Getting to Know Giddens: Structuration as an Ontological Framework

Abstract

Traditional approaches to educational research have viewed teachers as either the primary determinants of their actions in the classroom, or as subjects whose actions are mostly directed by social structural forces beyond their control. This has, in effect, compartmentalised educational research findings into two groups; those that address subjective factors and those that address objective factors. During the 1970s, Anthony Giddens expressed the potential of such objective and subjective factors to interrelate to direct human action in his theory of structuration. Giddens proposed that social practices arise from structure and agency phenomena that are not only dependent on each other, but that are also so interrelated that they actually presupposed one another. Based on this ‘duality of structure and agency’, structuration provides an ontological framework for social interaction that reflects a dynamic interplay between structure and agency. Research guided by such an ontological framework has the potential to expose perspectives and ideas about the interplay of structure and agency within an educational setting that may otherwise have been masked by more traditional approaches. This chapter reviews Giddens’ theory of structuration as it has been represented and reported in the literature. The principles of structuration are explained and related to the field of educational research.