Action, structure and emergency in the sociological theory

Abstract

The distinction action/structure is immanent to the development of sociology. Its high level of abstraction, its ability to offer an ordered conception of the social, and its correlation with the actor's internal perspective, have allowed it to remain a key feature of the architecture of sociological theory from its very beginning. The aim of this article is to revise how it reacts to the increasing use of another concept which progressively becomes a transversal programme in contemporary sociology: the concept of emergence. This implies the comprehension of action and structure as levels of the social containing autonomous and mutually irreducible properties related to each other through irritations in differentiated temporal sequences. James Coleman, Talcott Parsons, Margaret Archer and Niklas Luhmann are the reviewed authors. The underlying hypothesis is that the theoretical constructions based on the concept of emergence are better positioned to apprehend the complexity of modern society than those understanding the relationship between action and structure in a reductionistic manner.