2017

Research Essay
PRACTICE THEORIES AND THE STRUCTURE-AGENCY DEBATE.
CARLOS RAMOS GARCIA. AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY. JULY, 2017

CARLOS RAMOS GARCIA. AUSTRALIAN NATIONAL UNIVERSITY. JULY, 2017

The structure-agency debate .................................................................................................................. 3

The structure-agency antinomy in IR theories ................................................................................... 4

Practice theory: the focus on practice .................................................................................................... 8

Bourdieu’s contribution .................................................................................................................... 11

Some criticisms and ongoing work ................................................................................................... 14

References ............................................................................................................................................ 17
Introduction

Practice theory, in its attempt to integrate structural and agential accounts of world politics,

represents a decisive step forward in understanding international relations. This essay

presents a view of how practice theory provides useful insights to this discussion. The

contribution of practice theory is better understood in contrast with other International

Theory (IR) approaches to the structure-agency debate. Therefore, I will summarize the

limitation of other IR theories approach and then I will focus on two contributions of

practice theory. Firstly, the insight of introducing the concept/vocabulary of practice as a

mediator between structure and agency by establishing the logic of practicality as prior to

the logic of representations. Secondly, I will recapitulate the contribution of Pierre Bourdieu

and summarize how his concepts of habitus and field propose a vocabulary of heuristics to

validate the claim that there is not an antinomy but a continuity between agency and

structure.
The structure-agency debate

The structure-agency debate is implicitly or explicitly pervasive in theoretical accounts of

social life, and international relations is not an exception. “All social scientific theories

embody an at least implicit solution to the agent structure problem which situates agents

and social structure in relation to each other” (Wendt 1987).

Structure is the recurrent pattern of arrangements that influence or limit the choices and

opportunities available to agents. It is a matrix of opportunities and constrains. Agency is the

capacity of individual or organizational agents to act independently and to make their own

free choices (Barker 2003). Put simply, the debate on structure and agency in social sciences

revolves around the question of whether human (or also non-human) agents have the ability

to act without any consideration of the structure in which they operate, or if the structure

always determines the choices of such agents. There are also attempts to bridge this

dichotomy.

Various influential IR theories like neorealism and neoliberalism hold the belief that what we

understand by international politics is largely determined by the overall structure of the

international arena (third image or level of analysis) and that the perceived agency of human

or organizational agents can be explained by the action of this structure. In contrast, other

well-established approaches (e.g. interactionism) emphasize the role of agency in the

creation of the world. Other theorists of IR like Wendt see structure and agency as

complementary forces and try to bridge the two approaches through a concept that he

defined as “structuration”.

Constructivism has the merit of highlighting the structure vs. agency dilemma for the field of

IR and broader audiences. It was Alexander Wendt who defined the problem for the IR

discipline based on “two truisms about social life” (Wendt 1987):

reproduce or transform the society in which they live; and

2) society is made up of social relationships, which structure the interactions between their

purposeful actors.

Taken together these truisms suggest that human agents and social structures are, in one

way or another, theoretically interdependent or mutually implicating entities (Wendt 1987).

The structure-agency antinomy in IR theories

Wendt also referred to the two interrelated problems of the ontological and epistemological

biases underlying the debate. Depending on where the ontological priority is placed, the

answer to the structure-agency debate is shaped to support structuralism or individualism,

or (according to Wendt) structuration theory. Making the structure the ontologically

primitive unit of analysis is the landmark of structuralism, while doing so with agency is the

approach of individualism and agential accounts of social action. Wendt opted to give both

equal ontological status to propose his structuration theory. The way that these ontological

issues are addressed conditions the epistemological approach to the debate (Wendt 1987).

However, as Wendt recognizes, there is not a self-evident basis upon which it is possible to

build any of these ontological choices, which brings the debate to an impasse impossible to

overcome (Wight 2006).

Where such ontological assumptions come from? Generally, IR theories build their systems

by borrowing ontological and epistemological assumptions from their philosophical parents.

Indeed, as Wight asserts, the ontological furniture of IR is taken to be self-evident (Wight

2006). In this regard, it is relevant to stress the impact that positivism and neo-positivism

have had on the development of important IR theories by conditioning their “ontological

furniture”.
Despite the fact that apparently opposed IR theories like neoliberalism and neorealism differ

in terms of their normative conclusions, the same ontological and epistemological biases

underpin their assumptions. For example, in the case of the structure and agency dilemma,

neoliberals and neorealists both regard the formulation of the problem as an “either

structure or agency” dichotomy based on an ontology more or less taken for granted (and

then choosing to place the ontological priority on the structure of the international system).

However, an approach based on prioritizing the ontological substance means that the agent-

structure problem is one where there can be no overarching or definite solution (Wight

2006). Maybe in this case, as the old adage suggests, it is not possible to solve a problem

with the same mindset that created it in first place. When all what we have is a hammer,

everything looks like a nail. Positivist and neo-positivist epistemological and ontological

choices are determining factors for the conclusions that most IR theoretical framework

arrives at. They have shaped the way in which problems are chosen, formulated and

approached. For major proponents of these theories, positivism is equivalent to science.

The scientific method shared by these theories has determined an approach that sees the

world through a series of antinomies including the so-called agency-structure problem.

Thanks to the influence of positivism, “[c]ontemporary social science is structured by a series

of seemingly irresolvable antinomies: individualism versus collectivism, constructivism

versus realism, objectivism versus subjectivism, materialism versus idealism, mind versus

matter, macro versus micro, and agency versus structure.” (…) As such, the (agency-

structure) problem “can be cast in the guise of a Cartesian–Kantian two-world problem,

where mind and body, noumena and phenomena, agents and structures are seen as distinct

realms, each generating its own particular epistemological and methodological problem-sets

and/or resolutions. The world of agents is the subjective realm of individual choice, whereas

structure refers to an objective realm of impersonal forces. Once this mode of thinking is

accepted, the need for two separate and irreconcilable modes of inquiry seems self-
evident“ (Wight 2006). These theories suffer from a representational bias in that they focus

on what agents think about instead of what they think from (Pouliot 2008). For them, theory

isolates a realm in order to deal with it intellectually. A mental picture is a simplified

representation. To display important causes and effects, the picture has to omit most of

everything that goes on.

Therefore, many IR theorists, taking for granted that a theory has to build abstract models of

reality to represent “natural” laws (as natural sciences successfully did), automatically

assume the antinomy of structure and agency as a given, and focus on relations of causality

between them. After all, it seems a natural course of action. After creating such a model of

how the world works (a model of the interaction of the elements chosen by the observer),

that the question that follows is how the parts or agents that constitute such model interact

with the whole and vice versa.

H. Bull exposed the limitations of the scientific approach. He showed how such approach

denies the importance of judgement, and it is not able to achieve actual progress. The

models constructed by such an approach are dangerous and can slips easily into a

dogmatism that empirical generalization does not allow. There is a political dimension in any

theory and is not possible or wise to build models of reality as if they are in a vacuum. Bull

recognized the need for an approach that was not ahistorical and was capable of self-

critique. However, critical theorists were the ones that pushed further in a search for a more

self-conscious theory. As Cox puts it, critical theory shows that theory is always for someone,

and for some purpose (Cox 1981).

Critical theory presents structural accounts of power while at the same time emphasizing a

utopic aspiration to emancipatory change. While positivist IR theories proposed that

structure is always prior to power relations (i.e. self-help imperative as external to history,

and prior to politics) critical approaches rejected the notion that social structures were
apolitical or the result of natural laws. Cox characterized critical theories as different from

“problem solving” theories and emphasized their focus on change: “critical theory, unlike

problem solving theory, does not take institutions and social and power relations for granted

but calls them into question by concerning itself with the origins and how and whether they

might be in the process of changing”. Even so, critical theorists did not manage to propose a

robust theory of the dynamic relations between their description of structures of power and

the agency that drives the change. Further, on in this essay I will discuss how practice

theories achieves an interpretation of the relationship between change and order.

Other theories like Wendt’s constructivism, were critical of the positivist approach, and tried

to overcome the dualism of structure and agency by pointing to the ontological link between

them. For Wendt “the goal of structurationist ontologies is to replace the ‘dualism’ of agency

and social structure that pervades individualist and collectivist ontologies with a perspective

that recognizes the ‘codetermined irreducibility’ of these two fundamental units of social

analysis (Wendt and Duvall 1989). However, while identifying the ontological link between

structural determinism and agency, Wendt’s structuration theory did not overcome the

problem from the methodological standpoint. Trying to build a bridge between rationalist

and relativist theories of international relations, he declared his approach as

methodologically positivist and did not manage to offer robust accounts of the interplay

between agency and structure. As a result, structuration theory amounted to only a

restatement of the problem (Palan 2000), and was only a description of social life that failed

to provide basis for a theoretical explanation (Hollis and Smith 1990).

Finally, practice theory proposes an interpretative outlook that searches for meaning rather

than trying to affirm natural laws in the positivist sense. Like critical theories, it exposes the

“intellectualist” bias that encourages the researcher to observe social life as a spectacle

rather than as a series of concrete situations that require being navigated as such.
Furthermore, practice theory offers heuristics that allow for decisive steps forward in

understanding international politics in concrete situations and not relying on abstracts

models of the reality. Practice theory responded to the need for understanding international

politics instead of creating representations of it. As Pouliot asserts in Adler-Nissen 2012, “the

social world necessitated an interpretive outlook that searched for meaning rather than

trying to affirm natural laws” and “forces the researcher to recognize that rational scientific

criteria are themselves a product of an intellectual history, rather than a primordial

essence.” (Adler-Nissen 2012). That outlook is what practice theories bring to IR.

Practice theory: the focus on practice

Practice theories emphasize heuristic descriptions of process over static representational

concepts of reality. How things happen are more important that any abstraction

representing what things are. Practice theorists hence prefer to focus on “ordering” instead

of order, “structuring” instead of structure, and “knowing” instead of knowledge. By

prioritizing processes over substance, practice theory also takes the contribution of critical

theories a step further and prioritizes an ontology of relations over separateness.

Consequently, it offers an interpretation of international relations that bypasses the

distinction between antinomian static concepts like agency and structure (Guillaume 2007),

(Bueger and Gadinger 2015).

According to Sherry Ortner, practice theory seeks to explain the relationship “between

human action, on the one hand, and some global entity which we call 'the system' on the

other." (Ortner 1984). However, practice theorists seek "to do justice to the practical nature

of action by rooting human activity in a nonrepresentational stratum” (Schatzki 1997).

In this way practice theory establishes the ontological priority of the logic of practicality over

the logic imposed by representational knowledge. By bringing the focus from the abstract
realm of grant theories to the concrete social world of the logic of practicality, practice

theory dissolves the irresolvable antinomy of structure and agency. Instead of looking at the

model of the world based on antinomies, it looks at the actual world and wrestles what is

going on there. What is going on there is the struggle of the daily practice. In this attempt to

understand the ways humans create their social relations and to what extent social relations

create humans challenge ontological conventions that underpin traditional accounts of

agency and structure.

Practice theory resets the formulation of the problem by proposing a new vocabulary based

on relations instead of substance. Hence it is appropriate to say that practice theory’s

approach dissolves the problem (instead of proposing a solution for a problem that arguably

only exist on paper), by shifting the vocabulary of static representations of structure and

agency, to one that accounts for the dynamics of a relational ontology. The vocabulary of

practice theory is one that stresses cultural contingency and historicity much more than the

textualism or mentalist accounts (Bueger and Gadinger 2015) of international politics. Such

vocabulary shows that the dichotomy was arbitrarily set in first place. The real world is the

word of practice and practice theory vocabulary focuses on this real world, not on abstract

models.

The concept of practice is a mediator of structure and agency itself, as are other important

concepts of practice theory like habitus and field. The vocabulary contains the structure-

agency problem but offer a different heuristic point of entry to the debate. For example,

Ortner sustains that "…every usage of the term 'practice' presupposes a question of the

relationship between practice and structure." (Ortner 1989). In this sense, practice is a

mediator of the relationship between the subjectivity of international actors and their

actions, and the objective conditions where those actions are possible. The vocabulary of
habitus and field is also more useful than the use of structure and agency, as Bourdieu

showed.

As such, practice theory not only has a significant contribution to make to academic research

in IR, but also to the day-to-day practice of international politics. The work of practice

theorist like Bourdieu “allows us to explore how people create international relations in

their daily activities” and “helps us to take the discursive, visual and embodied practices in

international politics more seriously” (Adler-Nissen 2012).

For practice theorists the international sphere occurs in the practices of diplomats,

terrorists, international organizations, economic actors and all other organizational or

individual agents. In other worlds, the social occurs in the practice. This allows practice

theorists to understand order (or structure) not as a deterministic structure of power, but as

reproduction: “social order is thus basically social reproduction” (Reckwitz 2002) by means

of practice. As practice is the repetition of patterns, agency is then a process of “ordering”

(hence the appropriateness of using the verb instead of the noun “order”). This approach

allows for an understanding of continuity (reproduction of structures by actions of agency)

and change (innovation by actions of agency) as a continuum, something which is not

possible using the static vocabulary of the agency-structure antinomy (Bueger and Gadinger

2014). The “world is filled not, in the first instance, with facts and observations, but with

agency (Pickering 1995). The world is “continually doing things” (Pickering 1995).

The role of change is a major challenge in practice theories, and specifically its role in

international relations remains one of the main tasks for the future of international practice

theory (Bueger and Gadinger 2014). Nevertheless, in the process of resolving the tension

between reproduction of order and change, practice theory suggests a paradigmatic shift in

resolving the structure-agency problem that critical theories did not achieve (reference).
Bourdieu’s contribution

Practice theory is strongly associated with Pierre Bourdieu’s work and his praxeological

conceptual apparatus seems adaptable to IR research (Bueger and Gadinger 2014). IR

categories such as strategy, conflicts, and culture appear to correspond to Bourdieu’s key

concepts of habitus, field and capital (Adler-Nissen 2012). Both Bourdieu and IR traditional

theories are concerned with power relations. Despite his work being primarily focused on

domestic European societies, the theoretical concepts of Bourdieu deeply question a

number of key assumptions in IR. One of his mayor theoretical contributions has been his

insights for the structure-agency debate.

Bourdieu dissolves the agency–structure problem and offers an epistemological position

representing what some have seen as a middle ground between objectivist and

interpretative research traditions (Adler-Nissen 2012). He had the conviction that “of all of

the oppositions that artificially divide social science, the most fundamental, and the most

ruinous, is the one that is set up between subjectivism and objectivism” (Bourdieu 1990). In

fact, “the world according to Bourdieu is one where our familiar metaphysical dualisms

dissolve” (Adler-Nissen 2012).With this mindset, he was able to present an ontological

synthesis of the structure-agency antinomy, by employing his notion of habitus and field.

The concepts of habitus and field are the two pillars upon which Bourdieu’s theoretical

platform of relational ontology rests. Habitus is a “system of lasting, transposable

dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of

perceptions, appreciations, and actions” (Bourdieu 1972). The field on the other hand, is a

social space structured along three principal dimensions: power relations, objects of

struggle, and the rules taken for granted within the field (Pouliot 2008). The field is a power

structure determined by different forms of capital (such as economic, social, cultural, and

symbolic) and particular rules of the game or “doxa”.

structure and agent because it shows the continuity between the objective and subjective

aspects of social life. Habitus acts as an intermediary element that expresses the continuity

(Bueger and Gadinger 2014). Pouliot (Pouliot 2008) summarizes habitus in four dimensions

as follows:

1. habitus is to be understood historically and is marked by individual and collective

trajectories;

2. it relies on the internalization of practical, tacit knowledge learned by doing, that is,

from direct experience in and with the world;

3. habitus is a relational term, that is, collective dispositions are gathered through

embodied traces of inter-subjective interactions;

4. habitus is dispositional in the sense that it does not determine actions mechanically,

but rather initiates distinct courses of action.

Habitus can be understood as the actors’ practical sense of implicit rules on how to behave

(or what Bourdieu calls doxa) in relation to a specific field. Such practical sense is developed

as a product of socialization in a given context. The habitus in turn takes the doxa as self-

evident and therefore reinforces social reproduction of the structure. Therefore, habitus is

the key to understanding the relation between agency and structure. Through the habitus,

individuals incorporate their history, both personal and collective, into a set of guiding

principles and dispositions which dictate effective practices. Intersubjective by its very

nature, “the habitus is the point of dynamic intersection between structure and action,

society and individual” … As a “socialized subjectivity” the habitus conveys the mutually

constitutive dialectic that unites agents and structures (Pouliot 2008).

Habitus is relational and intersubjective and the actors cannot be insulated from the

historical and collective trajectory of the context in which they are embedded. On the other
hand, habitus is dispositional in the sense that it does not determine actions mechanically

and the agent has a choice about what aspect of the habitus to bring to the foreground of

their practice. It is important to stress here that habitus only generates practices in a specific

field. Field is the other key concept for Bourdieu’s interpretation of the relation between

agency and structure.

A field is a setting in which agents are located and is characterized by hierarchical relations

of power. Fields such as arts, politics or economics (or the international arena) are

characterized as hierarchical systems of positions, in which some agents are dominant and

others are dominated (Bueger and Gadinger 2014). The difference between the position that

the actors occupy in the hierarchy is given by the difference of capital, which can be material

(economic) and not material (symbolic, cultural, social). Symbolic capital allows for the

legitimization of what counts as common sense. To succeed, each agent develops a “feeling

for the game” that depends on his or her habitus and capital.

In Bourdieu’s view, social action is neither structural or agential, but relational (Pouliot

2008). Social action obeys to the logic of practicality and occurs at the intersection of a

particular set of embodied dispositions constituted by a historical trajectory of subjectivised

intersubjectivity on the one hand, and a specific field of positions comprised of power

relations, objects of struggle, and taken-for-granted rules on the other. The ontological

priority is in the interception of habitus and field embodied in the practice (relational

ontology)

This means that for Bourdieu and practice theories in general, the logic of practicality is

ontologically prior to any logic based on mental representations of the world. Seen from this

perspective, the antinomies of individualism versus collectivism, constructivism versus

realism, objectivism versus subjectivism, materialism versus idealism, mind versus matter,

macro versus micro, and agency versus structure can only result from viewing the world in
terms of representational logic, not the logic of practicality. “An engagement with

[Bourdieu’s] work redirects IR discipline from being influenced by overly abstracted and

simplified reifications of world politics, which is currently the case in both positivist and neo-

positivist IR schools” (Adler-Nissen 2012).

Some criticisms and ongoing work

The work of the foundational proponents of practice theories was mainly focused on

domestic societies. Bourdieu and his collaborators used to interview real people in their own

context, like marginalized young people or unemployed minorities. However, is it possible to

understand formations of transnational or global scale through a study of something of local

reach like practice? This seems a natural question to the arguments or international practice

theories, and it is indeed an area of debate. Buerger and Gadiner (Bueger and Gadinger

2014) summarize practice theories’ answers to this question as follows:

1) The concept of practice is open in scale. To study practice does not prescribe a

scale in time or space.

2) The study of practice does not necessarily entail studying all the complexity of

practice. Instead, it is often meaningful to develop overviews of fields of

practice. Such overviews operate at a higher degree of abstraction regardless of

scale.

3) Practice theory scholars – notably those emphasizing relationalism – reject the

idea of natural scales.

The third answer seems to be the most promising and consistent with practice theories’ aim

to overcome traditional representation of reality based on antinomies like macro and micro.

Micro–macro or local–global distinctions are not considered to be productive ontological a-

priori assumptions (Bueger and Gadinger 2014). Like structure and agency, they are

descriptions based on assumptions of the observer. Research into these issues has shown
that bureaucrats and scholars often put together a series of heterogeneous elements to

form concepts they claim to be “universal” and “global”. A number of studies have shown

the hybridity of such scales and how they are driven by micro-interactions.

Practice theories are yet to develop further concepts around the problems of size and scale.

However, it is already is evident that they have contributed significantly in challenging

traditional understanding of these issues and, importantly, the politics of scale (Bueger and

Gadinger 2014), especially in terms of overcoming traditional dualism of micro and macro.

Nevertheless, old habits die hard and practice theories can easily slip into new dualisms.

“The modern mindset easily creeps in and temptation exists to now speak about new

dualisms of, for instance, practice versus structure, practice versus narrative, action versus

practice, or even more perversely doxa versus habitus or practice” (Bueger and Gadinger

2014).

More empirical research on the application of practice theory to international relations

would be also of great benefit to practitioners. Particularly interesting is how practice theory

can contribute to bridge the traditional division in IR between theory and practice, and how

it can produce the kind of scholarly work that is of value not only to academics but also to

practitioners.

In any case, while practice theories are common to other fields like social theory and

anthropology, it is only recently that they have entered IR debates, and have a long way to

go to realize their full potential in the field. For example, some sociologists with approaches

that are less established in IR (pragmatist practice theory) like Luc Boltanski may bring new

light to the contribution of practice theory to the agency-structure debate. Boltanski draws

inspiration from American pragmatism to focus on action for overcoming dualisms such as

the individual and society or agency and structure. He believes that the notions of habitus
and field in Bourdieu imply structural determinism and instead of trying to improve it, he

favors an innovative combination of ethnomethodology and pragmatist action theory.

IR has been shown to have a short attention span for theories. The heterogeneity of practice

theories may result in their not progressing from the fringes of the discipline in order to

become a mainstream theory. Even so, there is a rich body of international practice theory

literature that is growing in volume and influence, and it is possible that international

practice theories will live up to their promises. In any case, it is already clear that IR theory

has benefited greatly from the contributions of practice theory to debates within the

discipline, even if it is only as another voice in the room.

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