P OL ITICS: 2002 VO L 22(1), 1723

Agency, Structure and Causality in Political Science: A Comment on Sibeon

Paul A. Lewis1
University of Cambridge

Researchers in political science are devoting increasing attention to the ontological commitments of their theories that is, to what those theories presuppose about the nature of the political world. This article focuses on a recent contribution to this ontological turn in political science (Sibeon, 1999). Tensions are identied in Sibeons account of the causal interplay between agency and social structure. It is argued that these tensions can be resolved by reecting explicitly on ontological issues, in particular the causal efcacy of social structure, using a particular approach to the philosophy of the social sciences known as critical realism. The value of such reection for the explanatory power of political analysis is highlighted.

Introduction
Political scientists are devoting increasing attention to the ontological commitments of their theories that is, to what those theories presuppose about the nature of social (including political) reality. It is impossible to engage in any sort of ordered thinking about the political world without making a commitment (if only implicitly) to some social ontology, because any attempt to conceptualise political phenomena inevitably involves the adoption of some picture of the nature of social being. Explicit reection about ontological issues can help to clarify the precise character of theoretical positions and arguments. This is useful in a number of ways: it allows intuitions to be more fully articulated and developed; it helps to reveal internal inconsistencies in arguments; and it enables researchers to identify more accurately the differences between competing approaches (Hay, 1995 and 1999; Marsh et al., 1999; Marsh and Smith, 2000). Here I want to focus on a recent contribution to this ontological turn, published in this journal (Sibeon, 1999). Sibeon focuses on a fundamental issue in social ontology, namely the relationship between social structure and human agency. He eschews (ibid., p. 139) both voluntarism, which holds that society is no more than the construct of autonomous individual people, and determinism, according to which people are merely the puppets of over-arching social structure. These reductionist positions are rejected in favour of the view that social life issues from the interplay of agency and social structure, rather than being the product of one of them alone. Following Hindess (1988, pp. 4448, 102105), Sibeon understands agency to be the capacity to act upon situations. Agency is a property of actors, dened as entities that are able to formulate and implement decisions. The term actor, so understood, denotes not only individual people but also any organisa Political Studies Association, 2002. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA

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tion (a household, trade union or rm, for example) that possesses the capability to make and execute decisions (Sibeon, 1999, pp. 139, 140141). The term social structure, on the other hand, refers to the conditions within which actors operate, encompassing social norms, rules and so on. Social structure both facilitates and constrains the behaviour of actors, inuencing their decisions about what course of action to pursue and thereby having an impact on the course of social events. Accordingly, in order to explain some social phenomenon of interest, it is necessary to examine the interaction between social structure and agency that gave rise to it (ibid., pp. 141143). Sibeons conclusion that adequate explanations of political events require an examination of both social structure and agency is one that, for reasons given below, I fully endorse. However, my immediate concern is to point out a tension in Sibeons argument. Consider the claim that social structure facilitates, constrains and thereby inuences the behaviour of social actors (Sibeon, 1999, pp. 141142). One might reasonably ask what is meant by the term inuence in this context. In particular, is such inuence causal in some sense? At rst glance, it might seem that the answer to this question lies in the conclusion to Sibeons article where, in discussing the way that agency and structure impact upon each other, he claims that in certain circumstances either social structure or agency may have causal signicance or causal primacy. In admitting that social structure can have causal primacy or causal signicance in producing outcomes, Sibeon would appear ipso facto to acknowledge that social structure can be causally efcacious. However, such an admission would appear to sit rather uneasily Sibeons claim that, Entities that are not actors cannot do anything for they have no causal powers [and] cannot be said to have causal responsibility for outcomes (ibid., p. 141). For if the possession of causal powers is conned to social actors, and if social actors are distinguished from social structure, it follows that social structure cannot exert a causal inuence over social events. This is clearly at odds with the claim that social structure can have a causally signicant role in the production of events. Moreover, if the social structures inuence on actors is not causal in nature then it is not immediately obvious how that inuence should be understood. In what follows, I shall clarify these issues by analysing the causal processes at work in the structureagency relationship. Before doing so, however, I should say that while my article is in places critical of some of the details of Sibeons analysis, I hope that the fact that I have responded to his call for explicit reection on ontological issues indicates how valuable I believe his project to be. In addition, I hope to be able to further that project by illustrating how ontological inquiry can help to ensure that categories of explanatory signicant factors are not ignored in the course of political research.

Critical realism
The argument developed in this article is based upon a critical realist approach to social science (Bhaskar, 1989; Archer, 1995). At the heart of critical realism lies its account of the relationship between social structure and human agency. Like Sibeon, critical realists seek to avoid the polar extremes of voluntarism and determinism. Social structure and agency are held to be recursively related. Each is both
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a condition for and a consequence of the other. Actors constantly draw on social structures in order to act and in acting they either reproduce or transform those structures. Consequently, neither agency nor structure can be reduced to the other. Critical realists contend that the structureagency relationship must be understood as an intrinsically historical or tensed process in which social structures and actors stand in temporal relations of priority and posteriority towards one another (Archer, 1995, pp. 6592, 137158). All social activity takes place within the context provided by a set of pre-existing social structures. At any given moment in time, actors confront social structures which are pre-formed in the sense that they are the (often unintended) product of actions undertaken not in the present but in the past (Hay, 1995, pp. 198200; Hall and Taylor, 1996, p. 941; Marsh and Smith, 2000, pp. 6, 11). As Sibeon (1999, p. 142) notes in his analysis of policymaking, the conditions which political actors confront include, inter alia, the intended and unintended outcomes of earlier policies (emphasis added). More generally, every person is born into a world of antecedent social structures, learning a language and entering a culture and mode of economic organisation that are not of their own choosing. These social structures are bequeathed ready made to the current generation of actors and are therefore ontologically irreducible to the latters current actions. Hence, an ontological distinction must be drawn between pre-constituted social structure, inherited already formed from the past, and current social activity (Bhaskar, 1989, p. 37; Archer, 1995, pp. 72, 196). For critical realists, then, social structure is not merely the voluntaristic creation of agency. Rather, the fact that social structure pre-exists and is therefore ontologically irreducible to the current exercise of human agency implies that it enjoys a certain degree of autonomy from the latter (Archer, 1995, pp. 137139). Critical realism portrays actors as constantly drawing upon (pre-existing, possibly inadequately understood) social structures in order to act, with the ensuing actions subsequently bringing about (intentionally or otherwise) the reproduction or transformation of those structures. The existence of social structures is a necessary condition for the exercise of intentional agency. Activities such as speaking and cashing cheques presuppose antecedent social structures such as rules of grammar and the banking system. However, as well as facilitating agency, social structures also constrain it. A person who desires to communicate effectively in Britain must speak English. Someone who insists on speaking Russian, say, is unlikely to be understood. This is not necessarily because of awkwardness or intransigence on the part of the persons British interlocutors; rather, it reects the fact that while the rules of English grammar facilitate successful communication in Great Britain, they also constrain one to speak English if one does indeed wish to communicate. However much local people might wish to help a visitor to Britain by speaking Russian, they are unlikely to be able to do so because, thanks to the activities of the parents and teachers who educated them in the past, they were taught not Russian but English (Archer, 1995, pp. 7679, 85; cf. Hindess, 1988, pp. 97, 112). Social structure can thus be seen to make a difference to the way in which actors behave in the sense that the existence of a particular set of social structures (rules of grammar, for example) militates in favour of certain actions being undertaken (speaking English). And it is this capacity to make a difference (here, to the behav Political Studies Association, 2002.

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iour of social actors) that is the hallmark of causal efcacy. Social structure, understood as pre-existing and therefore relatively autonomous from current social activity, can thus be seen to exert its own, emergent causal inuence on the latter (Bhaskar, 1989, pp. 12, 3940; Archer, 1995, pp. 139, 147148, 176). Social structure also exerts a causal inuence over the behaviour of actors because at any given point in time antecedent social structures embody a particular distribution of vested interests and resources. Depending on the position they occupy within the nexus of social relations, actors are endowed both with the incentive to pursue particular objectives and also with (usually, at least some of) the resources required to do so (Marsh et al., 1999, pp. 4041; Lewis, 2000, pp. 258259; cf. Hindess, 1988, pp. 9697, 111112). In virtue of their location in the social hierarchy, actors are endowed with historically given endowments of incentives and resources which, because they are the result of actions undertaken in the past, constitute an ontologically irreducible inuence on actors current decisions. Critical realism, then, suggests that both the social rules and the distribution of interests and resources laid down by historically given social structure may exert an important inuence on social affairs. However, this does not mean that the behaviour of actors is determined by social structure. For example, while a person who is in Britain and who wishes to communicate with other people will have to use the pre-existing rules of English grammar in order to produce intelligible speech acts, those rules do not determine what he or she says or writes. Alternatively, he or she may be a taciturn individual who prefers not to communicate at all. What this goes to show is that critical realism avoids the deterministic reduction of actors to social structure.

Causality and social structure

Critical realists conceptualise the causal forces at work in social and political activity within an Aristotelian framework (Bhaskar, 1989, p. 34). The paradigm of the Aristotelian perspective is the sculptor. A sculptor produces a work of art using the raw materials and tools available. The sculptor is the efcient cause the agentic source or driving force of such artistic activity. However, while the medium in which the sculptor works clearly does not initiate activity (it does not mould itself of its own accord) and hence does not qualify as an efcient cause, it does affect the nal outcome by inuencing the sculptors actions. Different types of material lend themselves to different types of sculpture and may therefore induce the sculptor to use different tools and techniques. By making a difference to the sculptors actions, the material exerts a causal inuence over the nal outcome. In recognition of this, the medium in which the sculptor works is described as a material cause of that outcome. Critical realists contend that social action in general is analogous to the behaviour of a sculptor and can therefore be understood in similar terms. Just as a sculptor fashions a product out of the raw materials and tools available to him, so social actors produce their actions out of pre-existing social structure. Like the medium in which the sculptor works, pre-existing social structure lacks the capacity to initiate activity and to make things happen of its own accord social actors are the only efcient causes or prime movers in society but it does affect the course of events in the social world by inuencing the actions that people choose to undertake (Marsh
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et al., 1999, p. 16; Marsh and Smith, 2000, pp. 5, 69). I have already provided above a number of examples of how this occurs. And by inuencing the behaviour of social actors, pre-existing social structure makes a difference to and hence exerts a (material) causal inuence over social life (Lewis, 2000, pp. 263265). Critical realism suggests that one way of explaining and resolving the tensions in Sibeons work identied earlier is to argue that he relies on two notions of causality, only one of which is made explicit. In his explicit discussion of agency, Sibeon (1999, p. 141) reduces causal efcacy to agency that is, to the capacity to initiate trains of events by formulating and acting upon decisions (efcient causality). However, the sculptor example makes clear that if causality is understood as the ability to make a difference to the course of social events, then agency does not exhaust all the varieties of causality in the social world. For although actors or agents are the only efcient causes in the social world, there are in addition material causes such as social structure. It is on something like the notion of material causation that Sibeon (ibid., p. 143) seems implicitly to be relying when he states that causal responsibility for outcomes may be assigned to social structure. The addition of material causality to Sibeons conceptual portfolio makes it possible to ascribe causal efcacy to social structure whilst avoiding the danger of reication. Reication, Sibeon (ibid., pp. 140141) maintains, consists in attributing decision-making ability to entities that are not actors. But the claim that social structures are material causes does not imply reication, so dened, for, as I have shown, material causality operates only through the decisions of actors. The ontological distinction between actors and social structure enables critical realists to argue that the two may possess very different properties (Bhaskar, 1989, p. 35). Thus, critical realists can without tension or contradiction claim that intentionality and the capacity to initiate activity characterise actors without anthropomorphically attributing such properties to social structure. While social structures have their own distinctive property of material causality, they are neither conscious decision-making entities nor prime movers that subordinate actors to the dictates of some structural imperative. Like Marx, then, critical realists suggest that people make their own history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing (Hay, 1999, p. 36). Pre-existing social structures, bequeathed to the current generation of actors by actions undertaken in the past, constitute the conditions in which current action takes place and so shape (without determining) the latter. In turn, the (reproduced or transformed) set of structures which are the product of current behaviour form the context for the next round of action. For critical realists, then, social and political events are generated by a complex causal nexus that involves both the efcient causation of actors and the material causation of social structure. Accordingly, social and political events of interest must be understood not monocausally but rather as the result of the causal interplay over time between social structure and agency (Archer, 1995, pp. 15, 71, 165344; Hall and Taylor, 1996, p. 942; Marsh and Smith, 2000, pp. 5, 7, 911). Critical realists of course acknowledge that a particular causal factor may on occasion dominate events. However, whether or not that is the case is contingent upon the particular (and unpredictable) mix of inuences at work at the time in ques Political Studies Association, 2002.

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tion rather than being an inevitable consequence of some over-arching logic of history. Hence, like Sibeon (1999, p. 142; see also Hindess, 1988, pp. 9397), critical realists maintain that the diversity of social life cannot be reduced a priori to the operation of one particular factor. The existence or otherwise of a dominant causal inuence at a particular point in time can be ascertained only ex posteriori through empirical research (Sayer, 1995, pp. 11, 2026; Archer, 1995, pp. 21, 75, 146, 159160). In a similar vein, critical realists argue that the stability or lack thereof displayed by social structure is a contingent matter that can only be explained ex posteriori as the result of the contingent interplay of structure and agency (Lawson, 1997, pp. 170171; cf. Sibeon, 1999, p. 142). Approaches that prejudge these issues risk giving a highly misleading account of the phenomenon under investigation (Marsh et al., 1999, pp. 69; Lewis, 2000, pp. 260263). Critical realism, on the other hand, leaves conceptual room for a range of causally signicant factors and as a result is more able to do justice to the complexity of political life. And by drawing attention to potentially explanatorily signicant categories of factors that might otherwise be ignored, critical realism helps to clear the ground or underlabour for fruitful political research (Lawson, 1997, pp. 6061; Hay, 1999, p. 34; Marsh et al., 1999, pp. 210211, 222).

Conclusion
This article has argued that the addition of the critical realist categories of ontologically irreducible social structure and material causality can help to resolve the tension identied in Sibeons otherwise admirable article. While actors are the only efcient causes or sources of activity in the political world, social structures are material causes that inuence political affairs by conditioning the course of action that actors choose to pursue. Thus, the causal efcacy of social structure can be sustained whilst simultaneously avoiding reication. Ultimately, the argument presented here reinforces the central conclusion of Sibeons paper, namely the value of reecting explicitly on the ontological issues (in this case, the causal efcacy of social structure) raised by political analysis.

Note
1 I am very grateful to Jochen Runde and two anonymous referees for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

References
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Lewis, P.A. (2000), Realism, Causality and the Problem of Social Structure, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour 30, pp. 249268. Marsh, D., J. Buller, C. Hay, J. Johnston, P. Kerr, S. McAnulla and M. Watson (1999), Postwar British Politics in Perspective, Cambridge: Polity. Marsh, D. and M. Smith (2000), Understanding Policy Networks: Towards a Dialectical Approach, Political Studies 48, pp. 421. Sayer, A. (1995), Radical Political Economy: A Critique, Oxford: Blackwell. Sibeon, R. (1999), Agency, Structure and Social Chance as Cross-disciplinary Concepts, Politics 19(3), pp. 139144.

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