Structure, agency and social capital in migrant domestic work

The migrant domestic worker can be analysed as an agent who creates and/or recreates a particular structure. According to Giddens (1979: 55), agency refers to a continuous flow of conduct. The agent is an active subject who has access to a common cultural stock of knowledge that allows him or her to act in a given temporal and spatial context. Being an agent means having an internal structure, which acts as both a constraining and a facilitating factor. Structure refers to particular structuring properties, such as rules and resources. Structures exist ‘paradigmatically as an absent set of differences, temporally “present” only in their instantiation, in the constituting moments of social systems’ (Giddens 1993: 36, 1979: 64). Giddens refers to structure as particular ‘sets or matrices of rule – resource properties governing transformations’. The rule-resource properties are constituted of three components. Firstly, it is knowledge, as memory traces of ‘how things are to be done’ by social actors; secondly, these are social practices organised through recursive mobilisation of knowledge; thirdly, these are capabilities that the production of those practices presupposes (Giddens 1979: 64). The agent brings structure into being and, conversely, structure produces the possibility of agency. The central concept of structuration is the duality of structure, which refers to the recursive character of social life and expresses the mutual dependence of structure and agency. Duality of structure means that social structure is both enabling and constraining: people reflexively produce and reproduce their social life (Giddens 1993: 37).

I will use the concept of agency to analyse the experience of migrant domestic workers. This involves discussing the meaning that migrant workers assign to their work abroad, their motivations behind migration and knowledge of their own situation as well as the ability to reflexively monitor their situation and change it. I believe the concept of agency allows a change in perception of the migrant as a passive individual who is entirely determined by circumstances to see him or her as an active subject in a specific spatial and temporal context. Agency also involves unintended consequences of intentional actions.