Social structures, social change and the metric/nonmetric distinction

Abstract

This paper examines how the concepts of social structure and social change are interpreted in sociological theory today. Social structures are commonly defined in opposition with agency and accordingly as constraints on action. Concomitantly, social change is understood as emancipation or the removal of such constraint through the exercise of agency (and for it). Against this common understanding, the paper develops an alternative approach so as first to articulate a more sophisticated model of social change, one that does not boil to an over-dramatic opposition between constraint and release from constraint, and second to distinguish between different types of social structures, metric and nonmetric, thereby making room for a variety of social changes depending on how structures interact with other structures.