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A consistent tension in sociological theory lies between two fundamental visions of how social life unfolds. On the one hand, we have “structural” points of view that emphasize the role of durable social practices, resources, norms, and institutions that shape how people behave. The classical roots for this perspective are obvious in Marx (historical materialism; see Vol. 1, Part III) and Durkheim (social facts; see Vol. 1, Part IV)). On the other hand, much social theorizing is about what people do and how their actions matter. This agentic approach is similarly rooted in classical thought (consider Weber’s work on social action, Vol. 1, Part V) and, in its purposive-action variant, forms the core axiom of contemporary micro-economic theory. Known colloquially as the “structure/agency” problem, the tension turns on how we account for both sides of a process that, at some degree, we know must be both true and incomplete. That is, it is obvious that people are agentic in some domains and to some degree locally making choices that affect their life and life chances and collectively acting (or not) to affect wider social and political features. The apparent reality of consequential choices is evident in the many biographies detailing people’s lives and historical accounts of pivotal events – actors experience their lives through an agentic lens. However, at the same time, durable inequalities deeply rooted in race, class, and gender, and other long-lasting cultural patterns persist, often despite concerted efforts to change them, and the best predictor of most outcomes in social life is the accident of where people are born.

The conundrum is not merely a question of empirical scope; rather, it is a question of theoretical incompleteness and internal consistency. A clear and consistent theory at either pole is generally incapable of accounting for core observations from the other pole. For example, a model built on well-internalized norms leaves people making pseudo-choices and living only seemingly agentic lives, as the institutionalized norms and practices are so deeply rooted in people’s (collective) memory that they cannot meaningfully make other choices. Theoretical consistency is not easier on the agentic side, as the implications of choice-sets for action quickly compound beyond what actors could possibly know, gutting any meaningful notion of agency or reverting to a “revealed-preference” accounting that is true by default and unfalsifiable (see Leifer, 1988).

This problem is well recognized by contemporary social theorists and has been the subject of extensive theoretical effort aimed at solving the problem at the intersection while retaining the power of structural and agentic accounts, respectively. The roots of these contemporary debates lie in social exchange and social dilemma problems, such as the free-rider problem (see Vol. 1, Part IX) with the works of Blau and Homans being key touchstones and much of Parsons’ work aimed to solve a similar set of problems from a structural point of view. Contemporary work has layered in an interpretive problem that we need to understand what actors are doing from their own points of view, which breaks the traditional simplifying rationality assumption while maintaining agency. Each of our single-author sections later in this volume (Bourdieu, Foucault and Habermas) deals directly with these questions.

In this section, we provide four theorists who each point to characteristic strategies for solving the structure/agency problem, arranged here thematically starting with clear-action models and moving on to more structure-centric models. We start with Michael Hechter’s work from Principles of Group Solidarity (1987); Hechter has been at the forefront of building rational-choice models in the study of social/collective solidarity. This work highlights the core challenges to individualistic accounts for collective outcomes. Similarly, James S. Coleman in Foundations of Social Theory (1990) uses a disaggregation strategy, relying on a traditional rational-action approach at the actor level while recasting the structure problem as one largely of context on the input side and complex aggregation on the output side. Perhaps not surprisingly, a tempting solution is to understand structure as an emergent property of social interaction through social networks. Harrison White developed a model of normative structures embodied in roles and norms as the tractable implication of consistent social relations. Here, we reproduce an underground-circulated set of Harrison White’s class notes (“Catnets”) as an exemplar of a general contemporary approach rooted in observed social networks. Finally, in New Rules of Sociological Method (1976), Anthony Giddens highlights the difficulty of integrating structural constraint with an actively interpretive agent’s understanding, laying the groundwork for his own recursive structuration approach.