Image: first organizational chart (link) One mark of modernity is the fact that we swim in a sea of structures -- states, markets, militaries, employment systems, social networks, taxation systems, and systems of racial and gender disadvantage, to name several. In place of a perhaps mythical pre-modern society in which social life was mediated by …
The mode of production as society’s structure
Figure: Althusser's conception of the CMP (RP Resch, Althusser and the Renewal of Marxist Social Theory) Sociologists study social structure and the effects that structures have on individual behavior and life outcomes. But what do they have in mind when they refer to "structure"? It turns out that there are important ambiguities in the idea of …
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Giddens on agents and structures
Anthony Giddens is one of the theorists whose ideas are most often invoked when the idea of social-structural explanation is in play. His 1979 collection of essays, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and Contradiction in Social Analysis, is a classic statement of some of his views. Here is how he frames his core concern …
Small cities
A recent post on the suburbs closed with the observation that there is an important "other" social space in the United States beyond the categories of urban, rural, and suburban. These are the small cities throughout the United States where a significant number of people come to maturity and develop their families and careers. I …
Making structures
John Levi Martin's Social Structures (2009) takes an innovative approach to the question, "where do structures come from?" His approach is aggregative: he wants to see how institutions and structures accrete from features of individual relationships. (Here is an earlier post on Aggregation Dynamics.) He writes in the Preface: More generally, the structures we see around us -- up …
University as a causal structure
An earlier post laid out a case for a modest social holism, in the form of a set of arguments for the idea that there are social forces and causal powers that are relatively autonomous from the features of the individuals who constitute them (link). These ideas parallel some of those offered by Dave Elder-Vass …
Structures and structuration
Several recent posts have focused on new thinking about how to characterize "agency". Much of that thinking is aimed at dissolving the distinction between agency and structure. So what remains to be said about "structure"? Has the structure side of the debate developed much in the past decade or so? One of the important exponents …
Persistent racial inequalities in America
Historian Thomas Sugrue is a national expert on the state of persistent racial inequalities in our nation today. His The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit set the standard for the field of recent urban history when it appeared in 1996. His most recent book, Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden …
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Spatial patterns in the US
Here are four interesting graphics representing different kinds of activity in the United States. The top panel represents population concentrations across the United State. The second image is air traffic across the country, and the third image is internet traffic across the country. The final image is a photograph of the United States from space …
Is a rail network a social structure?
figures: RER map of Paris; E. J. Marey's graphical representation of Paris-Lyon train schedules, 1885 What role does a rail network play within an adequate ontology of society? Is a rail system primarily a set of physical assets, a set of administrative procedures, or a set of embodied opportunities and constraints for other members of …
Understanding Society 