Page 99 - Cultural Theory

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••• John Scott •••

through which actions and social systems are organized. While the patterns found in
social actions and social systems reflect these ‘structures’, patterns and structures are
not the same things. Structures are quite distinct from the properties of the action
processes and social systems themselves, though they are ‘instantiated’ in them.
Such structures are not directly observable or amenable to conscious experience:
they exist ‘virtually’ in the observable patterns, but they are not reducible to these
(Giddens, 1976b: 127; 1981: 26). They exist only in the traces that their use leaves
behind in the properties of social systems and the memories of individuals. Patterned
flows of action, codified norms and laws, measurable rates of activity, recurrent sets
of relationships, and so on, must be recognized as the observable, external manifes-
tations that serve simply as indicators of the structures that actually organize social
life. The rules that comprise social structures are the key objects of sociological inves-
tigation. They are the means through which social actions and social systems are able
to exist; they make social life possible.
This distinction between unobservable structures and the observable patterns they
produce is something that Giddens developed from his reading of structuralist the-
ory. With the structuralists, he turned to Saussure’s account of language (De Saussure,
1916) as a basis for understanding all other social phenomena. According to
Saussure, the speech patterns found in everyday talk and conversation result from
the application of definite rules of grammar (rules of syntax, semantics, phonology,
etc.). These rules do not exist anywhere separately from the speech, but they can be
identified and formulated by linguists as ways of explaining that speech. Competent
speakers of English, for example, are able to form plural expressions in real time by
adding appropriate endings to root words and making certain other regular changes
to them. Linguists, for their part, can formulate the rules that govern this: when to
add ‘s’, when to add ‘en’, and so on. These linguistic rules, however, are not present
in the consciousness of the individual speakers as they speak, and individual speak-
ers may be completely unaware of the rules that they follow unreflectively.
Nevertheless, it is because the members of a linguistic community share these rules
that it is possible for them to speak and to understand the speech of others.
Giddens follows the structuralists in extending this account of speech to all forms
of social action. The flow of actions is governed by definite rules, of which the actors
may be unaware, and the task of sociological analysis is to uncover the non-
linguistic rules that make action possible. The sociologist, like the linguist, produces
a theoretical model with explicitly formulated rules, and this must be seen as an
intellectual formulation of the actual rules that operate, generally without any con-
scious awareness, in and through the actions of individuals. Actual rules, Giddens
holds, are generalizable procedures of action. They are akin to formulas in that they
allow actors to show ‘the methodological continuation of an established sequence’
(Giddens, 1984: 21), but they exist as capacities, abilities, and dispositions rather
than as conscious and explicit statements.
Giddens argues that actors may not consciously know the rules that inform their
actions, but that they always know them tacitly in the same way that individuals
know the rules of grammar: they know how to continue speaking and acting, even if
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