Sociological Forum, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1990
Review Essays
Structure, Agency, and Gender: The Social Reproduction of a Discipline Barbara Laslett ~
In 1965, one year after the publication of the Handbook of Sociology, edited by Robert E. L. Faris, I entered graduate school at the University o f Chicago and in 1968 got my first academic job. It was a heady time in American sociology. The first meeting o f the Women's Caucus, later Sociologists for Women in Society, was at the 1969 meetings o f the American Sociological Association in San Francisco, and challenges to the intellectual hegemony of structural functionalism from political leftists, blacks, gays, and feminists were increasingly evident. By entering the discipline when I did, I w a s - t o use McAdam et al.'s term in their chapter on "Social Movements" in the 1988 Handbook of Sociology-"biographically available" to participate in the political and intellectual currents that have helped shape American sociology over the past quarter o f a century. Yet what strikes me in reading the new Handbook of Sociology, edited by Neil Smelser, is the unevenness with which these different currents have been integrated into contemporary sociological debate. In contrast to 25 years ago, there now appears widespread recognition of the contributions made by Marxist theory and class analysis. There has been a reemergence o f attention to political economy, and a convergence on the centrality of the political for understanding both social organization and social change. Yet despite the explosion of research on gender, sexuality, the sociologies of culture and emotions (all of which have established themselves as sections of the American Sociological Association), these subjects have not been well integrated into mainstream sociological debates. In the presentation to follow, I will elaborate on this observation, suggest some reasons why I think this integration has been illusive, and argue for its inclusion in
' D e p a r t m e n t o f Sociology, University o f Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455. 135 0884/8971/90/0135506.00/0© 1990PlenumPublishingCorporation
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the future. As a consequence of limiting m y attention in this way, there are many chapters in the new Handbook I will not discuss. Like guests at a good potluck dinner, other contributors to this review symposium will, I hope, help make for a more complete and satisfying meal. Alexander's account o f "The New Theoretical Movement" in sociology claims that sociological theory is at a turning point, that the macro- and microlevels of t h e o r i z i n g - structuralist accounts of social organization and social change, on the one hand, and symbolic interactionist, ethnomethodological, and constructionist approaches to social life, on the o t h e r - h a v e reached an impasse. To escape the one-sidedness of each of these theoretical traditions, Alexander claims that a younger generation of sociological theorists has set out an agenda of an entirely different kind .... Neither micro nor macro theory is satisfactory. Action and structure must now be intertwined. (77) A concern with the intersection of structure and agency is also central to contemporary developments in historical sociology (Abrams, 1982) as it is to numerous chapters of the new Handbook. (Although historical sociology as a distinct subfield does not appear in the 1988 edition of the Handbook of Sociology, its importance is clearly evident in many of the substantive chapters.) Granovetter and Tilly, for instance, argue that inequalities associated with labor result from bargaining and conflict among workers, capitalists, households, organizations,and governments... [but that] [t]his conflict carried out within the limits of the contenders' interpersonal networks and the resources found within those networks, which are in turn profoundly influenced by such demographicmatters as population age structure and flows of immigration, and such macroeconomic conditions as the level of aggregate demand, the composition of demand for particular products, the looseness or tightness of the labor market, and the dispensability of particular types of labor. (213) Thus, inequality is created out of the struggles between social actors, individual and collective, within historically specific contexts of both opportunities and constraints, and the outcomes o f these struggles are more complex and contingent than previous theoretical accounts suggest. In the end, Granovetter and Tilly "veer away f r o m the quest for One Big Equation specifying relations between labor processes and inequality, toward a series o f simultaneous contingent relationships" (214). Tracing the intersection of social structure and h u m a n agency under concrete historical conditions, conditions that are themselves subject to systematic understanding, then, holds out the promise for doing better sociology. A similar observation is made by Evans and Stephens in their excellent review of the sociology of development and the world economy. Beginning with a discussion of the modernization perspective that dominated debates in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they argue that
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explanationstoo oftenseemed"actorless";urbanization,bureaucratization,and other componentsof modernizationappeareddrivenby inexorableimpersonalforcesrather than by the interests and actions of states, classes and other social actors. (739) Evans and Stephens then present an account of the evolution of critiques of modernization-dependency theory, world systems theory, comparative political e c o n o m y - a n d the contributions they have made to the sociology of development. But while the two chapters by Alexander and Evans and Stephens make good reading, they leave a feminist sociologist like myself a bit puzzled. Where, in these accounts, is attention to the work on sexuality, gender relations, and family systems that describes how the social reproduction of labor is accomplished? Evans and Stephens acknowledge that they have "abdicated responsibility for dealing w i t h . . , the way in which racial, ethnic and gender divisions shape and are shaped by the process of development" (749). But they can do this, presumably, because they do not see work on race and gender as central to the sociology of development as it has evolved over the past 25 years. There is a brief and occasional nod to demographic processes, but it would appear that in the world economy, reproduction occurs by parthenogenesis, or whatever other means states and classes renew the labor supply without attention either to sexuality or the racial and gendered division of labor. Similarly, Alexander's discussion of new theoretical movements in sociology gives the reader no hint of the large literature on the social constructions of sexuality, gender relations, social reproduction, or feminist theory that have appeared over the past two decades. (For a review of this literature, see Laslett and Brenner, 1989.) From my perspective, moving ahead with the intellectual agenda of integrating social reproduction into macrosociological theory needs a new conception of social organization, one in which the socially necessary day-to-day labor by which populations are fed, clothed, washed, and sheltered is made visible. The separation of social life into public and private spheres, also one of the structural imperatives of modernization theory, seems to remain part of the unrecognized theoretical baggage of contemporary comparative political economy and of the new theoretical movements in sociology. Yet it is not as if integrating social reproduction into macrosociological theory is nonproblematic. Huber and Spitze, for instance, begin their review of trends in family sociology with an acknowledgment of the weak theoretical base on which the field has rested and the difficulty of integrating research on the family into general sociological theory. And even though their example of how such a connection might be m a d e - l o o k i n g at the relationship between subsistence technology and family patterns-is a bit too structuralist for my taste, the general problem of social reproduction is recognized as of central importance. Thus, at the end of their chapter they ask
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Can Western countries maintain fertility at levels adequate to support their retirement systems?The direct economicbenefits of child rearing currently go to the elderly accordingto their wage-relatedcontributions. The persons who rear the child receive no direct economic benefits. Is child rearing rewarding enough to offset such costs? Does an innate factor drive humans to reproduce regardless of disincentives?... If so, it will need to be strong. (441) The question o f choice, of h u m a n agency, is at the center of social reproduction. Especially now that sexuality can be separated f r o m procreation, why people have children, how they are cared for and by whom, and how, for that matter, people of all ages receive food, clothing, shelter, and nurturance is central to understanding not only how societies are reproduced but what kinds of societies they are. To answer this question, however, we need to know more about how actors define what is meaningful to them and how these meanings are shaped by prevailing institutions, relations of power, and cultural forms. Tuchman's chapter, "Mass Media Institutions," provides an excellent review of the literature on some of these subjects. But to examine this question, we also need to turn to the social organization of sexuality, emotional life, and personal identity as well as to politics and production. It is in this regard that two other interrelated themes in the new Handbook are of interest: the attention to culture on the one hand and to rational actor models on the other. Alexander suggests that what is missing from macrotheoretical arguments o f the last two decades is " a robust conception o f culture" (93). Further theoretical progress, he believes, needs "a more direct recognition of the centrality of collectively structured meaning, or culture" (93). [One can agree with Alexander's prescription for further attention to culture without accepting his view that doing so is to "recognize the central importance of Parsons's theoretical contributions" (93)]. Similarly, Evans and Stephens identify a resurgence of interest in "more cultural approaches to the study of social change" (760); these authors also articulate an interest in rational models of action, which they believe quite compatible with comparative political economy. "Debate with rational choice theorists," they say should have the salutary effect of forcing comparative political economy to consider more carefully the conditions under which shared social structural position is likely to produce a historically important political or economic actor. (761) But the concept of a "historically important political or economic actor" as used here is "theory soaked," I believe, shaped by presuppositions about what political economy identifies as important. Dimensions of what has come to be called "personal life" unlikely to be so d e s i g n a t e d - not only manners and mores but the ways in which sexuality and gender relations are socially constructed, shape subjectivities, and are, in turn, shaped by them. H o w these subjectives are mediated through cultural symbols and how these
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symbols are reproduced or resisted cannot be reduced to the static notion of "shared social structural position." If, indeed, structural location rigidly determines how actors understand the world, then culture is an artifact of structure, and human agency does not enter into the formulation in any significant way. Alexander's solution to the problem of rationality and nonrationality is somewhat different. He suggests that we substitute this classical dichotomy with another, in which Rmionalistic or instrumental approaches portray actors as taking their hearings from forces outside of themselves, whereas nonrational approaches suggest that action is motivated from within. (84)
Why should we be more sanguine about the inside/outside distinction? Is what is "inside" untouched by what is "outside," and is the "outside" world unconnected to our internal world? The Parsonian bifurcation of instrumental and expressive is simply being reintroduced to social theory with different names, and the relevance of sex and gender to both subjectivity and instrumentality is nowhere considered. One of the maj or challenges to macrosociological theory, then, is how to make visible these less recognized dimensions of social life and incorporate them into large scale social analysis. The problem is not an empirical one. It is n o t a problem of data. As Giele's enthusiastic account of the dramatic accumulation of research on gender and sex roles demonstrates, in the past two decades we have learned a great deal about women's lives and gender relations in many different societies and time periods, and we now know more than ever before about the social organization of sexuality. In addition, feminist theory has been concerned explicitly with these questions and has grown increasingly diverse and sophisticated. Is the problem one of knowledge or of knowing? Giele touches on this question. "Students of gender," she writes emphasize that the gender of the knower will affect the scientific enterprise... [that] the social location of the knower, males, who are generally in a socially dominant position, will have a different view of the social order than women, who are normally in subordinate roles. (292)
Does this help us account for the nonincorporation of issues of gender and social reproduction into macrosociological theory? As sociologists, we trace our intellectual inheritance back to the classical theorists of the 19th century; they are used to legitimate our current concerns and to define which sociological problems are important. But more often than not, these formulations take for granted precisely those aspects of social organization that I believe need to be e x a m i n e d - t h e separation of systems of production and reproduction, the institutional division between work and family in contemporary societies, the social division of labor by
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gender, claims about the differentiation of emotion and rationality, and the "natural" differences between women and men. Is the solution to this problem purely political, i.e., that when women are present in the discipline in sufficient numbers and occupy organizational positions of sufficient power and authority, then those subject matters that have been traditionally assigned to them will finally become part of the sociological canon? Perhaps. Having some clout never hurts. But there may be another solution- one that is grounded in our mutual intellectual interests rather than in our positional differences. The chapter on social movements suggests how and why the integration for which I am arguing might occur. McAdam, McCarthy, and Zald provide a detailed and interesting review of the conditions that foster the emergence of social movements- both structural and ideological. Among the issues that reviewing this literature alerted them to, however, is "the relatively underdeveloped state of knowledge about the dynamics of collective action past the emergence of a movement" (728). To use my language, more attention is needed, they believe, to the reproduction of social movements. (For a discussion of this idea, see Stoecker, 1989.) And to move in that direction, they suggest that particular attention be given to micro-mobilization contexts whose importance "derive from their potential for translating macro-structural opportunities for action into specific micromobilization dynamics" (728). For actors in these contexts, most explicitly perhaps in contemporary social movements but historically as well, the facts of gender, race, class, and sexual orientation are central to how and why people act. They are not simply individual attributes that indicate position and power, but they are also signifiers of social meanings. Either despite or because of unfinished political agendas, the importance of these social characteristics is unlikely to disappear. If that is true, then watching how students of social movements incorporate race, gender, class, and sexual orientation into their understanding of movement maintenance may have some lessons for sociology more generally.
CONCLUSION Sociology is a curious discipline. We claim that everything is within our province and maintain that belief despite the proliferation of specialized subfields. Thinking about a volume such as the Handbook of Sociology, no matter how excellent its individual essays and no matter how generous the space allotted, is inevitably frustrating. There are both too many questions and too many answers. I have limited my focus to the issues raised by some of the newer developments in sociology over the past two and a half decades-
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especially those o f interest to students o f gender and social change. In particular, I have focused on how the debates that have emphasized either social structure or human agency now need to focus on their intersection, an intersection in which real live women and men, individually and collectively, struggle to shape their worlds as they are also being shaped by them. And since I believe this capacity for agency is true o f sociologists as well as the subjects o f our study, I disagree with Smelster's interesting excursion into the sociology of knowledge at the beginning of the H a n d b o o k he has so ably edited. Smelser suggests that the model o f American sociology as a positive science that began with the discipline's struggle to gain academic legitimacy in the late 19th century was further encouraged in the 1920s and 1930s by the usefulness o f social "facts" to political actors. The system o f federal support for research, and the public visibility and accountability of the social and behavioral science in the halls of government, contributes still further, Smelser argues, to a continuity of the model of sociology as "methodologically s o u n d . . . [and] legitimately scientific" (15). But if this structuralist analysis was correct, how could we explain the place Marxist theory has achieved in American sociology over the past 25 years? And how could we understand the expanded attention to social conflict, social movements, and critical approaches to cultural studies, politics, and even sex and gender relations? I might wish for better integration o f the "newer" sociological subjects into our more established discourse, but these newer sociologies would not have emerged had it not been for the creative energies and insistent, if sometimes contentious, action of committed intellectuals within institutions that foster criticism as well as conformity. For this same reason, our sociological future can be open to the best that our sociological imagination has to offer.
REFERENCES Abrams, P. 1982 Historical Sociology. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Laslett, B. and J. Brenner 1989 "Gender and social reproduction: Historical perspective." Annual Review of Sociology 15:381-404.
Stoeeker, R. 1989 "Who takes out the garbage? Social reproduction as a neglected dimension of social movement theory." Paper presented at the meetings of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, August 9-13.
