Giddens - The Constitution of Sociey Exzerpt
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Giddens, A. (1984): The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration. University of California Press: Berkeley and Los Angeles
“I understand ‘sociology’ [..] to be not a generic discipline to do with the study of human societies as a whole, but that branch of social science which focuses particularly upon the ‘advanced’ or modern societies. Such a disciplinary characterization implies an intellectual division of labour, nothing more.” (S. xvii)
“Much more contentious is a second claim I defend, and elaborate in the book, that the uncovering of generalizations is not the be-all and end-all of social theory. [..] Generalizations tend towards two poles, with a range and variety of possible shadings between them. Some hold because actors themselves know them – in some guise – and apply them in the enactment of what they do. The social scientific observer does not in fact have to ‘discover’ these generalizations, although that observer may give a new discursive form to them. Other generalizations refer to circumstances, or aspects of circumstances, of which agents are ignorant and which effectively ‘act’ on them, independent of whatever the agents may believe they are up to. [..] But the first is just as fundamental to social science as the scond, and each form of generalization is unstable in respect of the other.” (S. xix)
“[T]hose working in social theory, I suggest, should be concerned first and foremost with reworking conceptions of human being and human doing, social reproduction and social transformation.” (S. xx)
“Structuration theory is based on the premise that this [the divide between subject and social object, Anm. L.D.] dualism has to be reconceptualized as a duality – the duality of structure. [..] the structural properties of social systems exist only in so far as forms of social conduct are reproduced chronically across time and space.” (S. xx-xxi)
“Practical consciousness consists of all the things which actors know tacitly about how to ‘go on’ in the contexts of social life without being able to give them direct discursive expression [..], and it has to be distinguished from both consciousness (discursive consciousness) and the unconscious. [..] the repetitiveness of activities which are undertaken in like manner day after day is the material grounding of what I call the recursive nature of social life.” (S. xxiii)
“It is not only individuals who are ‘positioned’ relative to one another; the contexts of social interaction are also.” (S. xxv)
“In structuration theory ‘structure’ is regarded as rules and resources recursively implicated in social reproduction; institutionalized features of social systems have structural properties in the sense that relationships are stabilized across time and space. ‘Structure’ can be conceptualized abstractly as two aspects of rules – normative elements and codes of signification. Resources are also of two kinds: authoritative resources, which derive from the co-ordination of the activity of human agents, and allocative resources, which stem from control of material products or of aspects of the material world. What is especially useful for the guidance of research is the study of, first, the routinized intersections of practices which are the ‘transformation points’ in structural relations and, second, the modes in which institutionalized practices connect social with system integration.” (S. xxxi)
“There are no universal laws in the social sciences, and there will not be any – not, first and foremost, because methods of empirical testing and validation are somehow inadequate but because [..] the causal conditions involved in generalizations about human social conduct are inherently unstable in respect of the very knowledge (or beliefs) that actors have about the circumstances of their own action. The so-called ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’ [..] is a special case of a much more generic phenomenon in the social sciences.” (S. xxxii)
“The point is that reflection on social processes (theories, and observations about them) continually enter into, become disentangled with and re-enter the universe of events that they describe. [..] It is impossible to have a modern sovereign state that does not incorporate a discursively articulated theory of the modern sovereign state.” (S. xxxiii)
“But theories in the social sciences have to be in some part based upon ideas which (although not necessarily discursively formulated by them) are already held by the agents to whom they refer. Once reincorporated within action, their original quality may become lost” (S. xxxiv)
“Human social activities, like some self-reproducing items in nature, are recursive. That is to say, they are not brought into being by social actors but continually recreated by them via the very means whereby they express themselves as actors. In and through their activites agents reproduce the conditions that make these activities possible.” (S. 2)
“Continuity of practices presumes reflexivity, but reflexivity in turn is possible only because of the continuity of practices that makes them distinctively ‘the same’ across space and time.” (S. 3)
Figure 1: “The stratification model of the agent” (S. 5)
“However, acts have unintended consequences; and, as indicated in figure 1, unintended consequences may systematically feed back to be the unacknowledged conditions of further acts.” (S. 8.)
“But from the point of view of the social sciences, it is hard to exaggerate the importance of the unintended consequences of intentional conduct.” (S. 11-12; auch als Kritik am Funktionalismus zu sehen, der irrationalen Aktivitäten durch ihre (unintendierte) Funktion quasi aus der ForscherInnenperspektive heraus ‘Rationalität’ verleiht;)
„[T]hree main research contexts [..] in which the influence of unintended consequences can be analysed. One [..] is in the cumulation of events deriving from an initiating circumstance without which that cumulation would not have been found [entspricht einer reaktiven Sequenz, Anm. L.D.]. [..] A second type [..] is a pattern resulting from a complex of individual activities. [..] As game theorists have convincingly pointed out, the outcome of a series of rational actions, undertaken separately by individual actors, may be irrational for all of them. [..] The third type of context [is] [..] where the interest of the analyst is in the mechanisms of reproduction of institutionalized practices. Here the unintended consequences of action form the acknowledged conditions of further action in a non-reflexive feedback cycle (causal loops).” (S. 13-14)
“[W]e can say that action logically involves power in the sense of transformation capacity. [..] Resources are media through which power is exercised [..] But all forms of dependence offer some resources whereby those who are subordinate can influence the activities of their superiors. This is what I call the dialectic of control in social systems.” (S. 15-16)
“The most deeply embedded structural properties implicated in the reproduction of societal totalities, I call structural principles. Those practices which have the greatest time-space extension within such totalities can be referred to as institutions.” (S. 17, Herv. i. Orig.)
“One of the main propositions of structuration theory is that the rules and resources drawn upon in the production and reproduction of social action are at the same time the means of system reproduction (the duality of structure). [..] Habit is part of routine, and I shall strongly emphasize the importance of routine in social life. ‘Rules’, as I understand them, certainly impinge upon numerous aspects of routine practice, but a routine practice is not as such a rule.” (S. 19)
“The discursive formulation of a rule is already an interpretation of it, and, as I have noted, may in and of itself alter the form of its application.” (S. 23, Herv. i. Orig.)
“’Structure’ refers not only to rules implicated in the production and reproduction of social systems but also to resources” (S. 23)
“The constitution of agents and structures are not two independently given sets of phenomena, a dualism, but represent a duality. According to the notion of the duality of structure, the structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organize. [..] Structure is not to be equated with constraint but is always both constraining and enabling.” (S. 25)
“But human knowledgeability is always bounded. The flow of action continually produces consequences which are unintended by actors, and these unintended consequences also may form unacknowledged conditions of action in a feedback fashion. Human history is created by intentional activities but is not an intended project.” (S. 27)
Figure 1: “Dimensions of the duality of structure” (S. 29, zugehörige Tabelle auf Seite 31)
“However, in the theory of structuration ideology is not a particular ‘type’ of symbolic order or form of discourse. One cannot separate off ‘ideological discourse’ from ‘science’, for example. ‘Ideology’ refers only to those asymmetries of domination which connect signification to the legitimation of sectional interests. [..] Domination depends upon the mobilization of two distinguishable types of resource. Allocative resources refer to capabilities – or, more accurately, to forms of transformative capacity - generating command over objects, goods or material phenomena. Authoritative resources refer to types of transformative capacity generating command over persons or actors. [..] But their ‘materiality’ does not affect the fact that such phenomena become resources, in the manner in which I apply that term here, only when incorporated within processes of structuration.” (S. 33, Herv. L.D.)
“Discursive consciousness means being able to put things into words.” (S. 45)
“the self, however, is not some kind of mini-agency within the agent. It is the sum of those forms of recall whereby the agent reflexively characterizes ‘what’ is at the origin of his or her action. The self is the agent as characterized by the agent. Self, body and memory are therefore intimately related.” (S. 51)
“Rather than concentrating upon what is denied to the infant by social organization, we should be concerned also with how the child benefits from it, and we should give greater consideration to the influence of differentiated types of social organization.” (S. 59)
“The concept of routinization, as grounded in practical consciousness, is vital to the theory of structuration. Routine is integral both to the continuity of the personality of the agent, as he or she moves along the paths of daily activities, and to the institutions of society, which are such only through their continued reproduction. [..] We can probe the psychological nature of the routine by considering the results of situations where the established modes of accustomed daily life are drastically undermined or shattered – by studying what may be called ‘critical situations’.” (S. 60)
“It is of the first importance to emphasize that a theory of routine is not to be equated with a theory of social stability. The concern of structuration theory is with ‘order’ as the transcending of time and space in human social relationships; routinization has a key role in the explication of how this comes about. Routine persists through social change of even the most dramatic type, even if, of course, some aspects of taken-for-granted routines may be compromised.” (S. 87)
“If agents are only players on a stage, hiding their true selves behind the masks they assume for the occasion, the social world would indeed be largely empty of substance. [..] It is precisely because there is generally a deep, although generalized, affective involvement in the routines of daily life that actors (agents) do not ordinarily feel themselves to be actors (players), whatever the terminological similarity between these terms.” (S. 125)
“The point is not that the widespread use of clocks makes for exact divisions of the day; it is that time enters into the calculative application of administrative authority.” (S. 135)
“I do not employ the more familiar terms, ‘micro-‘ and ‘macro-sociological’ study, for two reasons. One is that thes two are not infrequently set off against one another, with the implication that we have to choose between them, regarding one as in some way more fundamental than the other. [..] At any rate, I do not think that there can be any question of either having priority over the other. A second reason why the micro/macro division tends to conjure up unfortunate associations is that, even where there is noe conflict between the two perspectives, an unhappy division of labour tends to come into being between them.” (S. 139)
“Social institutions are not explicable as aggregates of ‘microsituations’, nor fully describable in terms that refer to such situations, if we mean by these circumstances of co-presence. On the other hand, institutionalized patterns of behaviour are deeply implicated in even the most fleeting and limited of ‘microsituations’.” (S. 141)
“The regionalization of class-divided societies, however complicated it may be in detail, is always formed around the connections, of both interdependence and antagonism, between city and countryside.” (S. 143)
“There is an obvious similarity between Foucault’s discussion of disciplinary power and Max Weber’s analysis of modern bureaucracy. To be sure, the focus of their respective writings is different. Weber concentrates on the ‘heartland’ of bureaucracy – the state and its administrative offices. In Foucault’s work, on the other hand, the mechanisms of the state are rarely analysed directly; the state is examined ‘symptomatically’, via seemingly more marginal forms of organization, hospitals, asylums and prisons. However, in each author there is a stress upon the emergence of novel types of administrative power, generated by the concentrated organization of human activities through their precise specification and co-ordination.” (S. 151)
“But Weber is surely right to say that administrative discipline is most effective precisely when other aspects of individuals’ lives are separated out from it.” (S. 154)
“In certain traditions of social theory the concept of society is characteristically linked in a direct way with that of constraint. [..] In rejecting such a view, I shall try to clarify the contention that the structural properties of social systems are both enabling and constraining[.]” (S. 162)
“All societies both are social systems and at the same time are constituted by the intersection of multiple social systems.” (S. 164)
“[S]ocialization fuses constraint and enablement.This is easily demonstrated in the instance of learning a first language. [..] Since any language constrains thought (and action) in the sense that it presumes a range of framed, rule-governed properties, the process of language learning sets certain limits to cognition and activity. But by the very same token the learning of a language greatly expands the cognitive and practical capacities of the individual.” (S. 170)
“But is is not the case that actors create social systems: they reproduce or transform them, remaking what is already made in the continuity of praxis.” (S. 171, Herv. i. Orig.)
“Thus Durkheim remarks: ’The hardness of bronze lies neither in the copper, nor in the tin, nor in the lead which have been used to form it, which are all soft and malleable bodies. The hardness arises from the mixing of them.’ [..] But human actors, as recognizable ‘competent agents’, do not exist in separation from one another as copper, tin and lead do. They do not come together ex nihilo to form a new entity by their fusion or association.” (S. 171, Herv. i. Orig.)
“Of course, ‘society’ is manifestly not external to individual actors in exactly the same sense as the surrounding environment is external to them. The parallel thus turns out to be at best a loose one, and a concern with it rests uneasily in Durkheim’s later work alongside a recognition that the ‘facticity’ of social world is in certain basic respects a very different phenomenon from the ‘giveness’ of nature.” (S. 172)
“Moreover, as I have strongly underlined, power is never merely a constraint but is at the very origin of the capabilities of agents to bring about intended outcomes of action.” (S. 173)
“The more that structural constraint is associated with a natural science model, paradoxically, the freer the agent appears – within whatever scope for individual action is left by the operation of constraint. The structural properties of social systems, in other words, are like the walls of a room from which an individual cannot escape but inside which he or she is able to move around at whim. Structuration theory replaces this view with one which holds that structure is implicated in that very ‘freedom of action’ which is treated as a residual and unexplicated category in the various forms of ‘structural sociology’.” (S. 174)
“Even the threat of death carries not weight unless it is the case that the individual so threatened in some way values life. To say that an individual ‘had no choice but to act in such and such a way’, in a situation of this sort evidently means ‘Given his/her desire not to die, the only alternative open was to act in the way he or she did.’” (S. 175)
“In the case of sanctions there are obviously major asymmetries in the constraint/enablement relation. One person’s constraint is another’s enabling. However, as critiques of zero-sum theories of power have shown, such asymmetries by no means exhaust the scope of the concept of power.” (S. 175-176)
“In each case constraint stems from the ‘objective’ existence of structural properties that the individual agent is unable to change.” (S. 176)
“Causal generalizations in the social sciences always presume a typical ‘mix’ of intended and unintended consequences of action, on the basis of the rationalization of conduct, whether ‘carried’ on the level of discursive or of practical consciousness. Technological change is not something that occurs independently of the uses to which agents put technology, the characteristic modes of innovation, etc. [..] Why is it htat some social forces have an apparently ‘inevitable’ look to them? It is because in such instances there are few options open to actors in question, given that they behave rationally – ‘rationally’ in this case meaning effectively aligning motives with the end-result of whatever conduct is involved.” (S. 178)
“[A]ll explanations will involve at least implicit reference both to the purposive, reasoning behaviour of agents and to its intersection with constraining and enabling features of the social and material contexts of that behaviour.” (S. 179)
“Division of labour within the enterprise is not simply an aspect or extension of the division of labour outside, the ‘division of labour in society’, but these none the less react upon one another.” (S. 190)
Figure 11: A schematic reproduction circuit
“The capitalist state, as a ‘socializing’ centre representing the power of the community at large, is dependent upon mechanisms of production and reproduction which it helps to bring into being but which are set off from and antagonistic to it.” (S. 197; Fraglich bleibt Giddens Begriffsverständnis von „Widerspruch“ insbesondere im Verhältnis zum Begriff des “Dilemmas”, Anm.)
„I shall distinguish two main types of collectivity according to the form of the relations that enter into their reproduction. I shall call these associations and organizations, and I shall separate them from social movements.” (S. 199, Herv. i. Orig.)
“None the less, the introduction of writing means that tradition becomes visible as ‘tradition’, a specific way, among others, of doing things. ‘Tradition’ which is known as such is no longer a time-honoured basis of custom but a discursive phenomenon open to interrogation.” (S. 201; vgl. Ähnlichkeit mit dem regelverändernden Konsequenzen der Formalisierung informeller Regeln, Anm.)
„Tere is no shortage of generalizations in the social sciences, although they do not have the same logical form as universal laws in natural science.“ (S. 215)
“Every research investigation in the social sciences or history is involved in relating action to structure, in tracing, explicitly or otherwise, the conjunction or disjunctions of intended and unintended consequences of activity and how these affect the fate of individuals.” (S. 219)
“The methodological individualists are wrong in so far as they claim that social categories can be reduced to descriptions in terms of individual predicates. But they are right to suspect that ‘structural sociology’ blots out, or at least radically underestimates, the knowledgeability of human agents, and they are right to insist that ‘social forces’ are always nothing more and nothing less than mixes of intended or unintended consequences of action undertaken in specifiable contexts.” (S. 220)
“A ruther question raised by the debate over methodological individualism is: are collectivities actors? [..] Action descriptions [..] should not be confused with the designation of agency as such. [..] but only individuals, beings which have a corporal existence, are agents. If collectivities or groups are not agents, why do we sometimes speak as though they were [..]? We tend to do so when there is a significant degree of reflexive monitoring of the conditions of social reproduction, of the sort associated especially with organizations, although not exclusive to them. [..] Decisions that are taken by governments or other organizations may not represent the desired outcome of all, or the most desired outcome of any, of those who participate in making them. In such circumstances it makes sense to say that participants ‘decide’ (individually) ‘to decide’ (corporately) upon a given course of action.” (S. 220-221)
“For ‘evolutionary theory’ in the social sciences to have a distinctive meaning, I shall say, it should show the following characteristics. [..] First, there must be at least some presumed conceptual continuity with biological evolution. [..] Second, social evolutionism must specify something more than just a progression of change in respect of certain designated criteria, that something being a mechanism of change. [..] There is no difficulty, either, in sustaining the claim that certain technical developments, or forms of social organization, are prerequisites to others. ‘Evolution in this sense is uncontentious as a concept. But to use ‘evolution’ in this way is not to explain anything about social change and does not meet the criterion of having a reasonably close affinity to biological evolution. Third, a sequence of stages of social development must be specified, in which the mechanism of change is linked to the displacement of certain types or aspects of social organization by others. [..] As I shall emphasize below, evolutionary theories are highly prone to merge ‘progression’ with ‘progress’ because of ethnocentric assumptions which, while probably not logically implied in evolutionism, are very difficult in practice to avoid. Fourth, identifying a mechanism of social change means explaining change in some way which applies across the whole spectrum of human history, not as an exclusive mechanism of change but as the dominant one. There is no doubt about the prime candidate here, since it figures somewhere in virtually all evolutionary theories, however much they may differ in other respects. This is ‘adaptation’ – usually meaning adaptation to the material environment. [..] It makes sense, therefore, to hold that if in the explication of social change the concept of adaptation turns out to be without value (as I shall claim), evolutionsm is stripped of much of its appeal.” (S. 231-233)
“It is little value indeed to claim that those societies or types of society which have survived for a given period of time, because they survived, must have survived. But that is exactly what explanations which involve ‘adaptation frequently amount to. Thus it is common to propose that the survival of a social item can be explained in terms of its superior adaptive capacity. But how is adaptive capacity understood? (..) where ‘adaptation’ is understood in a more limited way, however, proffered explanations tend to be equally defective, empbodying versions of functionalism.” (S. 235)
“Getting to know what goes on ‘in’ history becomes not only an inherent part of what ‘history’ is but also means of transforming ‘history’. [..] ‘Societies’ simply do not have the degree of ‘closure’ that species do. [..] Human history is not, to use Gellner’s term, a ‘world-growth story’” (S. 237)
“The modern world is born out of discontinuity with what went before rather than continuity with it. [..] Let me conclude by briefly listing four dangers which evolutionary thought courts – dangers which are best avoided by breaking with it in a radical way. [..] The first danger, unilineal compression, means the tendency of evolutionary thinkers to compress general into specific evolution. [..] By homological compression, the second danger, I refer to the tendency of some writers to imagine that there is a homology between the stages of social evolution and the development of the individual personality. [..] By the tendency of evolution theory to normative illusion, the third danger, I mean the inclination to identify superior power, economic, political or military, with moral superiority on an evolutionary scale. [..] Finally, by temporal distortion, the fourth danger, I mean the proclivity of evolutionary thinkers to presume that ‘history’ can be written only as social change, that the elapsing of time is the same thing as change, the confusion of ‘history’ with ‘historicity’” (S. 239-242)
“In explaining social change no single and sovereign mechanism can be specified; there are no keys that will unlock the mysteries of human social development, reducing them to a unitary formula, or that will account for the major transitions between societal types in such way either.” (S. 243)
“All social life is episodic, and I intend the notion of episode, like most of the concepts of structuration theory, to apply to the whole range of social activity. [..] To treat the formation fo a state as an episode means analytically cutting into ‘history’, that is, identifying certain elements as marking the opening of a sequence of change and tracing though that sequence as a process of institutional transmutation.” (S. 244)
“If all social life is contingent, all social change is conjunctural. That is to say, it depends upon conjunctions of circumstances and events that may differ in nature according to variations of context, where context (as always) involves the reflexive monitoring by the agents involved of the conditions in which they ‘make history’.” (S. 245)
“One idea that is relevant here, which I have outlined in some detail in other sources, is that there may be ‘critical thresholds’ of change characteristic of transitions between overall societal types. A set of relatively rapid changes may generate a long-term momentum of development [..]. ‘Momentum’ refers to the rapidity with which change occurs in relation to specific forms of episodic characterization, while ‘trajectory’ concerns the direction of change” (S. 246)
“In speaking of the influence of ‘world time’, I do not mean the arranging of events or happenings in a calendar of world history. I mean two things [..]. Each concerns factors limiting generalizations that might be made about types of episode. One refers to conjunctures, the other to the influence of human knowledgeability on social change. By ‘conjunctures’ I mean the interaction of influences which, in a particular time and place, have relevance to a given episode [..]. The conjuncture of circumstances in which one process of development occurs may be quite different from that of another, even if their ‘outcomes’ – e.g. the consolidation of a similar type of state apparatus – are similar. In order to understand how this may come about, it is essential to consider human reflexivity.” (S. 251)
“Power is not necessarily linked with conflict in the sense of either division of interest or active struggle, and power is not inherently oppressive. [..] Power is the capacity to achieve outcomes; whether or not these are connected to purely sectional interests is not germane to its definition. Power is no, as such, an obstacle to freedom or emancipation but is their very medium – although it would be foolish, of course, to ignore its constraining properties.” (S. 257)
“A primary concern must be the issue of how power is generated. [..] Power, I have described in the opening chapter, is generated in and through the reproduction of structures of domination. The resources which constitute structures of domination are of two sorts – allocative and authoritative.” (S. 258; vgl. Auch die Tabelle zu den beiden Ressourcentypen auf derselben Seite.)
„Moreover, the guiding mechanism of evolution that Parsons ties to the increasing adaptive capacity of his evolutionary universals – the cybernetic control yielded by constitutional symbolism – is surely quite unconvincing. Parsons evidently establishes this approach in conscious opposition to historical materialsm [..]. But it is no more plausible than are the theories he opposes. Once more an argument by analogy seems to be confused with the production of evidence.” (S. 271)
“I shall summarize these as a number of points; taken together, they represent the aspects of structuration theory which impinge most generally upon problems of empirical research in social sciences. (1) All human beings are knowledgeable agents. That is to say, all actors know a great deal about the conditions and consequences of what they do in their day-to-day lives. [..] (2) The knowledgeability of human actors is always bounded on the one hand by the unconscious and on the other by unacknowledged conditions/unintended consequences of action. [..] (3) The study of day-to-day life is integral to analysis of the reproduction of institutionalized practices. [..] (4) Routine, psychologically linked to the minimizing of unconscious sources of anxiety, is the predominant form of day-to-day social activity. Most daily practices are not directly motivated. Routinized practices are the prime expression of the duality of structure in respect of the continuity of social life. [..] (5) The study of context, or of the contextualities of interaction, is inherent in the investigation of social reproduction. [..] (6) Social identities, and the position-practice relations associated with them, are ‘markers’ in the virtual time-space of structure. They are associated with normative rights, obligations and sanctions which, within specific collectivities, form roles. [..] (7) No unitary meaning can be given to ‘constraint’ in social analysis. [..] (8) Among the structural properties of social systems, structural principles are particularly important, since they specify overall types of society. [..] (9) The study of power cannot be regarded as a second-order consideration in the social sciences. [..] (10) There is no mechanism of social organization or social reproduction identified by social analysts which lay actors cannot also get to know about and actively incorporate into what they do.” (S. 281-284)
“Social life may very often be predictable in its course, as such authors are prone to emphasize. But its predictability is in many of its aspects ‘made to happen’ by social actors; it does not happen in spite of the reasons they have for their conduct. If the study of unintended consequences and unacknowledged conditions or action is a major part of social research, we should none the less stress that such consequences and conditions are always to be interpreted within the flow of intentional conduct.” (S. 285)
“My aim is to analyse what follows from the basic claim underlying all social research – that the researcher communicates new knowledge previously unavailable (in some sense or other) to the members of a social community or society.” (S. 288)
“The analysis of strategic conduct means giving primacy to discursive and practical consciousness, and to strategies of control within defined contextual boundaries. Institutionalized properties of the settings of interaction are assumed methodologically to be ‘given’.” (S. 288)
“Willis’s study is unusual, compared with a great deal of social research, because he stresses that ‘social forces’ operate through agents’ reasons and because his examination of social reproduction makes no appeal to all to functionalist concepts.” (S. 293)
“Structural constraints [..] always operate via agents’ motives and reasons, establishing (often in diffuse and convoluted ways) conditions and consequences affecting options open to others, and what they want from whatever options they have.” (S. 310)
“But ‘comparative research’ must be what the term says. That is to say, we have to recognize that ‘typical’ processes of development can be assessed only by direct comparison between different societies, not by assuming that any one society can be treated as a model of an endogenous development process.” (S. 323)
“The conditions which originally gave rise to the City’s dominance over industry were not the same as those which allowed that position lager to be sustained.” (S. 326; vgl. Im Fall Microsoft: entscheidend ist nicht der Weg des Aufstiegs zum Monopol, sondern das Verhalten als Monopolist)
„Only for ethnomethodology ist he analysis of practical consciousness a circumscribed ‚field’ of study. For all other types of research the interpretation of practical consciousness is a necessary element, implicitly understood or explicitly stated, of broader features of social conduct.” (S. 328)
“What is ‘unintended’ and ‘unacknowledged’, in any context or range of contexts of action, is usually by no means a simple matter to discover.” (S. 329)
“Now, I do not doubt at all the importance both of the self-fulfilling prophecy and of a range of phenomena linked to it. But it is not the prototype of the ‘facticity’ of structural properties contained in the duality of structure. The point is a more subtle and more profound one, linking the very possibility of the mutual intelligibility and coherence of situated interaction to ‘facticity’ on a broadly based institutional level.” (S. 331)
“’Acceptance-as-real’ embodied in concrete modes of procedure plainly does not mean the same thing as discursively according legitimation to the system, although of course it by no means precludes it either.” (S. 332)
“But both the collection and interpretation of quantitative material depends upon procedures methodologically identical to the gathering of data of a more intensive, ‘qualitative’ sort.” (S. 333)
“All social actors, it can properly be said, are social theorists, who alter their theories in the light of their experiences and are receptive to incoming information which they may acquire in doing so.” (S. 334)
“The distinction is largely an analytical one; that is to say, common sense is mutual knowledge treated not as knowledge but as fallible belief.” (S. 337)
“It presumes, and I presume, that it is possible to demonstrate that some belief claims are false, while others are true, although what ‘demonstrate’ means here would need to be examined as closely as would ’false’ and ‘true’. It presumes, and I presume, that internal critique – the critical examinations to which social scientists submit their ideas and findings – is inherent in what social science is as a collective endeavour. [..] Criticizing a belief means (logically) criticizing whatever activity or practice is carried on in terms of that belief, and hast compelling force (motivationally) in so far as it is a reason for action. [..] Now social beliefs, unlike those to do with nature, are constitutive elements of what it is they are about. From this it follows that criticism of false belief (ceteris paribus) is a practical intervention in society, a political phenomenon in a broad sense of that term.” (S. 340; Herv. i. Orig.)
