1: How Is Social Structure Possible?

For much of its history, social structure has been seen as a defining concept for sociology as a discipline, and until the late twentieth century many regarded Talcott Parsons as its principal theorist. Parsons's major work, The Structure of Social Action (Parsons, 1937), argued that social structure must be seen in relation to the companion concept of social action. Parsons held that the ideas of the leading classical theorists could be synthesised into a compelling theory of the structures that sustain social life. Max Weber's view of social action and Emile Durkheim's view of social structure, in particular, he saw as providing the foundations for a powerful social theory. It was on these foundations that Parsons built his influential structural–functional and system theory. Even his critics were agreed, for the most part, that the ideas of Weber and Durkheim – perhaps with the addition of those of Karl Marx – provided an appropriate way to conceptualise social structure as the product of and condition for social action. Action and structure, then, were widely regarded as complementary elements in the sociological imagination, seen as forming, respectively, the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ aspects of social life. This point of view was the ‘orthodox consensus’ of mainstream sociology in the 1950s and 1960s (Atkinson, 1971, Ch. 7; Giddens, 1979).