Abstract
In this discussion I shall seek to draw some connections between certain aspects of the theory of structuration and the analysis of class structure in capitalist societies. The theory of structuration is based upon the following claims: that social theory (which I take to be relevant equally to each of the social scientific disciplines: sociology, anthropology, psychology and economics, as well as history) should incorporate an understanding of human behaviour as action; that such an understanding has to be made compatible with a focus upon the structural components of social institutions or societies; and that notions of power and domination are logically, not just contingently, associated with the concepts of action and structure as I conceptualise them.1 I shall not be concerned to substantiate these claims, but shall attempt rather to trace out a few of their implications for issues that I take to be important to class analysis.
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References
See New Rules of Sociological Method (London: Hutchinson, 1976); Studies in Social and Political Theory (London: Hutchinson, 1977); Central Problems in Social Theory (London: Macmillan, 1979).
Central Problems in Social Theory, pp. 145 ff.
See New Rules of Sociological Method.
Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974).
Max Weber, Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) vol. 1, p.223.
Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1949).
Wolfgang Mommsen, The Age of Bureaucracy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974).
Cf. Arthur Mitzman, The Iron Cage. (New York: Grosset & Dunlop, 1971).
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (New York: Free Press, 1968).
Peter M. Blau, The Dynamics of Bureaucracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967); see also the important discussion in
Martin Albrow, Bureaucracy (London: Pall Mall, 1970).
Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon (London: Tavistock, 1964).
Central Problems in Social Theory, pp. 147 ff.
Cf. Reinhard Bendix, Work and Authority in Industry (New York: Harper, 1963).
Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital, p.27.
See Russell Jacoby’s review of Labour and Monopoly Capital, in Telos, no. 29, 1976; and Gavin Mackenzie, ‘The political economy of the American working class’, British Journal of Sociology, vol. 28, 1977.
The Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1973) p. 111.
Cf. Bryan Palmer, ‘Class, conception and conflict: the thrust for efficiency, managerial views of labour and working class rebellion, 1903–22’, Review of Radical Political Economy, vol. 7, 1975;
H. G. J. Aitken, Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960);
Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), and ‘Marx, Braverman, and the logic of capital’, Insurgent Sociologist, Winter 1978–9.
Andrew L. Friedman, Industry and Labour (London: Macmillan, 1977).
Cf. Michael Buraway, The Manufacture of Consent (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
Friedman, Industry and Labour, p.7.
C.B. Macpherson, The Real World of Democracy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966).
For a critique of functionalism, in the light of the conception of structuration, see ‘Functionalism: après la lutte’, in my Studies in Social and Political Theory.
Wolfgang Müller and Christel Neusüss, ‘The “welfare-state illusion” and the contradiction between wage-labour and capital’, in John Holloway and Sol Piciotto (eds), State and Capital: a Marxist Debate (London: Arnold, 1978) p.34.
For the elements of such analysis, see my A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (London: Macmillan, 1981).
T. B. Bottomore, Karl Marx: Early Writings (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) p.125.
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© 1982 Anthony Giddens
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Giddens, A. (1982). Power, the Dialectic of Control and Class Structuration. In: Profiles and Critiques in Social Theory. Contemporary Social Theory. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86056-2_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-86056-2_14
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