British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

 

BA PDF Symposium 2004: Abstracts

21 April 2004

Dr Stephen Kemp

Critiquing the Structure/Agency Divide: A Post-Positivist Approach

This paper considers the relevance of post-positivist accounts of natural science for sociological investigation. One of the most important themes to emerge from post-positivist analysis of natural science is the idea that natural scientific inquiry is a dynamic process in which theories are transformed to deal with problems and inconsistencies in their accounts of the natural world. Writers such as Laudan and Shapere have argued that any element of a theoretical structure may be reconstructed in order to resolve such problems. Factual claims, substantive theories, and theoretical presuppositions may all be transformed in the process of inquiry.

Having outlined these post-positivist arguments, the paper then considers their bearing on theoretical debates in sociology, focusing particularly on the structure/agency debate. It draws on the work of Holmwood and Stewart in Explanation and Social Theory to argue that the division of substantive sociological analyses into structure and agency components acts as a blockage to social scientific inquiry. This is because this division can be called on by sociological thinkers to deny that there are problems or inconsistencies in their accounts, instead suggesting that any lack of fit between their accounts and the social world can be attributed to the agency of the social actors being analysed. The paper concludes that a mode of sociological inquiry informed by post-positivist arguments would avoid invoking the structure/agency division in its analysis.

Dr Stephen Kemp is in the third year of his Postdoctoral Fellowship, based at the Department of Sociology, University of Sussex. He is working on a monograph that explores the relevance of post-positivist philosophy of science for debates within social theory, particularly those addressing the status of social scientific knowledge and the relation between social inquirers and their lay audience. He has published articles in journals such as History of the Human Sciences and Philosophy of the Social Sciences.