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All of the major figures (and most of the minor ones) in the history of sociological thought have understood individuals and society to be intertwined and inextricably fused. Indeed, this is perhaps the founding assumption of sociological thought itself. (Layder, 1994, p. 207)

Framed as the ‘agency–structure’ or ‘self–society’ relationship, the in­ter­action between the individual and the social world at large is of central sociological concern. On the one hand, society is self-evidently something created by human beings. Just as there can be no language without those who speak it, there can be no society without the individual agents upon whose actions its existence depends. On the other hand, who we are as human beings is quite clearly influenced by societal dynamics which transcend our immediate consciousness and escape our absolute control. Just as the language we learn structures the very thoughts and words of which we are capable, so too do social processes influence the very persons we are and, indeed, are capable of becoming. While society is produced by human agency, human beings, as social selves, are the products of societal structures and dynamics.

Although it may strike us today as self-evident that society, its structures and institutions are produced by human agency, this insight (itself made available by sociology) has not always been present. Holding that the social order was grounded in a divinely created order (ordo Dei) or a biologically determined natural order (ordo naturalis), pre-modern thought regarded society and its institutions as fixed entities whose membership and hierarchical ordering reflect unchanging principles and immutable laws. As Pope Pius X put it in 1903: ‘It is in conformity with the order established by God in human society that there should be princes and subjects, employers and proletariat, rich and poor, instructed and ignorant’ (Houtart and Rousseau, 1971, p. 354). The kind of logic which informed Pope Pius X had implications for the whole of society and its institutions. By divine intent or biological determination, for example, the Western family was regarded as an institution given by nature, to be headed by a male and formed through the monogamous union of two heterosexuals for the purpose of procreation.

The perception of society and its institutions as pre-determined and thereby fixed structures originating beyond the generative processes of human agency is a form of ‘reification’ (Giddens, 1979, p. 195). Literally meaning ‘making a concrete thing (res) out of something abstract’, the act of reification affords the social world an unchangeable existence independent from the everyday activities of its inhabitants. As Berger and Luckmann maintain:

The reified world is, by definition, a dehumanized world. It is experienced by man as a strange facticity, an opus alienum over which he has no control rather than as the opus proprium of his own productive activity . . . Man, the producer of a world, is apprehended as its product, and h­uman activity as an epiphenomenon of non-human processes. (1966, pp. 106–7)

The word ‘epiphenomenon’ used by Berger and Luckmann refers to something being dependent upon something else for its existence and which has no influence upon that from which it derives. By denoting human beings as dependent and lacking influence upon society, reification undercuts the role of human agency as both giving rise to and continuing to sustain the social world and its structures.

By observing, charting and reflecting upon the myriad social interactions which make up the day-to-day experience of human beings, sociology furnishes an understanding of how everyday human agency both sustains and modifies the institutions and structures within which we live. While engaging how agency sustains and modifies structure, some social theorists also reflect upon why institutions and structures are such a fundamental part of human existence. Drawing upon other disciplines (such as psychology), the ‘why’ question is often answered by showing how the stability, safety and predictability which institutions afford human beings address deep-seated needs for security and order (Archer, 2008; Giddens, 1984). Together, sociological insights upon how and why human agency originates and sustains the institutions and structures which populate society shows the individual to be far more than ‘a passive entity, determined by external influences’. Rather, emphasis upon the constitutive character of agency underscores the fact that everyday micro-social interactions ‘contribute to and directly promote social influences that are global in their consequences and implications’ (Giddens, 1991, p. 2).

At the same time, just as the act of reification offers a one-sided reading of actual causal processes, so too does the assertion that society is the simple product of everyday human agency. As Craib notes, if ‘we start with social action and see systems as the straightforward product of such action, then we cannot . . . comprehend the very real constraints the social structures and systems place on us’ (1992, p. 121). While societal processes and social institutions are, indeed, the unintended by-products of everyday human activity, their ability to structure this everyday activity in ways which both transcend immediate awareness and escape precise control affords them a powerful causal efficacy. Although the understanding of society as artefact (something made by us) is one of sociology’s most insightful contributions to modern thought, many would agree with Bauman that:

it was the incessant effort to solve the puzzle of purposeful action of knowledgeable actors producing ‘unintended consequences’, or of the evident incapacity of ‘free-actors’ to exercise their freedom in the course of end-orientated action, or of the stubborn tendency of the multitude of individual actions to sediment into a reality independent of these actions and in its turn making the action dependent on itself which, for all intents and purposes, constituted the history of sociology. (1989, p. 36)

Certainly, the role of agency in generating and sustaining social structures has, by rights, an important place within social theory. However, the ‘examination and interpretation of specific compelling forces to which people are exposed in their particular empirically observable societies and groups’ has proved a theoretical mainstay of the sociological tradition (Elias, 1978, p. 18).