Giddens structuration theory pdf

In this way, the spirit of a technology constrains and enables normative behaviors and interactions legitimation. AST consists of six propositions that explicate relations between structural features, spirit, other sources of structure, appropriation of structures, decision processes, decision outcomes, and resulting structure. However, the authors point out that AST can be applied to any type of advanced information technology as long as the analysis includes analyzing structural features, spirit of the technology, social interactions using the technology, and outcomes of those interactions.

Researchers across disciplines have used AST to study computer mediated training and learning, the role of technology in organizational mergers, and technology mediated group processes within organizations. Communicative constitution of organizations A major theoretical move in organizational communication theory has been the development of a view of communication as organization.

Membership negotiation includes recruitment to the organization, socialization into being a member of the organization, and organizational identiication and identity. Organizational self-structuring includes communication among giddens structuration theories pdf and stakeholders concerning what the organization is and does, such as organizational charters and mission statements, policies and procedures, budgets and strategic decision making, and the like.

Activity coordination is related to self-structuring, although it is more directly concerned with carrying out the tasks of the organization. Such communication ranges from seeking procedural information to developing creative solutions to technical problems. Institutional positioning primarily occurs as communication with external entities, such as customers, suppliers, and competitors.

Structurating activity theory SAT was developed by combining main constructs from ST with main constructs from cultural—historical giddens structuration theory pdf theory Canary, With six propositions, SAT explicates relations between structure, action, activity systems, and contradictions in policy knowledge processes. In brief, SAT asserts that people afected by policies, such as policies that regulate educational practices, health care delivery, and employee rights, are situated within interrelated activity systems.

Activity systems draw on broader social structure to enable and constrain their activities as well as system-speciic elements that serve as rules and resources that shape how activity is accomplished. A key construct of SAT is contradictions, which are viewed in this theory as oppositional tensions inherent in any social system. SAT proposes that contradictions exist on several levels, both structurally and systemically, and that they may serve to generate system transformations in policy contexts.

Members of diferent activity systems might draw on the same broad structural rules and resources in policy processes, such as the legitimation of public policies to structure organizational practices. However, ways in which those broader structures are incorporated into system interactions, practices, and interpretations can vary widely between policy related systems.

Accordingly, SAT studies have examined these intersecting policy processes, including contradictions that arise when goals of activity systems oppose each other. Although developed to explain the communicative construction of policy knowledge within and between activity systems, SAT has also been used to study other processes. For example, studies have used SAT to examine decision making between professionals and lay people, organizational change initiatives, family communication about disabilities, family transformations ater traumatic events, and communication between health care professionals and people at increased risk for cancer.

Health care workers, such as nurses, doctors, and therapists, function within multiple professional and organizational systems. Accordingly, they operate at the nexus of multiple structures, at which point multiple social structures interpenetrate. If those structures support each other and are consistent in their enablements and constraints, there is no SD.

However, when these structures pull the individual in divergent directions, competing with each other in terms of determining appropriate actions in the workplace, SD ensues. Importantly, SD is used to describe individual experiences, not structural experiences or entire organizations. Development of SD occurred over the course of several qualitative studies of nurses in various organizational contexts.

Findings from these qualitative studies were then used to construct a quantitative, self-report measure of SD that can be used in organizations for both research and practice. SD research indicates that prior research focusing on these other negative professional phenomena have fallen short of identifying root causes. However, organizational communication scholars who have developed and applied SD argue that SD theory allows organizational researchers and practitioners to develop intervention strategies that will be efective because SD constructs enable identiication of deeply entrenched structural contradictions that are causing negative outcomes for organizations and their members.

Although research to date has focused on nurses, particularly due to their unique institutional position in health care organizations, SD authors assert that future research will help identify the prevalence of this problematic phenomenon across professional groups and across organizational types. SI uses frame theory to explicate a multilevel theory of communicating and organizing.

At the broadest level are frame systems, which are entrenched systems of beliefs and values within a social system, the underlying assumptions about how things are. Less broad are institutional frames and contextual frames. According to Haslett, structures of signiication, domination, and legitimation frame social institutions such as educational, legal, and economic systems.

Contextual frames relate to the knowledgeability of agents who know how to act and interact within particular contexts, such as their own or another culture, a grocery store, or a cocktail party. Framing refers to interaction encounters themselves as the unit of analysis. Because SI is grounded in multiple theoretical levels, SI-guided analyses will likely involve multiple levels as well, from interpersonal encounters occurring over time and space, to organizational and institutional contexts.

However, Haslett asserts that using SI will be consistent with and enrich the current communicative constitution of organizations based studies of organizational communication. Future directions Although considerable research has been conducted using ST in the past several decades, important elements of the theory remain underutilized in the ield of organizational communication.

One of those elements is time—space distanciation. Central to the duality of structure is the notion that activities and meanings are structurated across time and space in a process called distanciation. Distanciation occurs through colocated social interactions, called social integration, as well as through indirect, mediated interactions, called system integration.

As social systems and organizations become increasingly reliant on technology in an era of globalization, the asynchronous coordination of meanings across large geographic domains will become vital for ensuring organizational stability. Time—space distanciation ofers one powerful way of theorizing the emergent tensions, paradoxes, and contradictions that are likely to be instantiated by communicative fragmentation and dislocation.

Such phenomena might include international public policy making, multinational corporate change initiatives, and global humanitarian eforts. Published reports of structuration research frequently speak to an academic audience, explicating the theoretical and empirical implications of research results and pointing to potential implications for practice.

However, rarely are there published reports of a researcher continuing observations or returning to see how research participants were impacted by their participation in a research study or how organizational practices change or not based on research indings. Future research would beneit by providing accounts of this double hermeneutic — relecting on changed understandings and practices on the part of those conducting the research and on the part of those who were studied.

Technology as an occasion for structuring: Evidence from observation of CT scanners and the social order of radiology departments. Administrative Science Quarterly, 31 178— A conceptual deinition and theoretical model of public deliberation in small face-to-face groups. Communication heory, 12, — Structurating activity theory: An integrative approach to policy knowledge.

Communication heory, 20, 21— Management Communication Quarterly, 23 2— Perceived networks, activity foci, and observable communication in social collectivities. Communication heory, 4 3— Capturing the complexity in advanced technology use: Adaptive structuration theory. Organization Science, 5, — Giddens, A. Haslett, B. Communicating and organizing in context: he theory of structurational interaction.

New York, NY: Routledge. Kirby, E. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 30 150— Organizational structures and conigurations. Putnam Eds. London, UK: Sage. McPhee, R. Nicotera Eds. Nicotera, A. Between rocks and hard places: Exploring the impact of structurational divergence in the nursing workplace.

Giddens structuration theory pdf: One foundational concept of structuration

Management Communication Quarterly, 27 190— Conceptualization and measurement of structurational divergence in the healthcare setting. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 38, — Using technology and constituting structures: A practice lens for studying technology in organizations. Organization Science, 11, — Microlevel structuration in computer-supported group decision making.

Human Communication Research, 19 15— Poole, M. Group decision-making as a structurational process. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 71 174— Russo, T. Organizational and professional identiication: A case of newspaper journalists. Management Communication Quarterly, 12, 72— Development of a structurational model of identiication in the organization.

Communication heory, 8, — Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. Young, L. Social issue emergence on the web: A dual structurational model. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 17, — Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 9, — Central problems in social theory: Action, structure and contradiction in social analysis. It can be used to refer to specific phenomenon like the structure of social class or gender; or to general phenomena, where it acts as a place-holder for a series of un-named "structural" phenomena.

It can also be used to refer to society as a whole, or perhaps in a general sense to mean anything that is external to an organisation or an individual which, once again, makes the meaning impractically broad. Incidentally, my argument is not that all of these ways of using the term are exactly wrong; it is that there is simply far too much ambiguity.

Finally, discussion of social structures and institutions, often involves the use of terms like habits, habitus, rules, conventions, norms, values, roles, customs, laws, regulations, practices, routines, procedures and precedents, not to mention less commonly used terms like mores, scripts, obligations, rituals, codes and agreements. Once again, there is often confusion about what each of these terms mean, how they relate to one another, and how they relate to social structures and institutions.

Consider two examples. In considering "habits, routines, social conventions, social norms" as types of rules, 92 conflates properties that should be associated with human agency, i.

Giddens structuration theory pdf: This paper presents a critical review

He also makes the. In the first instance, it is demonstrated that Giddens exaggerates the powers of agents at the expense of structural constraints. International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies, It does it with regard both to the stability of social systems at various levels i. Institutional theory highlights the role of rules, norms, and typifications cultural beliefs and scripts in constraining and empowering social action and giving meaning to social life.

More recent contributions draw attention to the concurrent role of institutions in situations of change, where interests, agency and power play their own role in reaching stability or domination. This work looked for a unifying theory between physical-biological domain and social sciences. Constructal law unified physical and biological domain by telling the general sense in which flow systems tend to evolve.

Management theory looks for relations between institutions and human agency. Although being state of mind entities, institutions follow constructal law. This work proposed the main organization flows are information and credit. Biologic instincts derived from Darwinian natural selection are the driving or blocking forces of such flows.

Giddens structuration theory pdf: PDF | Introduction Anthony

Once biologic instincts systematically block information and credit flows in large numbers, this work proposed every human organization must have institutions to inhibit some behaviors. Those institutions need to be present, at least partially, in formal rules of social groups. This way it is possible to predict expansion or downfall of human groups using objective and quantifiable data.

Therefore, further studies may employ classical history to confirm this theory. This work analyzed some case studies to show qualitatively the application of proposed theory. Concluding, this work gave physically-biologically grounded guidance for institutional changes. This thesis discusses certain problems related to the concept of organization as a bounded entity, which presupposes the existence of a boundary between the organization and the environment.

The thesis consists of four parts: 1 an inquiry into the foundations of organization theory as an application of the system approach in social science; 2 a discussion of the application of the concept of network in the study of organizations; 3 an exploration of the concept of socio-technical network as a way of developing an approach to the understanding of organizing processes; and 4 the proposition and discussion of the concept of organizing as event-structuring, as a way of accounting for the boundary condition from a process-oriented perspective.

Based on the analysis of empirical cases and historical materials, it is concluded that the reduction of the organization to the boundaries of a firm, or any other example of bounded entities, produces an incomplete account of the phenomena involved in social organizational processes, and that organization theory cannot rest on an a priori distinction between organization and environment.

A requirement for developing organization theory is an understanding of the problem of boundaries rather than simply taking for granted their existence and consequences. The thesis attempts to contribute to this exploration by proposing an approach to the study of organizing processes which does not require the assumption of boundaries as a starting point of the inquiry.

Michel Foucault has moved from being marginal to organization studies to perhaps the most important authority in critical management studies. Yet his methods, historiography and the theoretical value of his work remain obscure, contested or, even worse, simply taken for granted. Governmentality, Foucault's term for how institutions are imagined, offers a way of understanding how specific forms of knowledge and power emerge, develop and decline.

III Giddens believed in the failure of social sciences especially when thought of them as a natural science of society. He recognised the basic difference between society and nature. While nature is not man-made, according to him, society is created and recreated afresh, by the participants in every social encounters. Thus, Giddens was firm in his farewell to the natural science of society before setting on his own theory of society.

In interpretative sociologies, according to him, action and meaning are accorded primacy in the explication of human conduct. Thus, Giddens recognises an imperialism of the subject in interpretative sociologies while that of the social object, in functionalism and structuralism. This compels him to come out with his own ambitions in the formulation of structuration theory, to put an end to each of these empire-building endeavours According to Cohen, Giddens has chosen to develop the insights which are fundamental to structuration theory in response to theories and schools of thought that already stand at some remove from positivistic points of view.

The issues of structuration theory, according to Cohen, are of a different order than those which absorb the attention of positivistic social theorists. V As Cohen puts, Giddens is unwilling to shape his inquiries to conform to a predetermined set of epistemological principles Giddens himself clarifies his position when he says that concentration upon epistemological issues draws attention away from the more ontological concerns of social theory upon which structuration theory primarily concentratesPXX.

The objectives Giddens pursues in the formation of an ontological theory of the constitution of social life do not stand apart from the concerns of social science at large Cohen, The basic domain of study of the social sciences according to the theory of structuration, as Giddens declares, is neither the experience of the individual actor, nor the existence of any form of societal totality, but social practices ordered across space and time For him, the capacity to structure the social universe and thereby obviate the scientific laws depicting the universe resides in the notion of agency 6.

According to Giddens, agency refers not to the intentions people have in doing things but to their capability of doing those things in the first place. Here, by agency, he implies the power. Further, for him agency concerns events of which an individual is the perpetrator, in the sense that, the individual could, at any phase, in a given sequence of conduct, have acted differently.

Whatever happened would not have happened if that individual had not intervened 9. Cohen identifies a distinguishing feature of social agency in that the interventions undertaken by social agents are, to some greater or lesser giddens structuration theory pdf, always under their own control. According to him, structuration theory directs a great deal of attention to both social and material constraints that any individual agent may be unable to change.

This is the reason why, he believes, the theory makes ample allowance for the limited options available for the exercise of giddens structuration theory pdf in any given set of circumstances Thus, for Cohen, the conception of agency in structuration theory resists the polarities of both thorough-going determinism and unqualified freedom while preserving all possibility between these extremes.

VII Cohen understands the social practices as elaborated in the theory of structuration as skillful procedures, methods or techniques appropriately performed by social agents. Thus, the performance of social practices distinguishes social life from nature; the basis of this distinction consists of the skills and resources required to perform any given practice.

Thus, human consciousness arises as a major theme in structuration theory. Giddens distinguishes two modes of consciousness namely practical consciousness and discursive consciousness though he himself does not intend the distinction to be a rigid and impermeable one. The difference is only of what can be said and what is characteristically simply done 7.

However the notion of practical consciousness is, for him fundamental to structuration theory 6. As Cohen puts it, the distinctive quality of practical consciousness is that agents need be only tacitly aware of the skills they have mastered. This allows for practices that can be performed without being directly motivated VIII Giddens introduces the notion of structuration as the true explanatory locus of structural analysis.

To study structuration, according to him, is to attempt to determine the conditions which govern the continuity and dissolution of structures or types of structures. Putting it differently, he says, to enquire into the process of reproduction, is for him, to specify the connections between structuration and structure According to him, the constitution of agents and structures are not two independently given sets of phenomena, a dualism, but represent a duality.

According to the notion of the duality of structure, Giddens identifies the structural properties of social systems as both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organise. The duality of structure, for him, is always the main grounding of continuities in social reproduction across time space. The flow of action continually produces consequences which are unintended by actors, and these unintended consequences also may form unacknowledged conditions of action in a feed back fashion Cohen believes that it is fundamental to the duality of structure that the structural properties of collectivities which are the rules and resources not only serve as the media of social reproduction but are also reproduced as an outcome of this process According to Giddens and Turner, for structuration theory, agents, action and interaction are constrained by, yet generative of the structural dimension of social reality 8 IX According to the theory of structuration, structure implies the rules and resources which exist as memory traces.

Through the reflexive monitoring of action, which is purposive or intended character of human behaviour and reflexive self-regulation by means of the feed back effect of the homeostatic causal loops, these memory traces reproduce social system. Social system, in turn, is the patterning of social relations across time and space. The structures are the rule-resource sets that are implicated in the institutional articulation of social systems.