Applied Linguistics as Social Science
Some key issues in social theory
Structuralist accounts of structure-and-agency
In structuralist accounts of the structure and agency relation, human beings are viewed as determined by the social world, such that if we wish to account for the social world we should concentrate on the role played by social structures. This role can take a variety of forms. For example, we may want to argue that the values and attitudes that people hold, or the ambitions that they have, are a consequence of the ways in which they have been socialized. Radical versions of this thesis replace socialization with ideological hegemony; postmodernist versions replace socialization with discourses which 'subject-ify'. The core feature of such 'structuralist' accounts is that, in explaining the social world, social structures are afforded causal primacy in shaping and fashioning agency.
Thus, the work of Levi-Strauss (1958, 1966) focuses on the underlying structures of cultural codes that are responsible for the surface variety of human mythologies. In a similar vein, Barthes' (1973) semiological studies of such apparently disparate phenomena as the VW Beetle car, wrestling and striptease sought to demonstrate their conceptual unity in an underlying schema of myths and dramatic codes. From a different tradition, that of structural functionalism, Parsons (1937, 1951) has sought to identify the functional prerequisites that underlie all social action.
One of the major problems with approaches which concentrate on the structural end of our continuum is how to explain social change. This is unsurprising perhaps, since an emphasis on the role of structures is necessarily accompanied by a diminished view of agency, one in which human beings scarcely figure as movers and shakers of the social world. The need to account for change, for the dynamic features of social life, has attracted many theorists towards the other end of our continuum where the focus is much more on agency, on people as active participants in the making of the social world.
