Sociology 401
Sociological Theory
Spring 2002
Dr. Scott Schaffer

Structure and Agency: Key Quotes

To give you an idea of what I think are the crucial parts of Sewell's article, I give you these selections:

p. 2: "The most fundamental problem is that structural or structuralist arguments tend to assume a far too rigid causal determinism in social life. These features of social existence denominated as structures tend to be reified and treated as primary, hard and immutable, like the girders of a building, while the events or social processes they structure tend to be seen as secondary and superficial, like the outer 'skin' of a layout of offices on floors defined by a skeleton of girders. What tends to get lost in the language of structure is the efficacy of human action - or 'agency,' to use the currently favored term. Structures tend to appear in social science discourse as impervious to human agency, to exist apart from, but nevertheless determine the essential shape of, the strivings and motivated transactions that constitute the experienced surface of social life."

p. 4: "Structures shape people's practices, but it is also people's practices that constitute (and reproduce) structures. In this view of things, human agency and structure, far from being opposed, in fact presuppose each other. Structures are enacted by what Giddens calls 'knowledgeable' human agents (i.e., people who know what they are doing and how to do it), and agents act by putting into practice their necessarily structured knowledge. ... This conception of human agents as 'knowledgeable' and 'enabled' implies that those agents are capable of putting their structurally formed capacities to work in creative or innovative ways."

p. 13: "If resources are effects of schemas, it is also true that schemas are effects of resources. If schemas are to be sustained or reproduced over time - and without sustained reproduction they could hardly be counted as structural - they must be validated by the accumulation of resources that their enactment engenders. Schemas not empowered or regenerated by resources would eventually be abandoned and forgotten, just as resources without cultural schemas to direct their use would eventually dissipate and decay. Sets of schemas and resources may properly be said to constitute structures only when they mutually imply and sustain each other over time."

p. 18: "Whether we are speaking of rules of grammar, mathematics, law, etiquette, or carpentry, the real test of knowing a rule is to be able to apply it successfully in unfamiliar cases. Knowledge of a rule or a schema by definition means the ability to transpose or extend it - that is, to apply it creatively. If this is so, then agency, which I would define as entailing the capacity to transpose and extend schemas to new contexts, is inherent in the knowledge of cultural schemas that characterizes all minimally competent members of society."

p. 19: "Agency, to put it differently, is the actor's capacity to reinterpret and mobilize an array of resources in terms of cultural schemas other than those that initially constituted the array."

p. 19: "Structures, then, are sets of mutually sustaining schemas and resources that empower and constrain social action and that tend to be reproduced by that social action. But their reproduction is never automatic. Structures are at risk, at least to some extent, in all of the social encounters they shape - because structures are multiple and intersecting, because schemas are transposable, and because resources are polysemic [have multiple meanings for different participants] and accumulate unpredictably."

p. 20: "I would argue that a capacity for agency - for desiring, for forming intentions, and for acting creatively - is inherent in all humans. But I would also argue that humans are born with only a highly generalized capacity for agency. ... agency is formed by a specific range of cultural schemas and resources available in a person's particular social millieu."

p. 21: "Agency also differs in extent, both between and within societies. Occupancy of different social positions - as defined, for example, by gender, wealth, social prestige, class, ethnicity, occupation, generation, sexual preference, or education - gives people knowledge of different schemas and access to different kinds and amounts of resources and hence different possibilities for transformative action. ... Structures, in short, empower agents differentially, which also implies that they embody the desires, intentions, and knowledge of agents differentially as well. Structures, and the human agencies they endow, are laden with differences in power."

p. 21: "Agency, then, characterizes all persons. But the agency exercised by persons is collective in both its sources and its mode of exercise. Personal agency is, therefore, laden with collectively produced differences of power and implicated in collective struggles and resistances."