Applied Linguistics as Social Science
Part 1: Some key issues in social theory
Structure and agency
One of the major themes of sociological debate since the discipline was established in the late nineteenth century has been the relationship between human beings and the social context within which they seek to realize their intentions, aspirations, needs and desires. This social context, made up of political and legal relations, institutions, distributions of wealth and income and so on, may frustrate or enable people's efforts to achieve what they want. The desire to go to university, for example, is much more likely to be realized by an individual who comes from a middle-class, rather than a working class, background.
Broadly speaking, the sociological interest in this relationship stems from the fundamental question to which it gives rise: do people make society or does society make people? Put in this crude way, of course, there can be no straightforward answer. Nevertheless, if we convert the question to a continuum in which the two elements of the question represent opposite ends, it is possible to see that sociologists have inclined towards one or the other. That is, some sociologists (such as Durkheim, Parsons or Levi-Strauss) have favored an emphasis on the role of society or social structures in shaping people's values, cultures and choices. Other sociologists (such as Goffman or Becker) have regarded the role played by individuals in sustaining social interactions and interpreting meanings as more central to accounts of social life.
Wherever a theorist lies on this continuum, however, the nub of the issue remains constant, namely the extent to which it may be claimed that individuals construct or create society and, conversely, the degree to which social structures may be said to impress or socialize individuals. This issue was not one invented by sociology, although sociologists have explored it in distinctive ways (Nisbet 1966). The much older philosophical debate about free will and determinism is also concerned with exploring the extent to which human beings are free to shape the world according to their own desires, wishes and intentions.
Concerned as it is with social theory and language, we shall adopt the characteristic sociological formulation of the issue as one of the relationship between structure (society) and agency (human beings). The 'structure-agency debate' is, as one recent commentator has put it, 'widely acknowledged to lie at the heart of sociological theorizing' (Archer 2000: 1). It occupies this salient position precisely because of the fundamental nature of the relationship it seeks to examine: that between human beings (the source of agency in the social world) and the social relations (structures) that are generated on the basis of their interaction. As we have seen, there are a number of possible ways in which the relations between structure and agency may be interpreted. We shall start at the structure end of the continuum, but before doing so we should enter an important caveat about the notion of structure which is raised by Lopez and Scott (2000). They argue that the meaning of the term 'structure' is itself ambiguous. Generally speaking, sociologists have employed the term in two senses: to refer to normative institutions (the legal system, ideological system and so on) and to relational groupings (capitalist and proletariat, for example). Relational structure and institutional structure are connected but distinct aspects of structure and irreducible each to the other. This cautionary note should be borne in mind in the following discussion of different approaches to the agency-structure debate. That is, structures are always 'macro' features of society, which persist over time; however, for some of the writers discussed in what follows, the term refers primarily to social institutions- such as the economy, schooling and so forth- while for others the emphasis is on social relations such as employer-employee, teacher-pupil and so on.
