“Historically, sociologists have portrayed people as either deterministic or voluntaristic.” Using examples, illustrate why these are viewed as opposing perspectives.

Running Head : Sociologists Portraying People Deterministic or Voluntaristic

Sociologists Portraying People Deterministic or Voluntaristic (Author 's Name (Institution 's Name

People Deterministic or Voluntaristic : An Introduction

Of the infinite valuable insights and vague maxims that social scientists have , the pronouncement that human beings make history , but not in circumstances of their own choosing ' is possibly both the most agreeable and tricky one . It appears noticeable that only advocates of either an acute voluntaristic or a perfect deterministic approach to social science would reject that neither the structural properties of social

arrangements nor human action can fully and wholly explain the occurrence that social scientists are interested in . However everybody else still has to decide his or her mind , though fortunately neither conclusively nor convincingly , about how much epistemological emphasis should suitably be given to either agency or composition in the justification of a specific event , and by what arbitrating links agency and structure are best thought of as correlated to one another

Some unambiguous choices of this kind perhaps establish to a large degree whether individual scholars contribute to methodological individualism or favor structuralist approaches . Nevertheless , even a speculative acknowledgement of the conjunctural effects and more or less equal epistemological significance of structure and agency does not rid people from the trouble of coming to grips with the basic epistemological and methodological problems necessitate in this assertion . As Giddens (1984 , pp . xxi ) exclaims about Marx 's oft-quoted phrase : what a diversity of complex problems of social analysis this apparently innocuous announcement turns out to disclose

In understanding of the need of explaining the structure-agency problimatique , Giddens has presented one of the most important contributions to the question in the form of the theory of structuration . This theory inquire about to rise above the dualism of agency opposed to structure in social theory by integrating both categories in the central concept of the `duality of structure , which he describes as the essential recursiveness of social life , as constituted in social practice (Giddens 1979 , pp . 5 . In this conceptualization structure is both medium and outcome of the reproduction of human practices . It enters simultaneously into the constitution of the agent and social practice , and `exists ' in the generating moments of this constitution (Giddens 1979 , pp . 5

Holmwood and Stewart (1991 ) examines the advantages of different structuration theories , including that of Giddens , by arguing that these theories either tend to attract agency and structure into each other at the cost of conceptual precision and heuristic value , or allocates these categories to different theoretical or empirical loci , which amounts to keeping the structure-agency dualism rather than transcending it (Jessop 1996 , pp . 121 . In spite of the widespread qualities and errors of Holmwood and Stewart 's critique (cf . Jessop 1996 , pp . 119 , it stresses the value of making further efforts to explain the exact nature of the duality of structure so as to get an understandable and possibly operationalizable image of what exactly it means to say that agency and structure are essentially linked by...