Recent Developments
The critical realist structure/agency perspective embodied in the Transformational Model of Social Action (TMSA) has been further advocated and applied in other social science fields by additional authors, for example in economics by Tony Lawson and in sociology by Margaret Archer. In 2005, the Journal of Management Studies debated the merits of critical realism.
Kenneth Wilkinson in the Community in Rural America took an interactional/field theoretical perspective focusing on the role of community agency in contributing to the emergence of community.
With Critical Psychology as framework, the Danish psychologist Ole Dreier, proposes in his book Psychotherapy in Everyday Life that we may best conceptualize persons as participants in social practices (that constitute social structures) who can either reproduce or change these social practices. This indicates that neither participants, nor social practices can be understood when looked at in isolation (in fact, this undermines the very idea of trying to do so), since practice and structure is co-created by participants and since the participants can only be called so, if they participate in a social practice.
The structure/agency debate continues to evolve, with contributions such as Nicos Mouzelis's Sociological Theory: What Went Wrong? and Margaret Archer's Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach continuing to push the ongoing development of structure/agency theory. Work in information systems by Mutch (2010)has emphasized Archer's Realist Social Theory. In entrepreneurship a discussion between Sarason et al. and Mole and Mole (2010) used Archer's theory to critique structuration view arguing that starting a new business organization needs to be understood in the context of social structure and agency. However, this depends upon one's view of structure which differs between Giddens and Archer. Hence if strata in social reality have different ontologies, then they must be viewed as a dualism. Third, agents have causal power, and ultimate concerns which they try to fallibly to put into practice. Mole and Mole propose entrepreneurship as the study of the interplay between the structures of a society and the agents within it.
Read more about this topic: Structure And Agency
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