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An alternative way of tackling this dilemma was developed by Anthony Giddens. Unlike Elias, Giddens (1984: vii) does not reject philosophy, arguing that sociology must be ‘alive’ to philosophical problems: ‘The social sciences are lost if they are not directly related to philosophical problems by those who practise them.’ Debates in philosophy can contribute to our understanding of social life and should not be ignored. However, Giddens also adopts a central focus on the structuring activity of individual actions, which bears some similarity to Elias’s interest in social processes.

Giddens’s approach begins from the recognition that people actively make and remake social structure during the course of their everyday activities. For instance, the fact that I use the monetary system contributes in a minor, yet essential way to the very existence of that system. If everyone, or even a majority of people, at some point decided not to use money, the ‘thing-like’ monetary system would collapse. A useful concept for analysing such processes is structuration (Giddens 1984). Structuration theory holds that ‘structure’ and ‘action’ are necessarily related to each other and are not opposites. Societies, communities and groups have ‘structure’ only insofar as people behave in regular and fairly predictable ways. On the other hand, ‘action’ is only possible because each individual possesses an enormous amount of socially structured knowledge which pre-exists them as individuals.

Take the example of language. To exist at all, language must be structured – that is, it must have properties which every speaker must observe. What someone says in any given context would not make sense unless it followed certain grammatical rules. Yet the structural qualities of language exist only insofar as individual language users actually follow those rules in practice. We can say that language, as with other social institutions, is constantly in the process of structuration.

Interactionists are quite right to suggest that human agents are highly knowledgeable actors. Social life demands that we follow complex sets of conventions, such as the rituals strangers observe when passing by or meeting in the street. On the other hand, as we apply that knowledge to our own actions, we give force and content to those rules and conventions on which we draw. Structuration always presumes this ‘duality of structure’ in which all social action presumes the existence of structure. But, at the same time, structure presumes action because it depends on regularities of human behaviour.

This resolution to the structure–agency problem has its critics. One issue is the relative weight afforded to structure and agency in particular settings. Despite the laudable attempt to bridge the divide, Giddens’s structuration theory does seem to put heavy emphasis on the structuring power of actors in shaping social life. Even though social structures are seen as effective, structuration theory still views human agency as capable of changing and reshaping them, however powerful or long established they may be. But the extent to which this is true cannot be decided in advance of empirical research into concrete cases.

Margaret Archer (1995, 2003) is sympathetic to structuration theory but sees Giddens’s theoretical discussion as overly descriptive. It is not enough simply to note that structure and agency are co-constitutive (that one implies the other). Sociological explanations need to establish whether structure or agency is the cause of social phenomena in particular cases. The continuous interplay of structure and agency that Giddens rightly identifies has a definite chronological sequence: existing social structure → individual actions → modified social structure, and so on. In tracing this continuous sequence in specific studies, it should be possible to discover whether structure or agency is more effective.

It seems unlikely that the structure–agency problem will ever be resolved to the satisfaction of all sociologists, especially as various perspectives and theories lie closer to one side or the other of the dilemma. Individual sociologists also lean towards structure or agency perspectives depending on their own social backgrounds and life experiences. Nonetheless, the two approaches discussed above are evidence of a desire to take some of the heat out of this longstanding problem.