Structural Constraint And Human Agency Analysis

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Recommended: Structure and agency

Melissa Franco
Professor Lum
Media and society
4 October 2016
Structural constraint and Human agency
The structural constraint is the capacity someone can have to make a decision having in mind the political, economic, social and cultural elements. An example of structural constraint could be a black man historically prohibited from accessing some of America’s buildings or businesses and women being paid different wages. The structural constraint is the fact that you are incapable of going to space in this moment because we don't have great economic resources. When we hear structure they mean the “stable arrangement of institutions whereby human beings in a society interact and live together” (Media and the Social World, Chapter 1, p.21). …show more content…

There is a relationship between Human Agency and Structural constraint that some people are not aware of. The structure is referring to the connection between different types of groups such as social forces, institutions, and many other elements of social structure that can modify the behavior, experience or choice. Meanwhile, Agency is the power or the ability people have to think for themselves and act in ways that can modify their own experiences and life path. Agency is planned and it's also an unproven human …show more content…

Berger and Thomas Luckmann exposed in their Social Construction of Reality in 1966, the relationships between structure and agency as a debate. Society creates the people who make society gradually forming a continuous cycle. James Samuel Coleman from the Coleman boat gives a link about macro-sociological phenomena and their individual behavior. A macro-level phenomenon is known as establishing certain actions by individuals, this resulted in an eventual macro-level phenomenon. When he mentioned Individual action it was taken as a reference to a macro-sociological structure, and this particular action done by many individuals resulted as a modification to that macro structure. This is one of the most regular discussions in sociology because it infers the relative dilemma of agency versus structure. First of all, individual people tend to have a great ability for acting without constraints by a superior or larger social structure. As a matter of fact, some people argue that social systems don't exist in reality. If social systems did exist in the certain fashion, it was only for one purpose: free human agents.This debate can be seen by different kinds of people and they will all see the different aspects of it, allowing them to have their own respectable opinion and point of

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