Title: The Accidental Derogation of the Lay Actor A Critique of Giddens's Concept of Structure .
Subject(s): STRUCTURALISM ; SOCIAL change ; GIDDENS, Anthony
Source: Philosophy of the Social Sciences , Sep2000, Vol. 30 Issue 3, p362, 22p
Author(s): King, Anthony
Abstract: The concept of structure is central to Giddens's structuration theory because it apparently accounts for the reproduction of the social system without derogating the lay actor in functionalist or structuralist fashion. In fact, the concept of structure involves the very derogation of the lay actor which Giddens highlights as the principal error of these objectivist social theories and which he wishes to avoid.
However, although Giddens fails to recognize it, the concept of "practical consciousness" which
Giddens also regards as central to structuration theory avoids this relapse into objectivism and offers a route to a sustainable social theory which highlights the agency of social actors. [ ABSTRACT FROM
AUTHOR ]
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The concept of structure is central to Giddens's structuration theory because it apparently accounts for the reproduction of the social system without derogating the lay actor in functionalist or structuralist fashion. In fact, the concept of structure involves the very derogation of the lay actor which Giddens highlights as the principal error of these objectivist social theories and which he wishes to avoid. However, although Giddens fails to recognize it, the concept of "practical consciousness" which Giddens also regards as central to structuration theory avoids this relapse into objectivism and offers a route to a sustainable social theory which highlights the agency of social actors.
Anthony Giddens's structuration theory is intended to explain how the social system is reproduced and transformed through the routine actions of individuals.
The fundamental question of social theory, as I see it--the "problem of order" conceived of in a way quite alien to
Parson's formulation when he coined the phrase--is to explicate how the limitations of individual "presence" are transcended by the "stretching" of social relations across time and space. (Giddens 1995, 35)
Crucially, structuration theory insists that individuals knowingly reproduce the social system and, thereby, avoid the
" derogation of the lay actor" (Giddens 1988, 71), which is the characteristic error of objectivising social theories; functionalism and structuralism wrongly reduced the individuals to cultural dopes who conformed unknowingly to the needs of the wider system. For Giddens, the social system is not reproduced in spite of the individual but only by means of knowledgeable individual agency. To explain the reproduction of the social system by means of knowledgeable social agents, Giddens has drawn on the notion of " structure ," which refers to certain rules and resources on which individuals draw in their social practice. Significantly, Giddens posits the notion of the "duality of structure " in which this structure is both the medium and outcome of knowledgeable social practice. "One of the most important propositions of structuration theory is that the rules and resources drawn upon in the production and reproduction of social action are at the same time the means of system reproduction (the duality of structure )"
(Giddens 1995, 9). According to Giddens, this duality of structure avoids the objectivist derogation of the lay actor since this concept allows individuals to perform certain social practices knowingly while ensuring that those practices simultaneously reproduce the wider social system in often unintended ways. Practice is "structured" so that

while individuals are knowledgeable, they act in a way which unintentionally reproduces the system. The concept of structure is central to Giddens's attempt to explain systemic reproduction without derogating the lay actor in a fashion typical of functionalism and structuralism.
Throughout Giddens's writing, the notion of structure is closely related to practical consciousness, which consists of mutual stocks of "tacit knowledge." Significantly, Giddens derives the concept of practical consciousness from hermeneutics and Wittgenstein's later philosophy so that practical consciousness refers to that horizon of meanings which allow individuals to go on in the appropriate manner in their interactions with other individuals. Despite
Giddens's claims that structure is closely related to practical consciousness and that structure allows for individuals to reproduce the system knowledgeably, in fact, the idea of structure is radically incompatible with Giddens's professions of Wittgensteinian faith and with the existence of knowledgeable individuals. Against Giddens's own intentions, the concept of structure returns structuration theory to the objectivism which it was intended to transcend resulting in an accidental derogation of the lay actor. In the end, Giddens's structuration theory posits a social theory which is unwittingly close to the very Levi-Straussian structuralism which he rejects; for, despite Giddens intentions, the notion of structure , as a "virtual order" or "absent set of differences" (Giddens 1988, 64), binds individuals to the system in substantially unknown ways. However, while Giddens's notion of structure is at odds with the hermeneutic and Wittgensteinian emphasis on the knowledgeability of the lay actor, the idea of practical consciousness, derived from hermeneutics, offers a genuine route out of the problems of objectivism which social theory has faced. The reproduction of social relations can be understood and explained wholly in terms of practical consciousness, and, consequently, practical consciousness renders structure superfluous to theoretical requirements.
Giddens's notion of practical consciousness avoids the derogation of the lay actor, but, entranced by the concept of structure , Giddens is unable to see it.
PRACTICAL CONSCIOUSNESS
Giddens locates practical consciousness between discursive consciousness, of which the actor is fully aware, and the unconscious, which can only be recovered by means of psychoanalysis (Giddens 1988, 2), and maintains that his notion of practical consciousness is derived from Schutzian phenomenology and Wittgenstein's later philosophy.
More important are the grey areas of practical consciousness that exist in the relation between the rationalisation of action and actors' stocks of knowledge; and between the rationalisation of action and the unconscious. The stocks of knowledge, in Schutz's term, or what I call mutual knowledge employed by actors in the production of social encounters, are not usually known to those actors in an explicitly codified form: the practical character of such knowledge conforms to the Wittgensteinian formulation of knowing a rule. (Giddens 1988, 58)
Practical consciousness consists of the shared understandings between individuals which are essential for the prosecution of social life but which understandings are not explicitly known. There is something curious and even oxymoronic about claiming that something is known and not known at the same time, especially since it is essential for social action, and the paradoxical nature of this claim finds expression in some of Giddens's descriptions of practical consciousness. For instance, in distinguishing discursive consciousness from practical consciousness,
Giddens argues that this distinction is often unrecognized because of "a confusion which derives from the idea
(already implicit in Saussurian polarities) that either something is conscious (discursively available), or else it is unconscious" (Giddens 1988, 25). On a first reading, this statement seems bizarre since it is analytically contradictory that there could be any other state for a piece of knowledge; either something is known (and therefore, conscious) or it is unknown (and therefore, at best, unconscious). Although the notion of "tacit knowledge," which is conscious and unconscious, is initially paradoxical, it can be interpreted coherently. This curiously unconscious but not unknown realm of practical consciousness refers to that knowledge which we know so well and which is constantly assumed in our interactions with others that it disappears from view.
There is a better way of expressing the somewhat paradoxical notion of tacit knowledge. Practical consciousness should not be viewed as tacit knowledge but rather as unacknowledged understanding. It is genuinely what is "taken for granted," as Schutz would say, rather than unconscious. It would have clarified matters had Giddens called discursive consciousness "self-consciousness" (when we are fully aware of what we know), practical consciousness
"consciousness" (when we know things but just assume this knowledge without acknowledging it), while his notion of the unconscious could have remained the same. This terminology is implicit in Giddens's writing, and when discussing Goffman he uses the term "unacknowledged" to describe the conscious but not self-conscious state of knowledge in practical consciousness.
Goffman analyses "knowledge" in the Wittgensteinian sense of "knowing rules"; the feeling of sharp illumination that the reader often experiences in reading Goffman derives from his making explicit what, once he has pointed them out, we recognise to be ingredients of practical consciousness, normally employed in an unacknowledged way in social life. (Giddens 1988, 80-81, emphasis added)
The power of Goffman's analysis and the "feeling of illumination" the reader encounters in his writing stems not from the fact that he told us something about ourselves and our practices which we never knew but rather something which we knew only too well but had not seen in that way before. Goffman casts a self-conscious light on always conscious but unacknowledged understandings. Thus, everyone is conscious of the preparation of their selves in the back areas for their self-presentation in everyday life, whether they have read Goffman or not, but the nature of that preparation and the unease we feel when, for instance, we are caught looking in the mirror is put in a new context by

Goffman. We always knew what we were doing--preparing ourselves for social life--but after reading Goffman, we self-consciously recognize that this is, in fact, what we are doing.
Giddens sees a close link between this unacknowledged (rather than tacit) knowledge and Wittgenstein's later philosophy. In particular, Giddens believes that the application of practical consciousness in everyday life accords with Wittgenstein's descriptions of rule following as knowing how to go on. In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein was concerned to reject the idea that individual action could be explained by the application of transcendental rules and that, therefore, we could have a universalizing philosophy of human thought and action. Rather, Wittgenstein insisted that practices were social, and any rules that might inform practice were given meaning and force by the social context--the form of life--in which they were applied by individuals. "What is the criterion for the way the formula is meant? It is, for example, the kind of way we always use it, the way we are taught to use it" (Wittgenstein
1974, Section 190). For Wittgenstein, the final tribunal for action is not abstract reason but other individuals, engaged in a form of life, who mutually decide, given certain self-understandings, what constitutes appropriate practice. For Wittgenstein, rule following is not something that can be understood in the abstract or generally but only by the examination of particular forms of life informed by particular meanings. Peter Winch's (1958) famous book, The Idea of a Social Science, has been very influential in demonstrating the applicability of Wittgenstein's ideas to the social sciences, and since, as Porpora (1993) has noted, Giddens draws heavily on Winch's interpretation of Giddens to develop his structuration theory, a consideration of Winch's discussion usefully highlights what is implied by Giddens's appeal to Wittgenstein when he describes practical consciousness. In perhaps the most famous line of The Idea of a Social Science, Winch stated, "All behaviour which is meaningful (therefore all specifically human behaviour) is ipso facto rule-governed" (p. 52). As the discussions in the rest of the book demonstrate, rulegoverned behavior and meaningful behavior are the same thing for Winch because meaningful behavior refers to those activities which others understand as appropriate and, therefore, rule following. An activity follows a rule when it has some meaning in a particular social context; it has an intention which is discernible to other individuals in this form of life. Crucially, the performance of appropriate and regular actions which "follow a rule" is determined by the reactions of other individuals with whom one shares a form of life.
"One has to take account not only of actions whose behaviour is in question as a candidate for a category of rulefollowing, but also the reactions of other people to what he does" (Winch 1958, 30). To follow a rule and, therefore, to act appropriately in social life is not to apply a formula mechanically but rather to understand one's social relations with others which render certain forms of practice proper. By rule-governed practice, Winch (1958) does not, therefore, mean that behavior amounts to the individual application of general or a priori rules but, on the contrary, only that the appropriate course of social action--of rule following--is decided by the negotiation between individuals drawing on shared understandings. Highlighting the fact that by "rule-governed" Winch means meaningful practice between individuals, Winch strongly opposes Oakeshott's notion of habits in which individuals simply perform certain social practices instinctively and, therefore, asocially and unmeaning fully (Winch 1958, 62).
Winch does not deny that individuals do not always self-consciously interpret their social practices and so sometimes act in a way that is "habitual," but Winch's objection to Oakeshott is that the latter's reduction of human practice to habit threatens to efface the inevitably meaningful nature of social practice. Although certain habitual practices do not involve an explicit interpretation in themselves, these habits do have some meaning in the social context in which we resort to them. Human habits--as opposed to the conditioning of animals--always involve a meaningful dimension even if the act of explicit interpretation seems to be absent on a particular occasion. Thus, when we cut down a tree, each blow with which we strike the tree is not self-consciously interpreted, for the act of swinging an axe is an instinctive, bodily action. However, while this act is a matter of physical conditioning, our recourse to this physical, habitual act is explained by reference to the wider contexts of meanings and selfunderstandings which render the felling of the tree appropriate. The felling of a tree, involving the same physical and habitual processes of swinging an axe, can be a different phenomenon given different intentions. The felling of a tree by a professional gardener that threatens to destroy a house is a different act from petulant destruction of a tree by a disobedient child. Winch's emphasis on the rule-given nature of social interaction does not deny that certain activities are habitual, but it is intended to highlight the meaningful nature of social interaction in which the actor's intentions and their interpretation by others are crucial to the determination of any practice.
Giddens's practical consciousness is compatible with Wittgenstein's and Winch's discussions of rule following because, likewise, it highlights those mutual stocks of knowledge agreed on by individuals which give social actions meaning and by which individuals determine how to go on in social life. Moreover, like Winch, Giddens recognizes that very often in social life, the meanings which inform an action and determine whether it is a form of rule following are assumed and unacknowledged. However, even when social action becomes habitual and when it is simply enacted without explicit reference to the meanings that inform it, it is always implicitly drawing on these shared meanings. A social action which accords with no meaning at all and, therefore, follows no rule because no one can understand it is the kind of social practice which we look on as insane. Rule following is a genuinely social process in which appropriate action is not decided by a single individual applying general formulas to a particular situation but rather by individuals together agreeing on (and constantly renegotiating) appropriate courses of action in the light of given a body of shared understandings.
STRUCTURE

Although Giddens draws on Winch's Wittgensteinian account of rule following as intentional and intersubjective social action, he quickly develops the idea of structure which, in fact, falls back exactly into the objectivism which
Winch and Wittgenstein rejected. In place of individuals referring to their meaningful relations with other individuals to determine courses of action--Winch's notion of rule following--individuals are, under structure , seen to draw unknowingly on transcendental rules without reference to their relations with others but in accordance with objective social structure . This unwitting shift in paradigm from a hermenentic and Wittgensteinian account to an objectivist and rationalist one is demonstrated in Giddens's descriptions of the concept of structure : " Structure , as recursively organized sets of rules and resources, is out of time and space, save in its instantiations and co-ordination as memory traces, and is marked by an 'absence of the subject'" (Giddens 1995, 25). Structure then consists of rules, but these rules exist only when they are instantiated in practice. They are, therefore, virtual because they do not themselves exist in time and space.(n1) Giddens seems to believe that the notion of structure as a set of virtual differences is unproblematically compatible with his initial Wittgensteinian description of practical consciousness, for he directly equates "virtual orders of difference" by which term he describes structure with Wittgenstein's rules
(Giddens 1988, 46).Yet, the term "order of differences" is not derived from Wittgenstein's later philosophy but from
Saussure's (1966) structural linguistics. For Saussure, the words in any linguistic system are differentiated from each other on the purely arbitrary basis of their sound. According to Saussure, it is only its difference from other sounds which allows a word to signify a concept, and langue is only a system of differences between all the words in any language. By calling his structure a system of differences, Giddens is invoking a Saussurean objectivist account of langue in which speakers draw automatically and unknowingly on the system of differences in everyday speech. Just as langue has an autonomous existence, so are the virtual rules of structure drawn on unknowingly by actors whenever they perform a social act; these absent differences necessarily but tacitly structure possible practice. They orient subsequently knowledgeable actors. Significantly, like Saussure's langue, structure is marked by the "absence of the subject." Consequently, the rules of structure , which Giddens describes, are not simply unacknowledged because they are taken for granted and, in effect, known so well that they disappear from view. They are above and beyond the individual and impose objectively on the individual. They are no longer meaningful or social in the way that Winch's notion of rule following was, in which Winch intended to highlight the fact that even the most routine or apparently purely physical social practice was always finally determined by the culturally given intentions of the individuals involved in that practice. Structure is not intentional or meaningful. The concept of structure does not mean that individuals agree socially on courses of actions by reference to other individuals and their shared meanings but rather that an objective structure imposes invisibly on individuals singly, ensuring that those individuals act appropriately. On this model, rule following is not a matter of meaningful negotiation between individuals but the individualistic implementation of objective structure ; individuals do not apply structure by reference to the understanding of other individuals but merely instantiate it inevitably in practice to reproduce the system.
Giddens claims that this virtual structure of rules and resources has duality so that in drawing on structure , individuals simultaneously reproduce it, just as an individual reproduces the English language in uttering a sentence of English (Giddens 1988, 7). Significantly, he believes that this "duality of structure " explains the reproduction of the social system without lapsing into objectivism because while rules now " structure " social practice so that individuals perform the appropriate routines for their position in the social system, they do so knowingly. Yet, in fact, when Giddens introduces the notion of the duality of structure , he conflates the notion of structure as a set of virtual rules with the social system as the institutional context of action. "One of the main propositions of structuration theory is that the rules and resources drawn upon in the production and reproduction of social action are at the same time the means of system reproduction (duality of structure )" (Giddens 1995, 19).(n2) Individuals do not just reproduce structure through their practices but the system itself. For Giddens, there is a complete congruence between structure as a system of rules and the social system as a set of objective institutions so that, informed by structure , individuals perform the appropriate forms of practice to reproduce the wider social system.
Giddens emphasizes this binding of the individual to the social system by means of structure when he claims that
" structure forms personality and society simultaneously" (Giddens 1988, 70). The structure which unknowingly informs personal routines leads to the unintentional reproduction of the social system, which itself has an objective existence irreducible to human agency. As Giddens himself argues, "society is not the creation of individual subjects" (Giddens 1995, xxi) since the social system consists of institutions which cannot be understood in terms of or reduced to the individuals in them. Consequently, against his Winchian emphasis on individuals' interactions and interpretations, Giddens's structuration theory slips toward an objectivist account of social life, for structure effectively imposes an objective and institutionalist social stamp on individual personalities so that they act in ways which accord with the reproduction of the social system. Against the Winchian and Wittgensteinian image of rule following, on Giddens's structurationist account, individuals do not look to others with whom they share a form of life and a set of understandings to determine how to go on and how to sustain and change their social relations but have their social practices imposed on them by the system objectively. Individuals are separated from the intentional social relations with other individuals which Winch emphasized and now confront an objective externality--the system--which imposes individualistically on them by means of transcendental structure , which consists of an objective system of differences "marked by the absence of the subject." The system imposes on individuals personality-constituting routines that simultaneously reproduce that system rather than individual identity emerging

in the course of the interactions with others mutually agreeing on certain forms of practice in the light of wider social context.
The relapse into objectivism, in which the social system imposes on isolated individuals, is emphasized in other parts of Giddens's descriptions of structure . To demonstrate the kind of rule he has in mind when discussing structure , Giddens lists four types of rule:
1. "The rule defining checkmate in chess is ...";
2. A formula: [sub a]n = n[sup 2] + n - 1;
3. "As a rule R gets up at 6.00 every day";
4. "It is a rule that all workers must clock in at 8.00 a.m." (Giddens 1995, 19)
Giddens proposes that usage 2 (taken from Wittgenstein's discussion of rules) is most like those found in structure .
In cases 3 and 4, the statements merely describe regular occurrences, while the rule in case 1 has too specific and conscious a meaning. Against mere descriptions of regularities or specific and self-conscious rules, Giddens highlights usage 2 because it can be applied across a wide range of contexts and is not so much known as simply grasped because this rule is applied without thought or interpretation. "A formula is a generalizable procedure-generalizable because it applies over a range of contexts and occasions, a procedure because it allows for methodical continuation of an established sequence. Are linguistic rules like this? I think they are" (Giddens 1995, 20-21).
There is a serious question of whether this description of the rules of structure as generalized formulas is compatible with the claim that the rules of structure are a "virtual order of differences" since even these generalizable formulas are more than a set of arbitrary and signifying differences; they have some substantive content and refer to a particular course of action. However, even ignoring the problems of consistency which Giddens's writing presents, there is more significant difficulty with this description of rules as generalizable formulas. As Winch's (1977)
Wittgensteinian discussion of rule following revealed, social life is not ordered by general, abstract rules which an individual applies in the same way time after time; that is a crude simplification of the complex process of intersubjective understanding which determines in each particular case whether a course of action constitutes rule following. The rules or meanings which inform action are not unambiguous and rigid formulas which prescribe only one type of action. Rather, because rules are only understandings which are broadly agreed on by individuals, rules facilitate a broad range of possible practices, all of which potentially constitute rule following. The final determination of whether a particular action followed a rule properly is not the logic of the rule itself, which would delimit only one "correct" action, but rather whether other individuals in this form of life regard an action as appropriate, that is, whether other individuals understand this action as meaningful. Since rules are "fuzzier" than
Giddens believes and only established through continual intersubjective agreement, they are not as generalizable as
Giddens believes. Knowing how to go on does not involve single individuals applying an abstract generalizable rule to reproduce an objective social context--the institution--but rather individuals orienting themselves to other individuals given their mutual self-understandings. Individuals mutually reproduce and renegotiate their relations with each other; they do not individually implement rules which unintentionally reproduce the social system as a whole.
Significantly, although Giddens's structuration theory begins with a rejection of objectivist derogations of the lay actor and a description of practical consciousness which is compatible with a hermeneutic and Wittgensteinian account of social life, in the end it produces a social theory which echoes Levi-Strauss's (1977) structuralism.
Against his intentions, Giddens eventually postulates the existence of underlying transcendental frameworks--virtual orders of difference--which orient individuals so that they perform the appropriate practices and routines for the reproduction of the system. Individuals are unaware of these rules since they are virtual and, therefore, act in ways that are determined objectively. Although discursive consciousness potentially remains an area of autonomy, structure imposes on the individual to ensure that each individual reproduces the system as a whole. Somewhere between practical consciousness (which grounded social action in the interaction of knowledgeable individuals) and structure there has been an accidental derogation of the lay actor. The emphasis on shared but sometimes implicit intentions and meanings, on which individuals draw in their interactions with other individuals, is effaced by the objectivist and deterministic concept of virtual, unknown structure .(n3)
THE HERMENEUTIC CRITIQUE OF STRUCTURE
Rules Must Be Known
In a hermeneutic critique of structuralism, Ricoeur (1992) described Levi-Strauss's (1977) writings as "Kantianism without the transcendental subject" (p. 52). Like Kant's transcendental categories, Levi-Strauss's binary oppositions structured any possible human experience. Giddens accepts Ricoeur's critique of Levi-Strauss's structuralism as a relapse into Kantianism on the grounds that it derogates the lay actor The existence of transcendental templates implies the sovereignty of society over the individual because before individuals have even begun to think or act, their thoughts are already structured by preexisting, unknown categories. Employing Riceour's critique of Levi-
Strauss, Giddens argues that, in fact, for binary oppositions or any other structure to have a determinate effect on social practice, individuals would have to recognize and give meaning to the categories which structured their thought and practice. If individuals never recognized that they categorized things in certain ways and did not find that categorization meaningful and important, then such a categorization would be irrelevant to social life. It is only insofar as categories are meaningful to individuals and therefore known to them that they are important. It is true that categories are often unacknowledged in social life, but, as Garfinkel's breaching experiments demonstrate, this

nonacknowledgement of certain categories in no way implies that they are not known by individuals; "tacit" categories are exactly the rules which produce the most ferocious response when breached. The most important categories are exactly those which seem to disappear from view, but this does not mean that they are not known. On the contrary, they are known best of all because they are constantly assumed. Following this line of argument,
Giddens insists that Levi-Strauss's structuralism is immanently dependent on a hermeneutic account of the social world.
Riceour is surely correct when he argues that Levi-Strauss's structural analyses of myth, far from excluding
"meaning as narrative," bound to the contexts of its reproduction, actually presupposes it. Structural analysis presupposes hermeneutics in so far as the latter is taken to be concerned with the interpretation and repair of meaningful communication, grounded in the intersubjectivity of practical day-to-day life. (Giddens 1988, 26)
However, if Riceour's criticism of Levi-Strauss is convincing, as Giddens himself thinks, then his notion of structure is open to the same criticism. Just as individuals would have to recognize that they were employing (the same) binary oppositions if they are going to recognize the meanings of the myths which are supposedly essential to their culture,(n4) so individuals would have to recognize the "rules" which Giddens insists they apply in their social interaction. Individuals would have to know that they were drawing on a certain rule in a certain situation if they were going to act appropriately, which is exactly what Winch argued. If it is argued that individuals act appropriately but unknowingly, then it follows that their actions must be determined objectively in ways which are independent of their intentions. They have been conditioned to act in routinized ways which are not meaningful to them or understood by them but which unintentionally reproduce the system. It is into exactly this derogation of the lay actor which Giddens accidentally relapses with his concept of structure . Although certain habitual actions are not always consciously interpreted by us as we do them, the decision to engage in that habit is always informed by our conscious understandings of ourselves and the social situation which confronts us. Consequently, even the most routinized practices are not marked by the "absence of the subject," in which individuals unthinkingly and unknowingly reproduce the social system.
If Giddens is not to derogate the actor, he must reject structure and follow his avowed Wittgensteinianism through to its conclusion. He must recognize the sufficiency of practical consciousness to the explication of social life. In fact, Giddens implicitly opts for exactly this position that he explicitly espouses, for structure is described as being dependent on the hermeneutic idea of practical consciousness. Significantly, he claims that "the application of semantic rules as interpretative schemes [ structure ] in actual contexts of interaction normally draws heavily on tacit knowledge [practical knowledge]" (Giddens 1977, 133). The rules of structure are only ever applied by reference to a broader horizon of cultural understandings. In the end, practical consciousness determines which rules should be drawn on and how they should be applied because rules are applied by reference to the shared understandings and agreement of interacting individuals. Consequently, even on Giddens's own account, social practice is not primarily determined by virtual rules but on the contrary by the shared but often unacknowledged understandings of social actors, which provides the context for any rules which are employed. Minimally, the virtual rules of structure are dependent on practical consciousness. If the virtual status of rules is untenable and rules are, at most, unacknowledged shared meanings, then Giddens has returned to the Winchian account from which he deviates in his discussion of structure . His appeal to structure means only that sometimes unacknowledged shared cultural understandings are applied in social action to determine the appropriate and meaningful course of action. If that is the case, then the concept of structure is not only a falsely objectifying but a superfluous sociological concept.(n5)
The Problem of Social Change
Giddens repeatedly emphasizes the mutability of society through the knowing agency of individual actors, and structuration theory is intended to be able to account for the self-evident fact of social change without falling into facile theories of voluntarism. The very name "structuration theory" is intended to communicate the central position which social change has in this theory while maintaining the importance of enduring social phenomenon. "To study the structuration of a social system is to study the ways in which that system, via the application of generative rules and resources, and in the context of unintended outcomes, is produced and reproduced in interaction" (Giddens
1988, 66). Crucially, structure , as a set of virtual rules, does not prevent change but rather informs any change which occurs in social systems.
Structure is not to be conceptualised as a barrier to action, but as essentially involved in its production: even in the most radical processes of social change which, like any others, occur in time. The most disruptive modes of social change, like the most rigidly stable forms, involve structuration. (Giddens 1988, 70)
Structure can be drawn on to reproduce the social system, to stretch social relations across time and space, but structure is always also involved in any form of social transformation which occurs. Actors do not randomly or voluntaristically develop new forms of practice, but they always draw on structure to inform new practices. It is sustainable to maintain that any process of social change is limited and even determined by previous social conditions and understandings; the most radical revolutions appear in hindsight not nearly so original as they did to their protagonists. For instance, as Alexis de Tocqueville described, the French Revolution did not return to year zero as the Terror attempted but only resolved the contradictions of the ancien regime by eliminating an aristocratic class which performed no economic or political function beyond conspicuous consumption at the Parisian court. The
French Revolution only formalized the position of a bourgeoisie whose power was already informally recognized before 1789, and the revolution, therefore, only realized what was implicit in previous social conditions.

Yet, although it is possible to see what Giddens intends and recognize that this intention is coherent, his definition of structure as a virtual set of differences or rules, which merely orient actors without being known, contradicts this intention and renders the notion of structure untenable. If individuals draw on structure automatically because they are virtual, it becomes very difficult to explain social change, even though Giddens intends social change to be at the center of structuration theory. Since practices are necessarily mediated by structure , any action would have to accord with it. Individuals would certainly reproduce the social system and stretch their relations across time and space as Giddens wants, but under the virtual rules of structure , they would be incapable of doing anything other than conforming with structure and so go on doing the same thing over and over again. Clearly, Giddens does not intend to give this kind of determination to structure , and he believes that the rules lodged at the level of structure are open to discursive penetration. They can be changed by self-conscious interpretation. Yet, if the virtual order of structure is unknown because it is marked by the absence of the subject, then it would presumably structure discursive consciousness as much as practical consciousness, and thus any discursive interpretation would itself necessarily be oriented by virtual structure . Thus, the explanation of social change which is offered by discursive consciousness wherein agents "could have acted otherwise" by self-consciously considering their options (Giddens
1988, 56) is undermined by Giddens's idea of structure . Structure predetermines the possibility and nature of any discursive intervention that subsequently occurs. Since individuals can never penetrate structure by means of interpretation because it has no substance or meaning but is only a form, they could never change it, just as we cannot consciously change the underlying grammatical structure of langue even though parole can be transformed relatively swiftly.
Although Giddens's structuration theory seeks to explain the reproduction and transformation of society through the actions of knowing individuals, in the end, he descends into the objectivism wherein his social theory, against his intentions, rules out social change by derogating the lay actor. These are fundamental errors in themselves, but they are also unnecessary, for they can be obviated by rethinking our vision of society on the lines suggested by practical consciousness. Rather than instantiating structure in their individualistic routines to reproduce the system as a whole, individuals are always aware of the meanings on which they draw in their relations with others, even though they do not always acknowledge them. Consequently, social transformation is always possible and explicable. Under practical consciousness, individuals are not imposed on by something they do not know but can always transform the cultural resources on which they draw by rethinking and reinterpreting their mutual understandings in their interactions with other individuals. On this account, rules do not inevitably structure a set of appropriate personal routines but are a looser set of understandings between individuals. Consequently, these rules as looser understandings can be drawn on in different ways to produce different but wholly legitimate forms of rule following since the legitimacy of a particular course of action as a form of rule following is not given finally by the rules themselves but only by other people involved in this form of life. While the concept of structure founders on the issue of social change, the possibility of historical transformation is always implicit in the Winchian concept of rule following because Winch grounds social practice in the meaningful interaction between individuals. Individuals do not follow rules by rigidly applying a formula but by recognizing what constitutes appropriate action in the light of their meaningful relations with others. There is, therefore, always room for maneuver because rules are only what individuals agree them to be.
The Superfluity of Structure
Since Giddens primarily postulates the existence of virtual structures to explain how social relations are stretched across time-space to reproduce the system and above all to reproduce institutions, which Giddens (1988) regards as
"the most deeply-layered practices constitutive of social systems" (p. 65), it might be expected that if the notion of structure is sustainable, it will be in the empirical case of the persistence of institutions. A key institution in modern society is the capitalist company, which operates with a recognizable hierarchy that outlives the occupancy of any incumbent but which is only reproduced by individual routine; it is stretched over time and space. Until very recently, the higher bureaucratic levels of capitalist companies have been overwhelmingly occupied by men, and, indeed, as various commentators (such as Wajcman 1996) have noted, even today women face serious obstacles to promotion to the highest levels of these companies.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter's work (1977) has been important in highlighting this exclusion, and she has argued that a phenomenon which she calls "homosociality" is central to the reproduction of the exclusionary, masculinist company. She argues that capitalist firms operate in uncertain competitive environments in which the best strategy is to minimize risk. Within the company, the minimization of risk involves trusting coworkers, and that trust is most easily achieved through a "similarity of background and a similarity of organisational experience" (pp. 49-50).
Consequently, since men share similar experiences and backgrounds with other men, who are employed at managerial grades, she argues that men invariably prefer to work with men rather than women. Since women were deemed to have a different background, they "were decidedly placed in the category of the incomprehensible and unpredictable" (p. 58). Yet, the exclusion of women was not simply due to the fact that they were conceived as having different backgrounds to men. The exclusion was also grounded in the fact that managers regarded the company as an inappropriate place for women. Fifty-one percent of Moss Kanter's sample thought that women were
"temperamentally unfit" for management (p. 198). Not only did managers regard women's proper role as mothers, but they also thought that motherhood ensured that women demonstrated certain biologically given characteristics, such as passivity and emotional instability, against male aggressiveness and rationality, which made them unfit for

managerial work (Moss Kanter 1977, 22). Developing Moss Kanter's themes, Acker (1990) has argued that while the bureaucratic organization of a company is symbolically constructed as rational and male, women and their bodies are seen as being outside this rational, male order. The hierarchical organization itself is seen as masculine, and women are viewed as symbolically liminal in it; the presence of women's bodies in these masculine, rational orders is a cultural transgression which is polluting and dangerous (Acker 1990, 152).
A structuration theorist employing Giddens's ontology would argue that this (patriarchal) system was reproduced by the instantiation of certain virtual rules (and resources) in practice so that male managers, informed by structure , repeat their exclusionary routines and thus contribute to the recreation of this masculinist system. Since rules exist virtually in structuration theory and are simply a system of differences or generalizable formulas, the rules which are the medium and outcome of managers' practices refer to the often-unacknowledged masculine culture which leads these men to exclude women from the office in often informal ways. These rules of masculinity orient the knowledgeable male manager so that he routinely acts in a way that ensures the reproduction of homosociality while excluding women from the highest bureaucratic levels. Thus, these virtual rules of masculinity are instantiated in certain practices such as sexual jokes, beer drinking, playing golf, and watching sport. By engaging in these routine practices, which both draw on and reproduce this structure , these individuals simultaneously unknowingly reproduce the patriarchal institution to which their particular structure is appropriate.
Although a structurationist would be correct to highlight the fact that it is the agency of these male managers which produces the patriarchal company, it is very difficult to see how we could describe such rules as "virtual" or marked by the absence of the subject. Although it is generally unnecessary for managers to acknowledge the understandings and practices that constitute their masculinity, their manliness is not something that is hidden from men. They recognize their own masculinity and their relations with other men more deeply and subtly than anyone. They are minutely aware of the nuances of masculine practices and are aware of the implications of certain forms of social practice for their relations with other men. They know what kinds of speech and practice are appropriate in their interrelations with other managers because they have an intimate knowledge of their shared notion of masculinity.
For instance, one of the central though often unacknowledged understandings of these men is that work provides men with a specific kind of masculine status that is central to their political and cultural standing in both the public and private domains. Men have excluded women from higher bureaucratic positions because they implicitly regard the entry of women into these grades as a profound threat to their political standing as men. Consequently, male managers have excluded women by interacting with their male colleagues in ways that make it very difficult for women to work in these organizations. It is the persistence of these deeply held and understood beliefs about masculinity and, therefore, about appropriate work mates that ensures the persistence of the patriarchal capitalist company. Yet, these beliefs are neither a "virtual system of difference" nor a set of generalizable formulas; rather, they a set of understandings and allied social practices which are agreed on but also constantly negotiated with other male managers. The feminist critique does not point to a structure of virtual differences or set of generalizable formulas. It is impossible to identify such rules. Rather, when Wajcman and Moss Kanter examine the exclusionary practices of men, they highlight these men's shared cultural understandings which inform these practices. They do not highlight something that was virtual nor do they need to because it is the unquestioned and assumed cultural values of these men which create the patriarchal company.
Moreover, it is not just that structure inappropriately obliterates the knowledgeability of male managers; it falsely obscures the inexorably social and interactive context in which homosociality occurs. Instead of focusing on the way that male managers exclude women through their interactions with each other and with women who work in the office, the structurationist vision operates with a falsely objectivist and individualist account of social reality. On the structurationist's account of social reality, the homosocial practices of the male manager are not learned and adapted in relations with other men but are imposed by means of structure so that the patriarchal system is reproduced through individual routines. Male managers instantiate a certain structure in their individual routines so that they contribute singly to the reproduction of this institution as a whole. Yet, this is not what actually occurs in the recreation of the patriarchal capitalist company. This patriarchal institution arises out of the relations and practices of masculinist managers and consists of the complex networks of relations between male managers. Each male manager in a capitalist company recreates his relations with the other male managers with whom he works and excludes the women whom he knows. The accumulation of all these particular interactions between male managers produces something we might loosely call the patriarchal capitalist system, but that system is nothing more than these particular networks of relations between managers. Male managers do not instantiate the fight structure in their practice so that their separate individual routines reproduce the system of patriarchy as whole. Rather, individuals contribute to particular networks of exclusion through their relations with other men informed by shared masculinist understandings. The persistence of the patriarchal company over a long duration is due to the fact that large numbers of male managers have agreed on these masculinist understandings and, consequently, acted in a particular way in relation o their male and female colleagues.
Despite Giddens's insistence on the importance of the concept of virtual structure to the explanation of social life, when we actually come to describe how these institutions endure through the practices of individuals, it is difficult to see what this concept contributes to our analysis of social life. When we look at the way men have consistently excluded women from managerial grades, we explain this exclusion by reference to the understanding of these men and their interactions with each other. All these individual practices which have produced networks of relations

between male managers over a long period of time and a large geographic area constitute the patriarchal structure of the capitalist company. The patriarchal company is just these networks of men. Male managers do not reproduce the system as a whole by the routine and individualistic instantiation of structure but produce exclusionary social networks through their meaningful interactions with other male managers. The hermeneutic account of social life embodied in the notion of practical consciousness is wholly sufficient to the explanation of the reproduction of social relations, and Giddens's discussion of structure is a superfluous excrescence which is incompatible with his avowed hermeneutic and Wittgensteinian intentions.
CONCLUSION
For all the erudition which Giddens displays, when applied to empirical analysis, structuration theory becomes a form of theoretical rococo, whose curlicues and arabesques we can admire but which actually does nothing; it does not explain social life. It does not support an empirical sociology or indeed even a coherent theoretical one.
Giddens's baroque structuration theory does not provide an explanation of social life because it presumes that the question which social theorists must answer, and which his entire theoretical project is proposed as solution, is how the individual is related to and reproduces an objective social system. To this end, Giddens postulates a bridging mechanism called " structure " that "binds" "time and space in social systems" (Giddens 1988, 64). Yet, this untenable and finally objectivist concept of structure would have been wholly unnecessary to Giddens had he recognized the implications of his Wittgensteinian notion of practical consciousness. Society does not consist of individuals who have to be bound to an objective system but only of the complex and meaningful social relations between individuals who draw on these mutual stocks of knowledge in their interactions. Consequently, on this hermeneutic or Winchian account of social reality, the concept of structure is supererogatory because individuals do not have to be bound to some objective entity beyond them. They only have to interact with each other. On this account, it is impossible to derogate the lay actor, for society consists only of lay actors knowledgeably interacting with other actors in complex networks, like the male managers who produce and reproduce homosocial companies by excluding women. On the ontology offered by practical consciousness (but not recognized by Giddens), there is no agencystructure problem but only a problem of the way individuals maintain and transform their relations with other individuals. Since structure is offered as a remedy to the putative dualism of objective society and the subjective individual when there is in fact no such dualism but only relations between individuals, Giddens's concept of structure is like a concoction peddled by medieval quacks that purports to be a cure for something that is not a disease. We do not need to explain how individuals reproduce or are bound to an objective system but only how they interact with one another. Consequently, Giddens's attempt to revive the lay actor by means of structure is predicated on a false diagnosis about the nature of society and has ironically resulted in the accidental and wholly unnecessary death of the lay actor.
I am grateful to Barry Barnes, Nigel Pleasants, and two anonymous referees at Philosophy of the Social Sciences for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this article.
NOTES
(n1.) I omit discussion of resources here, except to say that since by resources Giddens means the rules of allocation and authority rather the materials or power themselves, they can be subsumed under his notion of rules.
(n2.) As Archer (e.g., 1982) has noted, Giddens problematically conflates the "system" and the individual at certain key moments in structuration theory to explain systemic reproduction.
(n3.) For reasons of space, it is impossible to show that Giddens is far from alone in appealing to the idea of transcendental templates in the production and reproduction of society. It might be noted that Bourdieu's notion of the habitus (1977, 78, 84, 85) and Harre's notion of template structures (1979, 131-32) are important contemporary examples of the kinds of claims that could be submitted to the criticisms made here.
(n4.) If the Oedipus myth were really a tale about the cultural contradictions of the overestimation and underestimation of kinship ties and whether humanity was autochthonous, the classical Greeks would have to recognize this fact (Levi-Strauss 1977, 214-15).
(n5.) Stephen Turner (1994) has made some interesting arguments against the concepts like that of Giddens's structure , which he somewhat misleadingly has called "the theory of practices," which have some echoes here. In particular, he points to something which he calls the transmission problem (chapter 4), in which he points to the fact that if individuals were genuinely unaware of some practices, as he calls it, or structure , as Giddens calls it, they could not teach it to other individuals and to new generations (see also Schatzki 1997).
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By Anthony King, Exeter University
Anthony King is a lecturer in sociology at Exeter University. He is presently involved in a research project,
"Football and Post-National Identity in the New Europe,' which builds on his book, The End of the Terraces: The
Transformation of English Football in the 1990s, published by Leicester University Press in 1998. His work on social theory includes articles on Jean Baudrillard, Margaret Archer, and Roy Bhaskar.
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Source: Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Sep2000, Vol. 30 Issue 3, p362, 22p.
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