🏁 9. Module in Review

 

Main point

We are accustomed to thinking of rules as things that constrain us. But actually, rules also free us:

• Language rules restrict what I can say but also allow me to communicate. 
• Road rules restrict how I drive but also allow me to travel safely and efficiently.

So, instead of thinking in terms of rules and freedom, we need other concepts. This is where the concepts of structure and agency come in.  Structure refers to the social arrangements, rules, and arrangements that shape what we can do. Agency is our capacity to act and make choices within these structures. 

Consider a Filipina migrant employed to care for an elderly person in Taiwan. Many aspects of her situation are structured. Migration laws affect whether she can enter Taiwan and what work she can do. Her employer determines many of her working conditions. Wages, gender expectations and economic inequalities between countries also shape her situation. But she still exercises agency. For example, Lan describes migrant care workers who do more than simply perform the tasks required by their employers. A worker might hug the elderly person she cares for and say “I love you.” Nobody can simply require her to feel or express affection in this way. She actively creates a particular kind of relationship with the person she cares for.

So what?

The concepts of structure and agency offer a new way to understand our own lives as humans. People used to think that we lived somewhere on a continuum between determinism (society and culture make us do things) and free will (we choose what we want to do). Structure and agency hold that  people really do act and choose, but the possibilities through which they exercise that agency are socially structured. Structure isn't merely the opposite of freedom; structure can produce the conditions for agency.

What's next?

Structure and agency leave us with an interesting question. If people have agency, how can governments shape what they do? One answer would be through force: governments make rules and punish people who don't follow them. But we are looking at something far more subtle. Governments attempt to care and safeguard our health and through that we become to be disciplined subjects, through  This brings us to our next concept: governmentality. In the next module, we use governmentality to understand how the Canadian government tried to care for Inuit with tuberculosis and ended up creating greater control.