Are you steering your life, or is society steering you?
James Coleman sketched a boat to answer one of sociology's oldest puzzles. A large-scale condition prompts individual people to act; their combined actions then produce a new large-scale condition. The diagram, known as Coleman's Boat, tries to link two things social scientists have argued about for over a century: structure and agency.
Structure means the recurring patterns that shape or limit people's options. Agency is the capacity to act independently and choose freely. The debate is really about what the social world is made of, and whether social arrangements determine behaviour or people make those arrangements. Durkheim treated structure and hierarchy as the foundation of society itself and believed collectives have emergent properties of their own, while Marx stressed that structure can work against most of the people living under it.
Classical sociology leaned toward structure, a holistic view that the whole exceeds its parts. Methodological individualists, economists among them, start from the individual instead and largely dismiss holism. Many modern theorists look for balance, arguing that structures shape people and people reshape structures.
Several thinkers built bridges. Pierre Bourdieu introduced habitus in his 1972 Outline of a Theory of Practice: people absorb the expectations of a field, a social arena where prestige or money is at stake, and then act out those absorbed dispositions, internalising the external and externalising the internal. The International Sociological Association later ranked his 1979 book Distinction among the ten most significant sociology books of the twentieth century. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann described a loop in 1966 in which society forms individuals who in turn create society. Anthony Giddens, in The Constitution of Society in 1984, proposed a duality of structure, with structure serving as both the means and the result of action.
Others added twists. Roy Bhaskar's transformational model of social action differs from Giddens mainly by building in time. Roberto Mangabeira Unger's idea of negative capability accepts that structures mould people but insists individuals can resist and transcend their context. Earlier, Georg Simmel, best known today for The Philosophy of Money and The Metropolis and Mental Life, pioneered both concepts, and Norbert Elias shaped figurational sociology around power, emotion and knowledge over time.
Source: Structure and agency
