Working Relationships: A Meta-View on Structure and Agency

The article discusses the various contributions to the structure-agency debate with regard to their metaphysical assumptions concerning structure and agency. It argues that dualism theories, for all their positive contributions, cannot overcome certain problems due to their Cartesian heritage, which causes them to conceptualize the relationship between structure and agency in certain – deficient – ways. The article then critically analyzes the duality theories of Giddens and Bourdieu, which claim to have overcome these problems. Finally, it discusses metaphysical alternatives in form of the non-Cartesian metaphysics of Heidegger and Whitehead.