Page 98 - Cultural Theory

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••• Giddens and Cultural Analysis •••

interaction by placing methodological ‘brackets’ around the institutions and
collectivities that comprise the systemic features of social life. These system processes
figure simply as the ‘conditions’ under which actions take place. Similarly, individ-
ual action can be bracketed in order to allow an institutional analysis of systems and
their integration to be undertaken, without the need for any explicit analysis of the
complexities involved in individual action.
For many purposes, however, this bracketing is inadequate, and it is necessary to
explore the relationships between action and system. A full account of individual
action has to be grounded in an account of the systemic features of social life that
both constrain it and make it possible. Similarly, a full account of a social system can
make sense only if grounded in an account of the individual actions that produce
and reproduce it. It does not follow, however, that one can be reduced to the other.
3
Integration is not the same as conflation. Social theory must operate at both levels
to understand the complex articulation between them. Giddens argues that the appar-
ent opposition or ‘dualism’ between action and system can be overcome only if it
is seen as reflecting a duality in the social structure that mediates them. Individual
actions are shaped by a social structure, and the patterned features of social systems
are the outcome of socially structured human actions. Patterns in social actions and
social systems are the results of a process of structuring, which Giddens refers to as
‘structuration’. Social structures are the means or medium through which actions
are shaped and organized. At the same time, however, structures are produced and
reproduced by the very actions that they organize. They are a consequence or out-
come of structured actions within structured social systems. These two aspects of
structure – as medium and as outcome – are what Giddens refers to as the ‘duality of
structure’.
In making this point, Giddens gives the idea of social structure a central place in
his work. The concept of social structure is, of course, used very widely in sociology
(López and Scott, 2000), but Giddens’ concept is most unusual and quite distinctive.
Giddens notes, in fact, that his concept of structure is what many would refer to as
‘culture’, and he specifically mentions the parallel between his own ideas and the
work of Bauman on culture (Bauman, 1973; see Giddens, 1979: 268, n. 30). For most
sociologists, social structures are the institutional and relational patterns of social
systems. Examples would include kinship structures, class structures, and political
structures. Thus, social structure, as the patterning of social phenomena, is often seen
through an analogy with ‘the skeleton or morphology of an organism or … the gird-
ers of a building’ (Giddens, 1984: 16). Giddens recognizes this as a legitimate usage
for descriptive purposes, but he argues that a more fundamental concept of social
structure is needed.
For Giddens, a social structure consists of the rules that individual actors draw
upon in the actions that reproduce social systems. Giddens’ usual phrasing is that
structure consists of ‘rules and resources’. The addition of ‘resources’, however, is
never properly theorized. The part played by resources in social life is, nevertheless,
consistently emphasized by Giddens, and I will show that this is better seen sepa-
rately from the cultural structure of ‘rules’. Rules are the cultural mechanisms

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