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The final two chapters in Part One investigate the evolving research agenda of the English School of International Relations and its contribution to contemporary international relations. In this chapter, the author explores what may be described as the ‘new agenda’ in English School thinking about world politics. He begins by briefly tracing the long history of the concept of international society, noting how it has become synonymous with the English School despite the fact that other paradigms have also made use of the term. He moves on to reiterate one of the central claims of the first part of this book: that the English School and the concept of international society have been propelled to the forefront of contemporary debates about world politics by important sociological and normative developments in mainstream international relations in North America. He then identifies four core and as yet unsolved ‘puzzles’ that will frame the English School's new agenda as it continues to develop; these are the relationship between agency and structure, the boundaries between international society and world society, the moral basis of international society, and the tension between forces of society and hierarchy in contemporary world politics.

Analyzes the causes, organization, and impact of wartime migration during and since Mozambique's recent civil war (1977–1992), in order to challenge theories that establish categorizations of migration based on the degree of its ‘forcedness’. It demonstrates how predominant demographic theories of forced migration rest on a highly reductionist model of decision‐making that fails adequately to examine actor agency and the social and cultural factors that inform agency in acute crisis contexts. It also challenges theoretical models of so‐called ‘forced migration’ that privilege the analysis of macro‐political factors in explaining the causes and organization of wartime movement. Arguing that displacement must be examined in historical perspective, this study shows how migration had long been a strategy deployed by actors in central Mozambique in a variety of local‐level social struggles over the rights and obligations that defined social relationships. These culturally defined, and ‘micro‐level’ social struggles also shaped wartime migration in ways that ultimately resulted in a highly gendered wartime population distribution. This study focuses, in particular, on how struggles over the gendered configuration of power relations within marriage affected wartime and post‐conflict migration through the development of new forms of ‘transnationalized’ polygyny. Finally, this study proposes steps towards developing alternative theoretical approaches to the study of crisis migration.

Sociologists and anthropologists always have a sense of unease over what education is doing to society. Does education really make any difference? Or is it only reproducing inequality? And how can one know the answer? This chapter highlights some of the ways in which recent social theory can help us grapple with these questions. This chapter evaluates the notion that education leads to the reproduction of inequality in society, culture, and economy, and examines the roles played by structure and agency. It argues that a literal interpretation of the reproduction thesis is misleading, and suggests that a more nuanced understanding—with a more differentiated conceptual treatment—is needed. This author identifies the ways by which social theory can help illuminate the role of education in inequality, and discusses the views of Margaret Archer and Anthony Giddens who integrated systemic theorizing with the play of individual agency. In conclusion, the author suggests that we need a vision that encapsulates a wider view of the concrete roles, groups, and processes in society. Only then may one begin to address the question of whether education is making any difference at all.

This chapter presents the “Analysis of Determinants of Policy Impact” (ADEPT) model, an approach to policy analysis in health promotion that is easy-to-use, parsimonious, and empirically tested. The ADEPT model is based on a theory of action that has been adapted to the organizational and policy level. This chapter discusses the ADEPT model with regards to theories that have been developed specifically to explain the policy process and to the structure/agency debate that is going on in health promotion. It concludes with a discussion of the potential of ADEPT for those engaged in policy development and in policy analysis, emphasizing its versatility and its embedded conception of the process underlying policy development.

This chapter explains the objectives, theoretical framework, literature review, scope of research, methods of research, and chapterisation of this study. This study adopts a combination of Anthony Giddens’s structure-agency theory as well as Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and field as a framework for examining the strategies and tactics that Chinese Indonesians adopt to safeguard their business and personal interests as well as their ethnic and cultural identities in the post-Suharto era. Medan and Surabaya were selected as field sites for this study because both cities are economically and politically significant. Moreover, there are certain interesting contrasts in regard to their Chinese populations. The methods used in this research are library research, individual interviews, and participant observation.

Chapter 2 reviews how International Relations (IR) scholarship has been treating individual agency, especially within the dominant theoretical frameworks, Realism, Liberalism, and Constructivism. Various analytical perspectives, such as the “levels-of-analysis,” foreign policy analysis, and the transnational relations approach, have reserved room for the analysis of individuals in world politics. But concerns about academic discipline formation and real-world relevance have led to a widespread neglect of individual actors. While James Rosenau’s research and the integration of social theory into IR offer fruitful ways of thinking about individual agency, they often overemphasize the structural situatedness of actors fulfilling social roles. Revisiting the structure–agency debate, the chapter takes inspiration from Margaret Archer’s sociological insights in order to propose that agency should be analyzed as a variable with an intrasubjective and an intersubjective dimension, which always requires contextual specification. Power, it is argued, should be seen as a disposition, and its exercise vis-à-vis other actors as an intentional project.

This chapter is primarily concerned with individuals, households, and larger groups. It reviews the character and impact of difference in housing, followed by a section on how people relate to the home, as well as their housing strategies. The chapter summarises some socioeconomic and demographic trends, and notes the constraints that are bearing upon households. It also reviews the agency/structure relationships that were introduced in Chapter One.

Social network analysis offers a methodology and set of analytical tools to operationalize notions of structured agency. By outlining a network-based approach that emphasizes relations between entities as the unit of analysis, this chapter considers the ways that structure, agency, and power articulate and cross-cut diverse political and geographic boundaries. To demonstrate this approach, it examines how different rhetorical statements characterize the political strategies of Maya rulers and contribute to the definition of political boundaries in the Classic period. It suggests that political manoeuvring and power-building strategies can be empirically evaluated by focusing on the ways that Classic Maya rulers positioned themselves and expressed their relationship to others through the documentary record.

This chapter is concerned with the intersection of ethnicity, class, and gender, and the impact of labour market initiatives in Coventry. It is noted that Coventry went through a period of rapid structural change. The discussion studies two major themes from a structure-agency perspective: access to the labour market and the transformative potential of community-based initiatives (CBIs). CBIs are defined as outreach schemes that are based on voluntary participation aimed at improving the supply-side employability of disadvantaged people. The chapter first examines the broader structural context in Coventry, and then studies the selected initiatives and how they were perceived by the recipients.

This chapter presents the theoretical background that informs its research, and discusses, generally, how the political organization of states and empires can structure health outcomes. For example, tribute demands in foodstuffs by imperial elites may negatively impact the nutritional status of tribute communities, and the promotion of violence as a tool for imperial expansion may lead to increased injuries and premature death, as well as the creation of a military class. The author discusses how individuals and communities may affect imperial policies and practices, arguing that the path of influence is not solely top-down, but that the practices and their biocultural outcomes are mediated. The chapter closes with an extended discussion of violence and its use in imperial agendas, and with a more general discussion of the various social contexts in which violence may emerge.

We outline our current thinking on the processes associated with desistance from crime. This work, conducted as part of the theoretical apparatus of a fifth sweep of interviews with a cohort of ex-probationers originally interviewed for the first time in the late 1990s—but which, by implication holds lessons for those researching people leaving prison—is an attempt to build an account of the processes which help to shape the speed, nature, and direction of an individual’s efforts to avoid further offending. In it we develop an account of desistance that draws on thinking about macro-level structures and meso-level influences whilst retaining sufficient room for individual agency.

This chapter provides an overview of academic debates around the role of structure, culture, and agency in understanding the reproduction of poverty. It is argued that the recent “cultural turn” in poverty studies continues to construct drugs, gangs, violence, and early parenthood as central narratives in the lives of poor black and brown youth, while it privileges middle-class cultural norms. In doing so, scholars ignore the trajectories of youth who continuously struggle to become upwardly mobile. Families, romantic ties, and institutions of school and work function in paradoxical ways in the lives of marginalized youth—providing support while creating impediments as youth are forced to figure out a complex mobility puzzle while piecing together the scant resources available to them. This chapter also highlights how expansion of higher education and the service industry shapes educational and occupational trajectories of marginalized youth. It concludes with a discussion on issues of fieldwork and methodology.

This chapter examines how HBOS staff were coping with and making sense of rapid organisational change during the early days of merger. But more specifically, using material from staff training courses, it looks at how the Bank, like other modern organisations, develops its own internal discourse of the necessity and value of change, as a kind of moral imperative imposed on staff. Moreover, it looks at how the discourse of change within HBOS tended to construct Bank of Scotland as older and backward, and Halifax as younger and progressive, and the ideological work this was doing. The concept of ‘social change’ is scrutinised in the middle section, along with corollary concepts of competition, social structure and agency.

Chapter 1 outlines the key principles that guide interview-based research and highlights the unique contributions this can yield. Conducting depth interviews places each participant’s voice at the heart of the study, giving participants an opportunity to tell their stories in their own words and to think more deeply about their experiences than is usually possible with other methods. Through careful questioning, concentrated listening, and focused follow-up probing, interviewers invite further exploration that encourages people to share their life experiences, describe the social contexts surrounding these experiences, and consider their personal reactions to them, including the meaning they attribute to life events and the accounts, motivations, and actions these events engender. Then, through systematic analysis of how each piece of information stands in relationship to the other information offered by that participant and all the others, it becomes possible to chart the dynamic processes that shape life trajectories and link individual actions to larger social structures. This enables interviewers to address their original question(s) and any new ones that emerge to discover empirical patterns and develop theoretical insights.

This chapter briefly revisits the structure/agency dilemma before turning to a call to rethink the “at risk” framing of inner-city youth—as potential parents, drug users and dealers, gang members, and perpetrators of violence—that often shapes both public policies and the experiences of the youth. It then frames how to think about service jobs and also provides policy recommendations focusing on what can be done at the local level to facilitate young people’s transition to college and their retention once they are there, arguing for a need to provide sustained support in the face of persistent marginalization.

This chapter provides an overview of the political economic forces that created a precarious situation for one of the main characters of the book, Ramón García. It discusses how migrants from the interior of Mexico came to relocate to Tijuana and what happened once they encountered the economic opportunities present in the borderlands. The chapter also discusses the migration and labor-market strategies that people use and the social networks that people form in the borderlands to help to construct their livelihood options. It includes an examination of the broader theoretical issues of border regulation and national status, as exemplified by official documentation, such as passports.

After examining paradigmatic views on the relationship between trade shows and their underlying economic geographies, based on the structure–agency debate in the social sciences, this chapter proposes a two-way model of reciprocal influences between trade show specialization and territorial specialization. On the one hand, trade show specialization depends upon the characteristics of firms located in the local catchment basin, the hosting areas' image and cultural heritage, and the national institutional set-up. On the other hand, trade shows impact hosting areas by generating local economic impacts and regional development, facilitating the establishment of vertical pipelines with non-local business, and by contributing to the reproduction of national specialization patterns. The chapter also discusses how the link between trade shows and territories is stronger in some phases of the trade show lifecycle than in others, and for certain types of trade shows in contrast to others, thus emphasizing the need for a contextual analysis.