What Does Action Explain?

Abstract

The discussions of nature and culture and their place in social explanations suggested that they should be thought of as conditions of action. Conditioning is a relatively open concept of constraint which helps to explain regularity, patterning and typicality, but leaves room for the possibility of novelty, innovation and variation from the typical. As used here, ‘conditioning’ does not mean ‘determining’. The force of the relative autonomy of natural and cultural conditions is mediated by how people interact with them. So we have to think about the properties of the action involved in this mediation. This chapter discusses why action is a central concept in social theory and why the way action is related to culture and structure is said to be its fundamental problem. We have already argued that it is necessary to think of these three concepts as a set; it is not really possible to do social explanation without using all three (Figure 7.1). In particular it is not possible to talk about conditioning without talking about what mediates the conditioning, that is, action.