Structure vs. agency revisited
First, let’s go back a few years, when I was on my 3rd year in the university. One of our courses was methodology in political sciences, and one topic was the two different views of the world, one based on structures, such as institutions, and the other on agency, like individuals and actors.
So, I returned to the past, but why? William Dutton from the Oxford Internet Institute visited Helsinki to make observations about his new article on research-centered computational networks. However, what I thought to be more interesting was the difference he made on networked institutions and networked individuals.
The more Internet orientated social scientists had a meeting before Dutton gave his presentation, and we went trough what we study and how the OII functions. Dutton made an observation that in e-democracy field research tends to focus on networked institutions.
With networked institutions, Dutton meant maintaining and empowering the existing structures with the capabilities of computer networks. An example of this might be the university, which maintains its academic status by creating institutional support services, such as blogs, document repositories, …
However, as I understood it, Dutton’s argument was that information and communication technology could go further and redistribute the power currently held in the structures. As the Web enables one to publish and collaborate without the middleman, Dutton’s idea is that individuals should be studied as part of the networking society too.
In terms of e-democracy research, some terms already cover these topics. New social movement is the most obvious for me: it studies how humans group together and act on a common cause, but they are not organized as an institution. Concept ‘reflective action’ can also be used to describe the phenomena: reflective actors use network technology to advocate their agenda. However, as Dutton observed, lots of effort goes to understanding and prototyping the use of technology for institutions, the existing structures – not focusing on re-inventing new systems that could allow more direct responsibility.
This is just one sample of the structure vs. agency-fight, ongoing in the social sciences. And, as in most cases, this is not a black-white question; rather there are grey colors too. So, both of these views of the world have explanatory powers, and in the best case they should be used together to create a more complete picture. And the presentation was a good reminder for me of the methodology lecture I had totally forgotten.
Tags: institutions, internet, network society, research, society