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Sociologist Anthony Giddens adopted a post-empiricist frame for his theory, as he was concerned with the abstract characteristics of social relations. [according to whom?] This leaves each level more accessible to analysis via the ontologies which constitute the human social experience: space and time ("and thus, in one sense, 'history'").
Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens MAE (born 18 January 1938) is an English sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists and is the author of at least 34 books, published in at least 29 languages, issuing on average more than one book every year.
The introduction of this concept served a double purpose: to reassess sociology as a science of the present (moving beyond the early-20th-century conceptual framework), and to provide a counterbalance to the postmodernist paradigm offering a re-constructive view alongside deconstruction.
For Giddens, an agent's common interaction with structure, as a system of norms, is described as structuration. The term reflexivity is used to refer to the ability of an agent to consciously alter his or her place in the social structure; thus globalization and the emergence of the 'post-traditional' society might be said to allow for "greater ...
The double hermeneutic is the theory, expounded by sociologist Anthony Giddens, that everyday "lay" concepts and those from the social sciences have a two-way relationship. [1] A common example is the idea of social class , a social-scientific category that has entered into wide use in society.
According to the British sociologist Anthony Giddens, a risk society is "a society increasingly preoccupied with the future (and also with safety), which generates the notion of risk", [3] whilst the German sociologist Ulrich Beck defines it as "a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself".
Giddens's analysis, in this respect, closely parallels Jacques Derrida's deconstruction of the binaries that underlie classic sociological and anthropological reasoning (notably the universalizing tendencies of Lévi-Strauss's structuralism). Bourdieu's practice theory also seeks a more subtle account of social structure as embedded in, rather ...
In the duality, the agency has much more influence on its lived environment than past structuralist theory had granted. The key to Giddens' explanation is his focus on the knowledgeability of the agent and the fact that the agency cannot exist or be analysed separately from its structure. They can only exist as a duality.