The Relationship between Structure and Agency in Communicative Action Theory

The relationship between structure and agency is one of the many unresolved core enigmas in social sciences and social theory. the intent of integration of structure and agency is to conceive within the same model the relation between individuation and socialization, between freewill and the principle of coexistence and, Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, Antony Giddens’s structuration and Margaret Archer’s morphogenetics delimit its conceptual field. Habermas also develops communicative action theory, within which he attempts to integrate action- theoretical and systemtheoretical sociological perspectives. He divides modern society into lifeworlds (micro) and systems (macro). The lifeworld is the realm of ordinary everyday experience and intersubjective understanding but it loses power at the expense of powerful forces Habermas calls "system". Examples are the monetization of transactions, markets, law, and bureaucracy. He attempts to reconstruct the relationship between lifeworld and system (or agency and structure) but some of the critiques did not consider his attempts successful or they considered it as an incomplete project. Many Habermasian critics see the theory’s being problematic in its heavy reliance on ‘idealizing suppositions’. Yet fewer attack the non-idealized assumptions of communicative rationality. The problem here is that the lifeworld of such agents, with their equal access and use of relevant information, requires something seemingly unavailable in the modern sociopolitical context because there are, in real world, effects of an instrumentalist rationality that distorts the lifeworld through the ‘steering systems’ of capitalism and bureaucratic power. it seems that this theory implicitly do not consider the danger of domination of power structures over agency and wills of agents and hence, this way of establishing relationship between structure and agency implicitly have danger of establishing relationship between structure and structure i.e. modern society structures or systems in habermasian view in one hand and dominant power discourse structures that define or even dictate rationality and shape socio-political norms of given community in other hand.