The problem of structure and agency has rightly come to be seen as the basic issue in modern social theory. However, in acquiring this centrality it has completely overshadowed the problem of culture and agency. The main thesis of this book is that in fact the two problems do directly parallel one another: they raise identical difficulties and the method by which these can be resolved turns out to be exactly the same.

Nevertheless the structural and cultural domains are substantively very different, as well as being relatively autonomous from one another. These two considerations have crucial bearings on my main thesis. The first consideration means that the concepts used have both to respect and to capture the substantive differences between structures and culture; otherwise these would simply be clamped together in a conceptual vice, doing violence to our subject matter by eliding the material and the ideational aspects of social life. The second means that theories developed about the relationship between structures and social agents and between cultures and cultural actors have to recognize the relative autonomy of structure and culture. Otherwise we would be violating our ability to understand social life as the interplay between interests and ideas. In short, if these considerations are not acknowledged, then we would not be dealing with two parallel problems but simply collapsing the one into the other.

The problem of structure and agency is now a familiar phrase used to denote central dilemmas in social theory – especially the rival claims of Voluntarism versus Determinism, Subjectivism versus Objectivism, and the micro- versus the macroscopic in sociology.