Structures and structuration. Several recent posts have focused on new thinking about how to characterize "agency".
Much of that thinking is aimed at dissolving the distinction between agency and structure. So what remains to be said about "structure"? Has the structure side of the debate developed much in the past decade or so? Organising and Disorganising - Blackwell Bookshop Online. There are five ways of organising: the hierarchical, the egalitarian, the individualistic, the fatalistic and the autonomous.
Each approach is a way of disorganising the other four: without the other four, it would have nothing to organise itself against. In Organising and Disorganising, Michael Thompson gives a detailed explanation of the dynamics of these five fundamental arrangements that underlie 'Cultural Theory'. We may believe that our perspective is the right one and that any interaction with opposing views is a messy and unwelcome contradiction. So why should egalitarians engage with individualists, or hierachists with egalitarians? Using a range of examples and analogies, the author shows how the best outcomes depend upon an essential argumentative process, which encourages subversions that are constructive whilst discouraging those that are not. Michael Thompson. Beyond boom and bust. Swinging between the regulations of government and the excesses of the market has proven flaws, says Michael Thompson.
Here he outlines how cultural theory can offer a new economic paradigm "It’s déja vu all over again," Yogi Berra once declared, and many of those who have now experienced the credit crunch and its subsequent financial and economic turmoil will be inclined to agree with him.