Authors:
- Introduces metric and nonmetric to replace structure and agency, a distinction used in sociology, social anthropology, political science, history, and human geography
- Creates a framework that replaces “fixed” distinctions with a fluid approach to a variety of social realities
- Engages with classical and contemporary theorists in sociology and beyond
Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology (PSRS)
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
This book offers a solution for the problem of structure and agency in sociological theory by developing a new pair of fundamental concepts: metric and nonmetric. Nonmetric forms, arising in a crowd made out of innumerable individuals, correspond to social groups that divide the many individuals in the crowd into insiders and outsiders. Metric forms correspond to congested zones like traffic jams on a highway: individuals are constantly entering and leaving these zones so that they continue to exist, even though the individuals passing through them change. Building from these concepts, we can understand “agency” as a requirement for group identity and group membership, thus associating it with nonmetric forms, and “structure” as a building-up effect following the accumulation of metric forms. This reveals the contradiction between structure and agency to be a case of forced perspective, leaving us victim to an optical illusion.
Reviews
“In this original and provocative book, Jean-Sebastien Guy convincingly shows how the problem of structure and agency that has preoccupied sociologists throughout the history of their discipline amounts to an optical illusion. Employing the concepts of the metric and the nonmetric and using a variety of readily accessible examples, the author proposes an entirely different social theoretical lens that is perceptive to the internal variety of social reality.” (Olli Pyyhtinen, Professor of Sociology at the University of Tampere, Finland)
Authors and Affiliations
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Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada
Jean-Sébastien Guy
About the author
Jean-Sébastien Guy is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada, where he teaches classical and contemporary theory. He has published on globalization, Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory and relational sociology.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Theory Beyond Structure and Agency
Book Subtitle: Introducing the Metric/Nonmetric Distinction
Authors: Jean-Sébastien Guy
Series Title: Palgrave Studies in Relational Sociology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18983-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-18982-2Published: 20 September 2019
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-18985-3Published: 20 September 2020
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-18983-9Published: 10 September 2019
Series ISSN: 2946-4110
Series E-ISSN: 2946-4129
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 277
Number of Illustrations: 6 b/w illustrations
Topics: Sociological Theory, Social Theory, Historical Sociology, Ontology