This book offers a solution to the problem of structure and agency: a new solution, but one that draws on a number of existing traditions of thought, most significantly philosophical theories of emergence and causality, and the sociological debates around structuration theory. This introductory chapter sets the context by explaining the problem of structure and agency and its significance for sociology, and outlines some of the key points of my argument. It also offers the reader some hints on different ways to read the rest of the book and briefly locates it with respect to critical realism, the main philosophical tradition on which I draw.

The problem of structure and agency

Sociology is founded on the belief that our behaviour is causally influenced and in particular that there are social factors that influence our behaviour. Karl Marx, for example, famously wrote ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness’ (Marx 1978 [1859]: 4). Émile Durkheim, similarly, argued that ‘the individual is dominated by a moral reality greater than himself: namely, collective reality’ (Durkheim 1952 [1897]: 38). Conventionally, the social factors that are held to influence our behaviour are known as social structure, a concept that even today remains implicit in, and indeed essential to, much of the work done in the social sciences.

Yet there is also widespread disagreement about what social structure really is and how it could affect us.