That social structures are the product of social practices and, at the same time, the medium by which such practices are made possible is the insight derived from the confluence of philosophical and sociological perspectives in opposition to naturalism in sociology, brought together and formalized under the ugly label of ‘structuration theory’.

Within this literature, a central figure and the principal source of the ideas which follow is Anthony Giddens. His vast output has been overtaken by the quantity of critical literature addressed to it, mostly to his body of social theory published since 1976. I am primarily concerned with the application and extension of core concepts of his structuration theory to a theory of security. In this chapter I attempt to outline these concepts briefly, and in terms accessible to readers less familiar with the literature. In the following chapter, I shall apply this theoretical framework to the question of security and its relationship with identity.

Elements of social action

The novelty of a structuration, or reflexivist, theory of social action lies in the relationship it postulates between the agency of the unit actor and the structure which makes agency possible, constraining it and facilitating it at the same time. Against subjectivism which denies the constraint of structure in favour of the dominion of the subject, social action must be understood to take place within a framework of habit, or routine, not randomly in some process of creative imagination.