 As a famous Swiss man once said, man is born free and everywhere he is in chains. This short quote goes to the heart of one of the central phenomena of study within the social sciences. That is the idea of social order or structure and its relationship to agency, freedom and the capacity to change this social structure. Social institutions provide the paths and roads in our lives. They are the default positions that have already been created. They are the established institutions of culture, politics and the economy that enable us to go further, faster, easier, to do more. They enable us but they also constrain us and they are the frameworks through which power is exercised. When we take these pathways, we give over our agency and choices to travel along roads that have already been created by someone else. Someone else is defining our choices along this path and in so doing they have power over us. In the social sciences, social structure is the patterns of social arrangements in society. They are both emergent from and determinant of the actions and relations between agents. As enduring patterns of behaviour and interaction, they define some form of order to the overall system. Social structures are typically complex and reoccurring patterns of organization. In contrast to social structure, social agency is the capacity of individuals to act independently and to make their own free choices. Because social structure is largely about order, it is often treated together with the concept of social change, which deals with the forces that change the social structure and the organization of society. Structures are really designed to facilitate order, but social change requires some form of individual initiative, so we have to ask how do we as individuals change the social structure around us? Here we see the interdependency between the two. We need structures that often constrain the individual, but also we need individuals in order to test and change the structure so that it can develop. We need order, rules, obedience and the structure that they bring, but we also need individuals who will sometimes break and test those rules in order to make them manifest and so help to develop them. Social structures or organizations are a product of agents coordinating their activities in some fashion. This coordination can only happen by the individuals giving over their agency, their choices and actions to that organization. In people giving over their agency, they allow the organization to make decisions on their behalf. They submit to following orders and become obedient to the organization's agenda. Without this submission and coordination, we have no form of structure. It is only by police officers following orders that we can incarcerate people. It is only by people choosing to go to work every day that we get business organizations. It is only in our collective belief in money that it has any value. So the real question is then why do people give over their agency to organizations? Sociologists have really found three answers to this question. We do it either out of coercion, meaning we give up our choices because of the force that others exert on us. Or we do it in exchange, meaning that we bind ourselves into organizations because we perceive the benefit to us to be greater than the cost. Or lastly we do it for normative reasons, meaning that we form organizations and maintain them because we see it as a process through which to achieve some collective outcome that we value. Each of these different bases for giving over our agency create very different social structures with a different process of change, so we'll go over each of them separately. Coercive organizations are driven by relations of conflict. Military dictatorships are a classical example of coercive organizations. Power is based on force. You give over your agency because ultimately of some fear that you have. As humans we actually use physical violence very rarely in our interactions. Simply exercising violence is often a very last resort. What we do use though is intimidation, displays of power, manipulation, propaganda, neglect, acts of omission etc. That are ultimately all trying to force one into adopting certain actions and out of this we get some form of order and organization that is based on coercion. Inherent to the conflict theory of social order is that conflict is the normal state within a society, not the exception. This is most famously captured by Thomas Hobbes book The Leviant where he posits that man in a state of nature is in a continuous war of all against all. Order is then seen to only be maintainable through some powerful centralized force. This force is exerted through some hierarchical structure as we've already discussed relations of conflict give rise to a micro structure of one agent assuming a dominant position over another, a micro dynamic of power and authority, where one agent assumes greater control over the agency of the combined organization, while another assumes a subordinate position with a lower level of representation within the combined overall agency. As such the social structures that emerge out of agonistic relations engender various degrees of inequality within a stratified hierarchical system where power is exercised in a downward direction in order to maintain the state or order of the system. Coercive social structures have strong rules and follow a strict chain of command through a hierarchical structure that represents a systematic way to integrate the activities of members with divergent agendas by having a clear line of command and thus automatic method for resolving conflict. In order to control an organization in a hierarchical fashion it has to be linearized, nonlinearity is inherently uncontrollable through a hierarchical model. By linearized I mean that you have to define a closed system, create a boundary around it in order to constrain inputs and outputs to a relatively low level. Equally you have to reduce the number of nonlinear interactions within the system, meaning you need information to be primarily flowing up and down the hierarchy and not horizontally because this would empower the agents on the lower levels of the organization and have a corrosive effect on the top down exercise of control. There is of course a strong dichotomy here between agents and structure. Within coercive organizations individual agency is not some natural right that all members have. Members are typically stripped of individuality and forced to conform. The culture is one of strict obedience. Jails would be one example of this. Membership is not voluntary. The individual is stripped of their personal belongings and forced to wear identical clothing. They are identified by a number instead of their name. All of this is to reduce the diversity and individuality of the agents and facilitate their manipulation through the social structure. Agency within these social systems is really derived from your place in the social structure. For example with the feudal system the individual had no inalienable rights. You got rights from your place in the social hierarchy and there was very little social mobility. Conflict theory sees social change as only achievable through conflict. These coercive social systems are designed to serve the interests of those in the highest stratas of the system. Below some level in the hierarchy the value of being part of the organization is less than it returns. People remain in these lower positions because of coercion and dependency. This creates some subsystem that desires change. But above this theoretical line in the hierarchy agents are receiving more than they're putting in through exploitation. This creates another subsystem that desires the maintenance of the social structure. The system then remains in its current configuration as long as the upper stratas have sufficient power and the lower stratas are sufficiently dependent. But conflict theory goes on to add that this does not last forever. At some point change happens though through some abrupt revolution. When agents give over their agency based upon their own perceived interests within an exchange system we get what is called a utilitarian organization. People engage in this type of organization because they have something to gain. Thus the culture is one of productivity and efficiency. Legitimacy is based on the organization's or person's capacity to deliver in this exchange. Modern industrial societies are dominated by utilitarian organizations. With the enlistment came the idea of reason and people as rational self-interested agents driven to maximize their utility. On this new understanding of the individual we built a whole new set of social institutions that are fundamentally utilitarian in nature. They are designed to provide people with as much return on their investment of time, energy, money or freedom as possible. This is one way of understanding how economics and the idea of the market has become so dominant within modern society as an exchange mechanism for creating social order. A good example of a utilitarian organization would be a business organization. People consent to join and give over their agency while part of that organization in exchange for some remuneration that is to say they work in exchange for pay. When they feel this exchange is no longer of value to them they can discontinue it. The idea of the social contract would be another example of this. The modern theory of the social contract propounds that individuals have consented either explicitly or tacitly to surrender some of their freedoms and submit to governance in exchange for the protection of their remaining rights. We are exchanging the constraints of our agency for the agency that governments give back to us in the form of rights that they will protect. In utilitarian organizations order is maintained by a network of relations between the mutual interests of individuals and often regulated by some kind of impartial third party that oversees the exchange. Like in a football match we have two competing parties but we also have the referee to mediate this exchange and ensure the rules that facilitate the exchange are upheld. Utilitarian organizations are typically bureaucratic in nature that is to say that they have an organizational model that is rationally designed to perform complex tasks efficiently. In a bureaucratic business or government agency officials deliberately enact and revise policies to make the organization as efficient as possible. Legitimacy and status are based largely on one's capabilities and efficiency. Utilitarian organizations are designed to be impersonal, there is a degree of abstraction between the role and the individual person that is fulfilling that role at any given time and there are formal methods to facilitate the change process whether this is through election or some employment process. This form of organization often involves decisions made through what is called an adversarial decision making process. The use of a voting system to choose candidates to hold political office is an example of an adversarial decision making process. This process requires each candidate to convince voters that they are more trustworthy and will be more effective in the role than the opponent. Everyone gets a vote in this process but it does not require consensus, whoever gets the most votes wins. This process of decision making will sound very normal to us because it is used in many modern organizations. Lastly, we'll talk about normative organizations. People join normative organizations not out of coercion or self-interest but instead to pursue some goal that they believe has value in itself. These types of organization include community service groups, political movements, many charities and we might include the new forms of collaborative networked organizations We see emerging in post-industrial economies such as open source software or Wikipedia. These organizations involve high levels of positive interdependence making cooperation an attractor. These relations of positive interdependence create peer interactions of cooperation with low levels of stratification in a more horizontal network structure. Normative organizations really emerge from self-governance because the individual is not joining out of coercion or self-benefit, they are in no way dependent upon the organization. They engage in the organization voluntarily and thus the organization has no real power over them. Through self-governance, they themselves have chosen to constrain themselves in order to coordinate with that group and achieve some collective outcome. Despite the need to regulate and control the members of the organization, we can do away with much of the hierarchy within the first two forms of social structure that were required to simply ensure people's compliance. This means these organizations can likely be much more agile. Order is instead maintained through shared common commitment to some collective function. The organization is an emergent phenomena of the individuals pursuing a goal or some interest that is of value to the overall system. Within this form of organization, there is the possibility for consensus decision making, which is a group decision making process in which group members develop and agree to support a decision in the best interest of the whole. It is used to describe the process of achieving a decision that is fully inclusive. Through self-governance, the individual's agendas come to be aligned with that of the whole, and in this way, we get integration between agency and structure. But this is only because the individuals have created some internal structure of morals, values, ethics, etc. Thus, they are called normative organizations because they are really governed by these personal normative values that people have developed to govern themselves personally. In this way, the governance structure is not something out there in some constitution or set of rules that need to be enforced, it is in the individual's culture. We should remember that almost all real world social systems will involve some combination of these three forms of basis to their structure and order. For example, many people go to work both out of a profit motive and because they believe in the value of what their organization is doing. Or if we take the military as another example, we might see all three forms. People may join the military out of some belief in the value of securing their nation, but also they may join for personal financial benefit, and once they are there, rules will be enforced in a coercive fashion. In summary, we've been talking about social structure and agents of change. We noted how these two phenomena of agency and structure are deeply interdependent with social structure emerging out of individuals giving over and combining their agency within organizations that both enable the individuals and constrain them. We talked about the different types of social structures and how they can be understood in terms of the conditions under which the agents gave over their choices and actions, starting on the most basic level of coercion that places an emphasis on the structure over agency in a rigid hierarchical organization resistant to change. Next, we talked about utilitarian organizations where agents partake in exchange relations based on mutual self-interest with the result being bureaucratic organizations focused on efficiency that have come to be dominant in modern industrial societies. Finally, we talked about the normative organizations we get when people voluntarily coordinate towards some collective function that is of a normative value through an inclusive decision-making process.