Page "Structuration" Paragraph 3

Giddens used concepts from objectivist and subjectivist social theories, discarding objectivism's focus on detached structures, which lacked regard for humanist elements and subjectivism's exclusive attention to individual or group agency without consideration for socio-structural context.

He critically engaged classical nineteenth and early twentieth century social theorists such as Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Alfred Schutz, Robert K. Merton, Erving Goffman, and Jürgen Habermas.

Thus, in many ways, structuration was "... an exercise in clarification of logical issues.

" Structuration drew on other fields, as well: " He also wanted to bring in from other disciplines novel aspects of ontology that he felt had been neglected by social theorists working in the domains that most interested him.

Thus, for example, he enlisted the aid of geographers, historians and philosophers in bringing notions of time and space into the central heartlands of social theory.

" Giddens hoped that a subject-wide " coming together " might occur which would involve greater cross-disciplinary dialogue and cooperation, especially between anthropologists, social scientists and sociologists of all types, historians, geographers, and even novelists ( believing, as he did, that " literary style matters ".

He held that social scientists are communicators who share frames of meaning across cultural contexts through their work by utilising " the same sources of description ( mutual knowledge ) as novelists or others who write fictional accounts of social life.

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