "the complexity of skills shown by individual agents": if we are to follow this particular guideline, then in empirical work we need to take a look at the complexities of the stratification model in the context of particular individuals' daily lives. Last, and with respect to time and space, we can say that this guideline reflects Giddens's formal concerns with putting time and space in at the heart of social theory. Empirical research too, it seems, should also be sensitive to these issues, by situating action spatially and temporally, by examining the various spatial and temporal structures and scales within societies, and so on. As far as our guidelines go, then, it would appear that we are justified in seeing their source as lying principally in Giddens's concern to work on an ontology of human society, rather than simply with the ten structurationist points which he presents in Constitution, although the two must inevitably be seen as connected.
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2.2 Structuration theory and empirical research, some examples The examples which Giddens uses to illustrate the connections between structuration theory and empirical research are Willis's (1977) study, Learning to Labour, Gambetta's (1982) research on educational opportunity and employment, Boudon's (1982) and Elster's (1978) work on contradiction, and Ingham's (1984) study of the role of the city in British industry. Each study is presented as exemplifying certain aspects of structuration theory. Thus, Willis's work is used as an example of three main things: first, of strategic conduct—that individuals know a great deal about their situation, position, prospects, actions, and reasons; second, of the unintentional consequences of action, by which Giddens means that "the lads" "... having left school with no qualifications and entered a world of low-level manual labour, in work which has no career prospects and with which they are intrinsically disaffected, ... are effectively stuck there for the rest of their working lives" (1984, page 293); and, third, of the duality of structure. In this last case, those working-class attitudes to work and school which are critical to the creation of a school counterculture are also seen to lead (unintentionally) to the reproduction of the unskilled male labour force necessary for a decreasing number of sectors of capitalist production. The other pieces of research, although very different in that, in the main, they rely on extensive, rather than intensive, research methods, are used in a similar way. Gambetta's work, for instance, is used to indicate that human knowledgeability provides an important dimension to the analysis of structural constraint; Elster's and Boudon's work is used to relate structural contradictions to the unintentional consequences of action; and Ingham's study is quoted as an example of institutional analysis. Comments of this nature, in which brief illustrations of particular aspects of structuration theory are given, appear fairly frequently in Giddens's work. In both New Rules and Central Problems, they are, somewhat inevitably given the chief concerns of these texts, rather sporadic in occurrence, and provide little more than a thumbnail sketch type of example of the more abstract ideas which Giddens wishes to convey. Contemporary Critique, although on the face of it a text which has rather more to say at the concrete level than either New Rules or Central Problems (particularly with respect to the emergence of capitalist society) is also characterised by this same use of existing empirical work to illustrate specific structurationist points; witness, for example, the marshalling of the arguments of Jacob, Mumford, Sjoberg, Wheatley, etc around the theme of the time-space organisation of the city in history. What follows in Constitution, then, is but more of the same; or what Gane refers to as "an evocation of qoncreteness in the midst of a survey critique of elite theory" (1983, page 389). One of the first points which we can make about Giddens's discussion of the relationship between structuration theory and empirical research in Constitution, then, is that, whether we look at the guidelines or the illustrations, we remain steeped in arguments and methods used previously by Giddens. There is, in other words, nothing very new here, only reiteration, albeit on a more extensive scale than hitherto. 2.3 The theoretical and the empirical revisited There is one aspect of Giddens's discussion in Constitution which fails to comply with the conclusion reached immediately above. This is that these, by now very familiar points and arguments (see sections 2.1 and 2.2), are juxtaposed to some specific comments on the nature of the theory-empirical research question, rather than to a bald or simple statement referring to its importance. It is worth quoting Giddens at some length here, and not just because these comments serve to suggest
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where Giddens may stand in relation to the broader debate on the relationship between theoretical and empirical work in the social sciences. In my view, they serve to introduce more than a note of ambiguity, if not the seeds of possible misinterpretation, to the specific task of relating structuration theory to empirical research. The points about the nature of the theory-empirical research relationship which Giddens seems to want to put across are stated in the following passage, "There is, of course, no obligation for anyone doing detailed empirical research, in a given localized setting, to take on board an array of abstract notions that would merely clutter up what could otherwise be described with economy and in ordinary language. The concepts of structuration theory, as with any competing theoretical perspective, should for many research purposes be regarded as sensitizing devices, nothing more. That is to say, they may be useful for thinking about research problems and the interpretation of research results. But to suppose that being theoretically informed ... means always operating with a welter of abstract concepts is as mischievous a doctrine as one which suggests that we can get along very well without ever using such concepts at all" (1984, pages 326-327). The view of theory which is being forwarded here consists in two main parts. First, Giddens clearly sees theory in terms of concepts which make their strongest claims at the abstract level, a view which seems to be shared by Sayer (1984, page 131). Second, he makes a very clear conceptual distinction, or separation, between theory, on the one hand, and empirical work, on the other. Now, all of this is fairly uncontroversial stuff in terms of the debate over these questions in the social sciences. Indeed, these same two points form much of the basis of Saver's discussion of "theory as conceptualisation" (1984, page 49; and see, too, Massey and Meegan, 1985). However, there is one major difficulty here, and this concerns the degree to which Giddens seems to polarise the separation between the theoretical and the empirical in this passage. What he appears to suggest here is that empirical and theoretical research are, by and large, separate enterprises, but that empirical work can use theoretical concepts (as "sensitising devices") if these concepts, in any sense, impinge on specific empirical problems. At best, what this suggests appears to be defective, particularly since the reciprocal dialogue between the 'theoretical' and the 'empirical' (about which much has been rightly made in, for example, the pages of this journal, and which Giddens, in his arguments elsewhere for a contextual social theory, presumably agrees with, at least in part) reduces to a caricature of what is meant by dialogue. Here the dialogue is all one way, in that 'theory' acts in a potential service role for empirical work; in that it is empirical research questions which determine the use of theoretical arguments; and in that no place seems to exist for the interrogation of theory through empirical work. If we were to infer merely from this passage where Giddens stands on the general debate on the relationship between theoretical and empirical work in the social sciences, it would seem to be at some remove from the general consensus. However, such conclusions may be somewhat misplaced, as we can see if we examine the more specific problem of how Giddens tackles the relationship between structuration theory and empirical work.
There seems to be one clear problem with Giddens's discussion of this relationship in Constitution and this is that he does not make explicit the importance of the distinction between the often abstract concerns of structuration theory and the particularities of empirical research. This, I think, coupled with the illustrations which Giddens provides of structuration theory and empirical research makes it relatively easy to misconstrue the nature of the relationship which exists between
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structuration theory and empirical work as one in which structurationist concepts can literally be added-in to 'sensitise' empirical projects (see Thrift, 1985). Certainly, this is just the sort of impression which could be formed from, say, Giddens's discussion of Willis's work, where we find Giddens introducing structurationist concepts in the manner: knowledgeable individuals + unintentional consequences + duality of structure +.... It is an impression which we could also pick up from Giddens's use of nonstructurationist work in Constitution to illustrate specific structurationist points. There are, of course, various comments which we could make about both methods of working, including that they seem to go against the context-dependent status of meaning, but to do so would be to sidetrack from the main issue here, which is to say that the use of these methods serves to suggest that structurationist concepts can be slotted-in to empirical work straight away and without difficulty. Or, expressed in somewhat balder terms, they suggest that structurationist concepts can be extracted from Giddens's work as they stand and transferred immediately into an empirical setting. Although this is undoubtedly a possibility, and is indeed the case with the use of many theoretical concepts in social science (for example, wage labour, the labour process, industrial restructuring, masculinity/femininity), it is manifestly not so with structuration theory. And the reason why seems to be this: that structuration theory is a second-order theory. In other words, its concern, or what it is trying to elucidate, is an ontology of human society. Consequently, what we surely need to recognise is that structuration theory itself is sited at a higher level of abstraction than the events or contingencies of particular periods and places which constitute the domain of empirical enquiry. It is this point which Giddens does not make very clear in this section of Constitution, and it is this same point which may well be the source of our earlier confusion over the passage about the nature of the general relationship between theoretical and empirical work. If Giddens is talking about second-order theory here, then, of course, he is right to stress both the separation between the theoretical and the empirical and the sensitising role of abstract concepts; the point which would be being made is that it would be misplaced to put level-2 type concepts into a level-1 type analysis. If, however, he is talking about first-order theory, then we would be right in seeing this argument as defective. Needless to say, I think it is more likely to be the first of these possibilities to which Giddens is referring. These arguments seem to leave us in a position where we can suggest several further points, of which two in particular relate to the central concerns of this paper. The first is that this reading of theory seems to have much in common with what Gregory (1985, page 387) refers to as "theory as abstraction", which involves conceptualising or carving up the world into several fluid, rather than rigid, layers. This, we might note, is rather different to Giddens's comments elsewhere (1984, pages xviii-xx), which appear to suggest a contextual interpretation of theory; but it does at least suggest that the reciprocal dialogue between theoretical constructs and empirical details which has been urged in the general debate on theory and empirical work in the social sciences is something which Giddens finds favour with. The second point is one which follows from the first. This is that the interpretation of theory in Constitution is one which has considerable affinities with a broadly realist view of the world. Given this, an obvious possibility for further discussion is to consider still further these affinities by exploring the degree to which it is possible to use the realist concept of hierarchies of abstraction to facilitate movement between the level-2 type concerns of much of structuration theory and the contingencies of specific empirical research projects. It is these possibilities which form the concerns of the following two sections.
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3 Structuration theory and hierarchies of abstraction: 1 So far there have been relatively few attempts to wrestle with the problems of situating structuration theory within a hierarchy of abstraction which includes the detailed specifics of empirical analysis. However, one such attempt has been provided by Moos and Dear (1986) and it is this which is focused on in this section. Discussion here relates to three issues. In the first place, Moos and Dear's argument is outlined briefly; second, some of the difficulties with this argument are pointed out; and, third, a possible way of resolving them is suggested. The argument presented by Moos and Dear can be stated quickly and simply. Empirical analysis is identified with the examination of specific events occurring in particular periods and places. These events, so Moos and Dear claim, can be looked at in two ways, each of which they see as "representing a different level of analytical abstraction" (1986, page 243). Level 1, in their view, consists of analysing the individuals involved in generating particular events, social interaction between individuals, and how specific institutions are implicated in all this. Level 2 concerns a higher level of analysis; one which focuses on the isolation of those structural properties embedded in particular institutions, and which "affect agency and institutions in interaction" (1986, page 244). The two levels are tied together, or linked, by Giddens's concept of the duality of structure. There seems to be one major problem with this particular analysis, and this is that it appears to lack specification. To be sure, part of the purpose and attraction of abstraction as a method is, as Moos and Dear imply, that it enables us to move between what are often universal theoretical categories and the specifics of the events which occur in particular times and places; or, as Horvath and Gibson put it, "to descend from the empyrean heights of historical generality to fix upon the specific determinants of social life under particular historical circumstances" (1983, page 13)(1). But, what is missing from Moos and Dear's analysis is a way of moving between ahistoric universal categories and historically specific ones, or between level-2 analysis and level-1. So, instead of, say, an analysis which moves from the universal categories of the direct producer—nonproducer relation to the historically specific form of this relation under capitalism, capital wage labour (Horvath and Gibson, 1983, page 16), we find in Moos and Dear's case, two levels of analysis which are ahistoric—the one characterised by unspecified structural properties, the other by the again unspecified categories of knowledgeable human agents and institutions. In other words, what we have here is abstraction without specification, a hierarchy which fails either to descend from "the empyrean heights" or to move between these heights and the details of historically specific occurrences. It is this problem which seems to lie at the heart of the very considerable difficulties which Moos and Dear encounter in trying to use their levels of abstraction to (1)
Horvath and Gibson, along with others who have worked with the concept of hierarchies of abstraction, tend to present this (if not perhaps seeing things entirely in this way) in terms of a very definite downwards movement from high to low levels of abstraction. This tends to imply both a much more rigid distinction between levels of abstraction than is perhaps useful and a one-way movement from high levels of abstraction to lower levels. In this paper a looser sense of this concept is employed. Here no one level is considered to be any more important than any other, nor is it considered to be essential to move one-way through hierarchies. Instead, second-order statements are not considered to be in any way prior to first-order arguments, merely different; precisely because they are seen to be making abstract statements about the nature of the social world in general rather than specific statements about the social world as it is in particular places. Furthermore, since the two enterprises are obviously related—in that knowledge of the specific both feeds into and informs the general statements which we can make, and, vice versa, there seems to be no reason why we should not see hierarchies of abstraction in terms of a continual recursive movement between levels.
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construct a structurationist model of urban space (1986, pages 244-250). What they present here is a formalised model in which a degree of specification is achieved by selecting various ideal-type categories of agents and institutions (the agents are politicians, bureaucrats, interest groups, influential individuals, and ordinary citizens; the institutions are communicative institutions, political and economic institutions, and those involved in the legitimation of activities). The categories themselves are claimed to "reflect both existing empirical knowledge of the urban arena and the theory of structuration" (1986, page 246). However, it has to be said that, at least as they are presented here, they seem to have more to do with empirical knowledge than with the theory of structuration, particularly, with respect to their actual selection. Moos and Dear themselves do not exactly disguise this fact. For instance, they remark: "the identification of appropriate categories is one of the major unresolved difficulties in moving from the abstract to the concrete in structuration analysis" [footnote (5), page 246]. Nevertheless, it would seem that this issue warrants rather more attention than it in fact receives in their analysis. Indeed, two things seem particularly important to consider: these are the reasons for the existence of this difficulty in the first place and their implications for attempting to do 'structurationisf empirical research, and they are considered now. The problems which Moos and Dear encounter in trying to use structuration theory in empirical analysis seems to derive from one fairly important oversight on their part. This is that, although they recognise that structuration theory is, for the most part, sited at a high level of abstraction, they fail to follow up the implications of this point for anyone attempting to incorporate these insights into empirical work. These implications seem to be twofold, and both are points which were raised in section 2.3. They are, first, that structurationist concepts themselves will not be of the type which can be used directly in empirical research and, second, that to be extended to include the domain of empirical enquiry, structuration theory itself needs to be placed within a hierarchy of abstraction which, by working with increasing degrees of specification, permits movement between high and low levels of abstraction. At this juncture, both points seem to warrant a little more attention than they have been given so far. If we start with the first point, perhaps the most important thing to acknowledge here is Giddens's comment to the effect that his principle objective is to establish an ontology of human society. What this means in terms of the concepts which Giddens provides us with is this: that these concepts will, for the most part, be specific to the ontological level. In other words, what we have here is a set of concepts which relate more to the nature of being, or existence, in human society generally than to the contingencies of how this might work out in particular periods or places. This we can see from just a few examples of structurationist concepts. Take, for instance, the concept of locale, which has considerable affinities with many of the more traditional concerns of human geography. Giddens defines locale as follows, "Locales refer to the use of space to provide the settings of interaction .... Locales may range from a room in a house, a street corner, the shop floor of a factory, towns and cities, to the territorially demarcated areas occupied by nation-states. But locales are typically internally regionalized, and the regions within them are of critical importance in constituting contexts of interaction" (1984, page 118). Quite clearly then, the concept of locale refers to a basic condition of human society—that all action and interaction takes place within, uses, and structures space. It does not, however, make any factual or specific claims about the nature,
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form, or content of this setting. Indeed, to me, this seems to be the whole point which Giddens is trying to emphasise through his indication of the range of potential locales. Similar conclusions can be reached from a look at other concepts which Giddens works with: for example, the pivotal duality-of-structure concept which is used to try to capture the fulcrum between human agency and social structure. This we can see in the following terms: "according to the notion of the duality of structure, the structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organize" (1984, page 25). For the purposes of the argument here, what is important to stress is that, again, as with locales, no comprehensive attempt is made to specify particular structural properties and the practices implicated in their reproduction. Instead, the point seems more to acknowledge that this recursive relationship between agency and structure, individuals and society, is a universal feature of human existence, and to work from it in our conceptualisation of both agency and structure. We could go on and on here, but one further example will suffice to reinforce the point. This concerns human agency. Agency is something which Giddens unpacks into three distinct, but interrelated, components: the stratification model, linking the reflexive monitoring of action, its rationalisation, and motivation with the unacknowledged conditions and unintended consequences of action; a three-tier model of consciousness, comprising discursive consciousness, practical consciousness, and the unconscious; and the occurrence of action within the duree of everyday life, rather than, say, within the long duree of institutional or world time. What we find here, then, is an overt concern on Giddens's part with teasing out the universal, spatially and temporally invariant characteristics of human agency; an enterprise which we can note, in passing, includes much more in the way of ontological depth than Giddens's comments on social structure. Clearly then, the intricacies of particular instances of agency are far from central to Giddens's discussion; so much so that, even though small examples punctuate the text, their purpose can be seen to illustrate ontological issues, and not to examine the factual content of, say, agency in the circumstances provided by a Birmingham school. There seem to be two major conclusions which can be drawn from the comments above vis-a-vis the relationship between structuration theory and empirical work, and these are, first, that it would be unreasonable to expect structuration theory to generate either empirical research questions or appropriate categories for empirical analysis as it stands, and, second, that to transfer structurationist concepts directly into empirical analysis is misconceived. The reason why we cannot expect structuration theory to provide us with immediate questions or categories for factual investigation is expressed with great clarity by Ryan, albeit in the context of a discussion of the differences between the practices of science and philosophy, for which we may substitute here empirical social science and structuration theory, respectively(2): "what we have here [in philosophy] are not questions in the sciences ... but questions about those sciences; our questions are not first order or factual questions, but rather second-order or conceptual questions instead .... What makes second-order questions philosophical is that they cannot be decided by appeal to the known methods of obtaining the facts" (Ryan, 1970, pages 4 - 5 ; see also Bhaskar, 1979, page 9). (2)
I do not mean to imply anything more from this substitution other than that structuration theory appears to ask questions which are more about the nature of social science and that empirical work, by and large, is concerned with questions which concern the details of what is happening in particular places.
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Within structuration theory, as we have seen, ontological issues are at a premium: the central questions concern second-order conceptual problems, for instance, how we carve up human society and what we see it as consisting in, and not first-order factual issues, such as, for instance, what individuals working at Land Rover's Solihull plant are able to say about their current work situation. The distinction is important. Quite simply, it means two things: first, that the questions and categories which structuration theory directly generates are concerned, for the most part, with the appropriateness and validity of its ontological claims, and, second, that structurationist concepts and categories will not, and should not, be expected to specify particular empirical research projects. Furthermore, we can also say that to attempt to transplant any or some of these concepts as they stand from their ontological context to that of a specific empirical investigation both negates much, although not all, of the initial point of these concepts and runs the risk of leading to the dismissal of structuration theory itself. Second-order concepts relate primarily, although not exclusively, to second-order issues and not to first-order problems: at best they may alert first-order work to conceptual questions, but, at worst, this type of exercise could either encourage the reduction of structuration theory to a few basic concepts, or even lead many, and falsely, to reject it on the grounds that it fails to inform empirical research. If we wish to avoid such scenarios, it is clear that we need both to make explicit the gap which currently exists between structuration theory and empirical investigation and attempt to bridge it. The latter will not be accomplished simply by taking, as Moos and Dear do, existing structurationist concepts: instead, we will succeed in this only if we can incorporate and develop these concepts within a hierarchy of abstraction which, in its movement between abstract and concrete, recognises the importance of increasing degrees of historical specificity. One type of abstraction certainly facilitates this process and this is rational abstraction, the conceptual tool which not only enables us to carve up the world in terms of the internal, or necessary, relations which go to make up objects (or structures), but which also requires that we place and understand these abstractions within the contingencies of particular periods and places (Sayer, 1984). However, rational abstraction itself is very closely bound up with theoretical realism, in the sense that it is the method by which the causal structures so central to realist philosophy are isolated (see Allen, 1983; Sayer, 1981; 1984). To consider, therefore, whether structuration theory is actually amenable to this type of abstraction, and therefore whether our problem is resolvable in this way, we need to examine some of the points of connection and sources of conflict between structuration theory and realism. 4 Structuration theory and hierarchies of abstraction: 2 In this section, I want to do two things: (1) to indicate how Giddens himself has approached the problem of moving from high to low levels of abstraction, and (2) to consider some of the differences between structuration theory and theoretical realism, differences which make it extremely difficult to apply rational abstraction to structurationist concepts. To begin with, however, a few points need to be made about rational abstraction itself. Rational abstraction is the method used in forms of realism in an attempt to carve up the world in terms of necessary, or internal, relations between objects and causal structures. In other words, its raison d'etre is to aid the process of identification of internally homogenous, and analytically autonomous, structures of causation. In contrast, other forms of abstraction, among which, I think, we can number Giddens's own efforts, serve to delimit what are principally internally heterogenous objects, that is, groups of objects or things which are unrelated in a
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causal sense (Sayer, 1984, pages 126-128). Such differences become particularly important when we consider exactly what it is that we want or require from empirical work. If, in our empirical enquiries, as I assume we do, we wish to understand questions which, in the main, take the general form: why is it that particular things, events, occurrences, etc happen (for instance, why it is that women are employed in low-paid, often unskilled, and part-time activities or why did massive riots occur in UK inner cities in the summer of 1985), then we need to recognise that we are asking questions which seem to require and demand a causal analysis. The importance of rational abstraction in this respect seems to be that it both allows us to ask such questions and enables us to suggest meaningful causal explanations. It is for precisely this reason that it seems to me to be critically important to consider whether Giddens's theory represents a similar enterprise to theoretical realism. If it does, then it ought to be possible to use rational abstraction to bridge the gap which currently exists between structurationist concepts and empirical enquiry. One of the few areas where Giddens certainly does attempt to move from high to lower levels of abstraction comes in his development of the concept of structural principles (1984, pages 131 -189) {3) , and it is this, I think, which sits at the centre of much of the discussion to be found within Contemporary Critique. On this it is worth quoting from Giddens at some length: "In identifying structural principles the discussion has to move back from the formal to the rather more substantive. Let me recall, to begin with, a main strand of structuration theory .... The 'problem of order 1 in the theory of structuration is the problem of how it comes about that social systems 'bind' time and space, incorporating and integrating presence and absence. This in turn is closely bound up with the problematic of time-space distanciation: the 'stretching' of social systems across time-space. Structural principles can thus be understood as the principles of organization which allow recognizably consistent forms of time-space distanciation on the basis of definite mechanisms of societal integration" (1984, page 181). What follows is a summary of Giddens's, by now very familiar typology of societal types: tribal society, class-divided society, and class society, of which Contemporary Critique provides a far fuller discussion. Now, there seems to me to be two critical problems with this particular interpretation of abstraction. The first is that in this case Giddens uses abstraction principally to make generalisations about types of society based on degrees of time-space distanciation. These generalisations, furthermore, are grounded in similar, or associated, sets of routine practices: for instance, in tradition or kinship in tribal societies, or in specific military and economic powers of the state in class-divided and class societies. This use of abstraction, of course, does not rest easily with other forms of abstraction; in particular, the form of rational abstraction so central to Sayer's reading of theoretical realism. Indeed, generalisations which result in taxonomic groups, such as these, are the very stuff of Sayer's examples of bad abstractions or chaotic conceptions in social science (1984, page 127). Of course, this does not automatically mean that the categories tribal, class-divided, and class society are 'chaotic' in conception, but the possibility that they are so definitely exists; even more so, since Giddens himself certainly does very little to alleviate things by referring to those mechanisms which work to produce this classification of societal history. It is this point about mechanisms which provides us with our second critical problem. The central difficulty here is that, although degrees of time - space
