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xxiii What agents know about what they do, and why they do it - their knowledgeability as agents - is largely carried in practical consciousness. Practical consciousness consists of all the things which actors know tacitly about how to 'go on' in the contexts of social life without being able to give them discursive expression.
p.4 The vast bulk of the 'stocks of knowledge'... is not directly accessible to the consciousness of actors. Most such knowledge is practical in character: it is inherent in the ability to 'go on' within the routines of social life.
p.11-12 Philosophers have used up a great deal of ink attempting to analyse the nature of intentional activity. But from the point of view of the social sciences, it is hard to exaggerate the importance of the unintended consequences of intentional conduct. Merton... points out, entirely correctly, that the study of unintended consequences is fundamental to the sociological enterprise.
p.14 To be able to 'act otherwise' means being able to intervene in the world, or to refrain from such intervention, with the effect of influencing a specific process or state of affairs. This presumes that to be an agent is to be able to deploy (chronically, in the flow of daily life) a range of causal powers, including that of influencing those deployed by others. Action depends upon the capability of the individual to 'make a difference' to a pre-existing state of affairs or course of events. An agent ceases to be such if he or she loses the capability to 'make a difference', that is, to exercise some sort of power.
p.15 we can say that action logically involves power in the sense of transformative capacity.
p.20 Understanding... [JLJ - a formula, for Wittgenstein] is simply being able to apply the formula in the right context and way in order to continue the series.
A formula is a generalizable procedure - generalizable because it applies over a range of contexts and occasions
p.22-23 Most of the rules implicated in the production and reproduction of social practices are only tacitly grasped by actors: they know how to 'go on'.
p.25 Crucial to the idea of structuration is the theorem of the duality of structure, which is logically implied in the arguments portrayed above. The constitution of agents and structures are not two independently given sets of phenomena, a dualism, but represent a duality. According to the notion of the duality of structure, the structural properties of social systems are both medium and outcome of the practices they recursively organize. Structure is not 'external' to individuals: as memory traces, and as instantiated in social practices, it is in a certain sense more 'internal' than exterior to their activities in a Durkheimian sense. Structure is not to be equated with constraint but is always both constraining and enabling. This, of course, does not prevent the structured properties of social systems from stretching away, in time and space, beyond the control of any individual actors.
p.26 knowledgeability is founded less upon discursive than practical consciousness. The knowledge of social conventions, of oneself and of other human beings, presumed in being able to 'go on' in the diversity of contexts of social life is detailed and dazzling. All competent members of society are vastly skilled in the practical accomplishments of social activities and are expert 'sociologists'.
p.27 human knowledgeability is always bounded. The flow of action continually produces consequences which are unintended by actors, and these unintended consequences also may form unacknowledged conditions of action in a feedback fashion.
p.28-29 The very identification of acts or of aspects of interaction - their accurate description, as grounded hermeneutically in the capability of an observer to 'go on' in a form of life - implies the interlacing of meaning, normative elements and power.
p.32 we understand the relational character of the codes that generate meaning to be located in the ordering of social practices, in the very capacity to 'go on' in the multiplicity of contexts of social activity.
p.58 Research into child development suggests rather strongly that the formation of capabilities for autonomous action meshes closely with understanding others to be agents. Three main steps in the formation of concepts of agency can be distinguished, coinciding with the stages described by Erikson. One is the recognition of what has been called 'simple agency' - that others can causally intervene in a sequence of events so as to change them.
p.65 The 'here' of the body refers not to a determinate series of coordinates but to the situation of the active body oriented towards its tasks.
p.101 [Boomer and Laver] It is important to recognize that in speech 'normal' does not mean 'perfect'. The norm for spontaneous speech is demonstrably imperfect. Conversation is characterized by frequent pauses, hesitation sounds, false starts, misarticulations and corrections... In everyday circumstances we simply do not hear many of our own tongue-slips nor those made by others. They can be discerned in running speech only by adopting a specialized 'proof-reader' mode of listening.
p.112 movement in space is also movement in time... No two human bodies can occupy the same space at the same time; physical objects have the same characteristic. Therefore any zone of time-space can be analysed in terms of constraints over the two types of objects which can be accommodated within it.
p.145 Discipline can proceed only via the manipulation of time and of space. It ordinarily requires enclosure, a sphere of operations closed off and closed in upon itself.
p.214 Thus Hayek says: 'There is no other way toward an understanding of social phenomena but through our understanding of individual actions directed toward other people and guided by their expected behavior' [JLJ - corrected small quotation error]
p.234 Rappaport defines the term [adaptation] as 'the process by which organisms or groups of organisms, through responsive changes in their states, structures, or compositions, maintain homeostasis in and among themselves in the face of both short-term environmental fluctuations and long-term changes in the composition or structure of their environments'. [Rappaport, 'Ritual, sanctity and cybernetics', American Anthropologist, vol. 73, 1971, p.60]
p.257 Power is the capacity to achieve outcomes
p.258 Power, I have described in the opening chapter, is generated in and through the reproduction of structures of domination.
p.360-361 [Lipset] the task of the sociologist is to formulate general hypotheses... and to test them... [Giddens] The 'general hypotheses' of which Lipset speaks are commonly thought of in the manner I have discussed above, as laws which express causal relations that operate somehow independently of the volition of the agents to whose conduct they refer.
p.284 The sociologist has as a field of study phenomena which are already constituted as meaningful. The condition of 'entry' to this field is getting to know what actors already know, and have to know, to 'go on' in the daily activities of social life.
p.310 Structural constraints, in other words, always operate via agents' motives and reasons, establishing (often in diffuse and convoluted ways) conditions and consequences affecting options open to others, and what they want from whatever options they have.
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