Applied Linguistics as Social Science
Some key issues in social theory
Interactionist accounts of structure-and-agency
We have termed agency-centered approaches interactionist, and although this is a rather rough and ready description it will serve our central purpose of identifying those theories which reverse the direction of the structuralist's explanatory flow. Causal primacy in explaining the social world in the interactionist approach goes to human beings. Social structures are sometimes reduced to the status of convenient sociological descriptions (as in certain forms of ethno-methodology); or viewed as simply the accumulation of habit and routine; or as the discursive product of social conversation (as in some forms of social constructionism).
Movement towards the agency end of the continuum introduces the obverse problem to that raised by moving towards the structure end, namely the problem of social persistence. Here the emphasis on the role of agency is often accompanied by an impoverished view of structures, one in which social relations become more plastic, offering only a flimsy resistance to human reworking. It thus becomes difficult to explain why situations of injustice or inequality continue when they clearly work to the disadvantage of many.
So it would seem that an overemphasis on structure brings the problem of explaining social change, whilst an overemphasis on agency brings the problem of explaining social persistence or stability. Understandably enough, many social theorists have hovered more or less in the center of our continuum, convinced by neither structure nor agency as adequate bases for explanation of the social world. However, political and social changes such as the collapse of the Communist bloc and the increasing dominance of a global capitalism have renewed the demand for a social theory able to account for both social stability and social change. Additionally, the emergence of the so-called 'linguistic turn' in social theory has raised doubts about the value of earlier formulations of the structure and agency relation. Together these developments have prompted some fresh approaches to the structure-agency issue.
