Blackwell Reference Online

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The theory of structuration by Anthony Giddens is one of the most influential perspectives of the late twentieth century in the communication discipline. Its main argument is that communication in social systems is not simply a matter of individual action or social structure but a joint product of both these moments: social action, including communication, is an outcome of structuration, or the production and reproduction of structure in social interaction. Giddens's theory (see Giddens 1984 for the most comprehensive statement) embeds this core phenomenon within a wide-ranging, integrative, institutional framework that encompasses many concepts of interest to scholars of human communication, including agency, identity, power, and →  modernity . The signature contribution of structuration deals with the classic disagreement in social theory between perspectives that privilege action and those that privilege structure. Some positions assign primacy to the individual and his or her perceptions, experiences, and actions. For example, →  phenomenology takes the intuitive experience of the individual as its starting point, building from there to explain more aggregate features of the social world. Other perspectives take social structure as their starting point. Functionalism, for instance, holds that social institutions exist to serve social needs, like the need to live in an orderly ... log in or subscribe to read full text