Language and Intercultural Communication

ISSN: 1470-8477 (Print) 1747-759X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmli20

The structure and agency dilemma in identity and

intercultural communication research

David Block

To cite this article: David Block (2013) The structure and agency dilemma in identity and
intercultural communication research, Language and Intercultural Communication, 13:2, 126-147,
DOI: 10.1080/14708477.2013.770863

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2013.770863

Published online: 04 Apr 2013.

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Language and Intercultural Communication, 2013
Vol. 13, No. 2, 126
147, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14708477.2013.770863

The structure and agency dilemma in identity and intercultural

communication research
David Block*

Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Universitat de Lleida, Lleida, Spain

Against a backdrop of rapid global transformations, the ever-increasing migration

of people across nation-state borders and a wide array of language practices,
applied linguists, and language and intercultural communication researchers in
particular, often include identity as a key construct in their work. Most adopt a
broadly poststructuralist approach, drawing on the work of social theorists
working in a wide range of areas such as cultural studies, gender studies and
critical theory. However, the complexity of these sources poses challenges for these
researchers and the aim of this paper is to discuss one such challenge: the
theoretical tension between structure and agency, a tension often mentioned but
seldom explored in depth. First, I examine how identity, structure and agency
might be defined. Second, I then embark on a selective discussion of how structure
and agency have been framed by key thinkers in the social sciences, ranging from
Karl Marx to Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Pierre Bourdieu. Third, I
examine the work of Margaret Archer, who has explicitly and deliberately taken on
the dilemma of structure and agency and developed a suggestive way of thinking
about the interrelationship between the two. Finally, I end with a consideration of
how my fellow contributors to this special issue of Language and Intercultural
Communication have incorporated structure and agency into their papers, followed
by suggestions of how language and intercultural communication researchers
interested in problematising structure and agency might proceed in the future.

En un trasfondo de rápidas transformaciones globales, la cada vez mayor

migración de populaciones y una gama muy amplia de practicas lingüı́sticas,
los investigadores que trabajan en el campo de la lingüı́stica aplicada y muy
particularmente los que lo hacen en el ámbito de la comunicación lingüı́stica e
intercultural, incluyen a menudo la ‘identidad’ como idea clave en los estudios e
investigaciones que realizan. La mayorı́a de ellos adopta un enfoque post-
estructuralista, basándose en el trabajo de teóricos sociales en áreas tales como
estudios culturales, estudios de género y teorı́a crı́tica. Sin embargo, la
complejidad de dichas fuentes les plantea desafı́os a estos investigadores y el
objetivo de este articulo es discutir uno de ellos: la tensión teórica entre estructura
y agencia, una tensión a menudo citada pero raramente tratada en profundidad.
En primer lugar, evoco distintas definiciones de identidad, estructura y agencia.
En segundo lugar, me centro en cómo ‘estructura’ y ‘agencia’ han sido
formulados por pensadores claves en las ciencias sociales, desde Karl Marx a
Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens y Pierre Bourdieu. En tercer lugar, examino el
trabajo de Margaret Archer, quién ha asumido de manera explı́cita y deliberada el
dilema existente entre estructura y agencia y quién ha por otra parte desarrollado
una forma sugestiva de pensar en la interrelación entre los dos. Y para terminar,
reflexiono sobre como el resto de autores que han contribuido a este número
especial de Language and Intercultural Communication han tratado estructura y

*Email: dblock@dal.udl.cat

# 2013 Taylor & Francis

 Language and Intercultural Communication 127

agencia a lo largo de sus artı́culos para pasar después a sugerir posibles vı́as de
aproximación o enfoque en investigaciones futuras dentro del ámbito que nos
ocupa.
Keywords: structure; agency; identity; intercultural; culture

Introduction
Understanding the relationship between structure and agency remains one of the most
deep-seated problems in social sciences, which has persisted over decades. While some
might argue that the debate is stale and increasingly irrelevant in the (post-) modern
world, it keeps recurring in various guises
whether it is a concern about the
relationship between micro and macro levels of analysis, voluntarism and determinism
or individuals and society . . . It is particularly important for the study of migration
because the agency of migrants (and non-migrants) continues to play a central role both
in the development of social scientific theory on migration and in shaping the policy
responses to people’s movement. (Bakewell, 2010, pp. 1689
1690)

In this way, Oliver Bakewell describes a perennial and enduring dilemma in the social
sciences, the relationship between structure and agency. As regards agency, John
Joseph (2006, p. 241) has termed it ‘a true paradox, not a problem that can ever be
solved once and for all’ while Donald Hall frames it as a ‘controversial topic that has
been at the centre of discussions of subjectivity for centuries, and one that will never
be put wholly to rest, even as it remains compelling’ (2004, p. 5). By contrast,
structure does not seem to draw as much attention and in a great deal of work in the
social sciences it seems that it is considered to be such an obvious backdrop to any
discussion of the social world that it merits no mention.
Bakewell writes his words about structure and agency in the context of his
reflections on the current state of migration studies, which means that what he has to
say is directly or indirectly relevant to much of the work in applied linguistics (hereafter
AL), including that which is more specifically focused on language and intercultural
communication research (hereafter LAIC). I say this because in so many studies
examining the interrelationships between language, identity and intercultural com-
munication (children and adolescents in schools, adult language learners in
naturalistic settings, English language teachers around the world, etc.), research is
about the movement of people in current times. It is about what Appadurai (1990)
famously termed ‘ethnoscapes’, that is, transnational movements and distributions of
people correlated and affiliated in terms of ethnicity (including culture and language).
Indeed, transnationalism, understood as the ever-increasing multiplicity of links and
interactions between and among migrants (Basch, Glick Schiller, & Szanton-Blanc,
1994), has taken hold as a dominant construct and one sees a succession of derivative
‘trans’ terms coming to the fore: ‘transidiomatic practices’ (Jacquemet, 2005),
‘transcultural flows’ (Pennycook, 2007), translanguaging (Garcia, 2009) and so on.
In AL/LAIC research carried out against the backdrop of globalisation and
emergent ‘trans’ phenomena, there seem to be two general tendencies at work as
regards structure and agency. In some cases, individual agency seems to take over,
leaving the impression that individuals are relatively unconstrained as they make
their way through intercultural experiences. This can be seen in some narrative-based
research, such as that with which I have been involved (e.g. Block, 2006). However, it
is far more common for structure to be addressed, even if the amount of detail and
128 D. Block

attention varies considerably. For example, in her ‘critical’ introduction to

intercultural communication, Ingrid Piller (2010, p. 159) writes that ‘[w]hen it comes
to intercultural communication, language choice and understanding are very much a
matter of what is ‘‘acceptable’’, what our language ideologies allow us to accept,
within particular social space or institution’. Elsewhere, in the introduction to an
edited collection focusing on stance, Alexandra Jaffe (2009, p. 20) makes reference to

the way that culturally and historically specific social, institutional, and political
formations structure people’s access (as individuals and as categories of persons) to
particular linguistic stances (especially valued ones such as authority, legitimacy, etc.) as
well as shape the stances that are attributed to them.

Finally, while taking a clear and explicit social constructivist approach to social
reality which puts individual agency at the forefront, Adrian Holliday still finds
space in his discussion of interculturality for social structure in the lives of
individuals. He writes about ‘structures . . . particular to cultural locations, which
may be nation, but also other macro-forces such as religion and ideology . . . [which]
are also particular to global position and politics’ (Holliday, 2011, p. 130).
Despite such clear acknowledgements of the presence (and reality) of social
structures and their role in shaping (though not determining) individuals’ lives, there
is still little overt or detailed consideration of exactly what one might mean when the
structure
agency relationship is invoked. In this paper, I therefore propose to take up
Bakewell’s call for scholars to engage with structure and agency more explicitly and
to attempt to clarify what we mean by each and the respective roles of each in
ongoing identity development. My aim in engaging in such a discussion is twofold:
first, to revisit or to construct a kind of mini-archaeology of what is behind much
current thinking about structure and agency in AL/LAIC, and second, to elaborate
what I hope is a clear formulation of how structure works vis-à-vis agency.
In his discussion of structure and agency, Bakewell draws on the work of Sewell
(1992) as a source of definitions for these two key terms. For Sewell, being an agent
‘means to be capable of exerting some degree of control over the social relations in
which one is enmeshed, which in turn implies the ability to transform those social
relations to some degree’ (1992, p. 20; in Bakewell, 2010, p. 1694). This definition is
not inconsistent with one offered by the anthropologist Laura Ahearn (2001, p. 112):
‘[a]gency refers to the socioculturally mediated capacity to act’. And it chimes with a
more recent definition offered by Patricia Duff, writing about identity, agency and
second language acquisition (SLA): ‘Agency . . . refers to people’s ability to make
choices, take control, self-regulate, and thereby pursue their goals as individuals
leading, potentially, to personal or social transformation’ (2012, p. 413). Meanwhile,
structure is conceptualised by Sewell as follows:

Structure operates in social scientific discourse as a powerful metonymic device,

identifying some part of a complex social reality as explaining the whole. It is a word to
conjure with in the social sciences. In fact, structure is less a precise concept than a kind
of founding epistemic metaphor of social scientific
and scientific
discourse. (Sewell,
1992, p. 2; in Bakewell, 2010, p. 1695)

If we examine the previous definitions of agency and compare them with this
definition of structure, we can see a significant contrast. On the one hand, there is a
relatively clear idea of what we might mean by agency, as the individual able to act
 Language and Intercultural Communication 129

on, control and even transform the social worlds that envelope him/her. On the other
hand, Sewell’s definition of structure indexes a less clear notion of how we might
understand these social worlds. Indeed, described as a ‘metonymic device’, ‘a kind of
epistemic metaphor’, ‘complex’ and as forming part of a bigger ‘whole’, structure
remains relatively unclear to the reader. However, I see this lack of clarity as
symptomatic of the difficulties encountered by social theorists who might arrive at a
reasonably clear understanding of agency, but find that structure proves to be a far
more slippery notion.
With this contrast in mind, I consider what several noted social theorists have
had to say about structure and agency in the main body of this paper. This discussion
will act as a backdrop to a more in-depth discussion of Margaret Archer’s work and
further to this some consideration of ways forward for AL/LAIC researchers
interested in incorporating structure and agency into their discussion of identity.
Before proceeding in this way, however, I provide a short discussion of how we might
understand identity in the context of this discussion of structure and agency.

Identity, subjectivities and agency

As Mervyn Bendle (2002) notes, there has been a gradual turn to identity in the social
sciences over the last 150 years, a process which is due to a constellation of related and
unrelated large-scale developments. One such development is the gradual secularisa-
tion of countries in the industrialised world from the mid-nineteenth century onwards,
although there has also in recent years been a revival of religion as an identity marker
in much of the economically powerful world (see Christians in the USA, Japan and
South Korea; see Muslims in Western European countries). A second development
has been the rise of psychology from the late nineteenth century onwards, not only as
an academic discipline focusing on the individual but also progressively as a part of
day-to-day discourses in late modern society, a point described well by Giddens (1991)
in his classic book, Modernity and Self-identity. A third development has been the rise
of what Nancy Fraser calls the ‘politics of recognition’, which ‘designates an ideal
reciprocal relation between subjects in which each sees the other as an equal and also
as separate from it’ (2003, p. 10). This development includes human rights advances,
for example, civil rights movements around identity inscriptions such as race and
gender, taking place in many parts of the world in the latter half of the twentieth
century. Given these developments, taking place since the mid-nineteenth century,
there has been a multitude of approaches to identity, ranging from Freudian
psychoanalysis to the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss to the broadly post-
structuralist angle on the topic, which has arisen over the past 40-odd years.
My starting point is that in the social sciences today, and in AL/LAIC in
particular, the default position as regards identity is to frame it as a social process as
opposed to a determined and fixed product. The default position is also ‘broadly
poststructuralist’ (Block, 2007a, 2007b, 2009; Duff, 2012; Norton, 2010; Norton &
Toohey, 2011), where ‘structuralism’ involves the search for universal and invariant
laws of social activity that operate at all levels of human life, while ‘poststructur-
alism’ involves a recognition of the limitations of structuralism and an emphasis on
the emergent in localised, diverse and variable social activity. Most work on language
and identity inspired in poststructuralism adopts a social constructivist perspective,
according to which identity is about the multiple ways in which people position
themselves and are positioned, that is, the different subjectivities and subject
130 D. Block

positions they inhabit or have ascribed to them, within particular social, historical
and cultural contexts (Block, 2007a, 2007b, 2009; Duff, 2012; Norton, 2010; Norton
& Toohey, 2011). Subjectivities may be defined as ‘the conscious and unconscious
thoughts and emotions of the individual, her sense of herself and her ways of
understanding her relation in the world’ (Weedon, 1997, p. 32). In contrast to the
structuralist view of identity, Weedon proposes ‘a subjectivity which is precarious,
contradictory and in process, constantly reconstituted in discourse each time we
think or speak’ (p. 32). More recently, Claire Kramsch embellishes somewhat this
view in her discussion of ‘subject position’. She writes:

The term subject position refers to the way in which the subject presents and represents
itself discursively, psychologically, socially, and culturally through the use of symbolic
systems. It comes from a view of the subject as decentered, historically and socially
contingent
a subject that defines itself and is defined in interaction with other
contingent subjects. (Kramsch, 2009, p. 10)

As regards identity, and in particular how it might figure as a term alongside

subjectivity and subject position, Weedon explains matters as follows:

Identity is perhaps best understood as a limited and temporary fixing for the individual
of a particular mode of subjectivity as apparently what one is. One of the key ideological
roles of identity is to curtail the plural possibilities of subjectivity inherent in the wider
discursive field and to give individuals a singular sense of who they are and where they
belong. (Weedon, 2004, p. 19)

In taking this stance, Weedon echoes early discussions by Stuart Hall, for whom
‘identities are . . . points of temporary attachments to the subject positions which
discursive practices construct for us’ (Hall, 1996, p. 6), as well as the thinking of
James Paul Gee, who makes a distinction between the relatively ephemeral and the
relatively stable in his discussion of subjectivity and identity. Gee distinguishes
between ‘socially situated’ and ‘core’ identities, where the former are ‘the multiple
identities we take on in different practices and contexts’, while the latter are
‘whatever continuous and relatively ‘‘fixed’’ sense of self underlies our continually
shifting multiple identities’ (1999, p. 39).
Bringing together an amalgam of ideas related to poststructuralism and identity
and subjectivity, Bucholtz and Hall (2005) discuss what they call an ‘interactionist
approach to identity’, one which examines in detail how subjectivities emerge as
individuals engage in activity of all types. For Bucholtz and Hall this approach to
identity consists of five key components. Table 1 lists these components along with
how the authors describe them.
As regards structure and agency, Bucholtz and Hall argue that their interactionist
approach can take both on board:

The interactional view that we take here has the added benefit of undoing the false
dichotomy between structure and agency that has long plagued social theory . . . On the
one hand, it is only through discursive interaction that large-scale social structures come
into being; on the other hand, even the most mundane of everyday conversations are
impinged upon by ideological and material constructs that produce relations of power.
Thus both structure and agency are intertwined as components of micro as well as
macro articulations of identity. (Bucholtz & Hall, 2005, p. 607)
 Language and Intercultural Communication 131

Table 1. Bucholtz and Hall’s (2005) components of interactionist identity.

Principle Gloss (from Bucholtz & Hall, 2005)

The emergence Identity is best viewed as the emergent product rather than the pre-
principle existing source of linguistic and other semiotic practices and therefore
as fundamentally a social and cultural phenomenon. (p. 588)
The positionality Identities encompass (a) macro-level demographic categories; (b)
principle local, ethnographically specific cultural positions; and (c) temporary
and interactionally specific stances and participant roles. (p. 592)
The indexicality Identity relations emerge in interaction through several related
principle indexical processes, including: (a) overt mention of identity categories
and labels; (b) implicatures and presuppositions regarding one’s own
or others’ identity position; (c) displayed evaluative and epistemic
orientations to ongoing talk, as well as interactional footings and
participant roles; and (d) the use of linguistic structures and
systems that are ideologically associated with specific personas
and groups. (p. 594)
The relationality Identities are intersubjectively constructed through several, often
principle overlapping, complementary relations, including similarity/difference,
genuineness/artifice, and authority/delegitimacy. (p. 597)
The partialness Any given construction of identity may be in part deliberate and
principle intentional, in part habitual and hence often less than fully conscious,
in part an outcome of interactional negotiation and contestation, in
part an outcome of others’ perceptions and representations, and in
part an effect of larger ideological processes and material structures
that may become relevant to interaction. It is therefore constantly
shifting both as interaction unfolds and across discourse contexts.
(p. 606)

However, a close examination of publications based on empirical studies of the

relationship between language and identity shows that there is a good deal of
variation as regards the extent to which structure and agency are granted an equal
amount of attention. Indeed, I would ague that in many cases, there is a tendency to
grant much more weight to agency than to structure in the making sense of how
individuals make their way through social worlds. An example of this tendency can
be found in the introduction to the edited collection Discourse and Identity, where
Anna de Fina, Deborah Schiffrin, and Michael Bamberg (2006) clearly define the
social constructivist approach which drives the contributions to the volume, framing
identity around four key constructs:

Positioning: How do relationships we ‘take up’ through (a) linguistically realized actions
and (b) interactions with different facets of our social, cultural and ideological worlds,
contribute to ‘who we are’?

Interaction order: ‘Who are we’ when we are interacting with one another in face-to-
face talk?

Footing, multivocality and intertextuality: ‘Who’ is speaking ‘whose’ words and what
roles are they taking in ‘speech’?

Indexing local and global identities: How do our interactions with others contribute to our
reflection and construction of who we are? How is ‘who we are’ in our face-to-face
132 D. Block

interactions related to broader membership categories and to social, cultural and

ideological aspects of the world in general?
(de Fina et al., 2006, pp. 7, 9, 10, 14, respectively; italics in the original)

In these items, there is some reference to what Bourdieu (1977) called ‘structuring
structures’ in the form of ‘social, cultural and ideological worlds’; the words of others
in ‘intertextuality’; and ‘broader membership categories and . . . social, cultural and
ideological aspects of the world in general’. However, all of these potential structures
are engaged with from the starting point of interaction and they are not explicitly
invoked as shapers of interactions; rather, the interactions are seen to construct these
structures in an ongoing and emergent fashion, seemingly with little reference to how
structure shapes individual agency. Still, it is perhaps worth noting that this volume is
clearly about identity emergent in interaction and narrative and in such research
structure will always be seen more as an effect of than a shaper of activity.
In another edited collection, Identity Trouble: Critical Discourse and Contested
Identities (Caldas-Coulthard & Iedema, 2008), more of a balance seems to be
achieved in terms of structure and agency. In the introduction, the editors suggest
that in recent times social structures have perhaps been weakened by globalising
forces and flows. As they explain, ‘[w]ith the innumerable social and technological
changes of recent times, our sense of a stable identity anchored in familiar social class
hierarchies and cultural practice conventions has come under threat . . . [as]
[i]ncreasingly, we face fragmented and uncertain identity projects . . .’ (Caldas-
Coulthard & Iedema, 2008, p. 1). Contributions to the volume subsequently examine
these ‘fragmented and uncertain identity projects’, although all contain some
reference to social structures and how they shape the emergence of identity in
interaction and in narrative. In a theoretical paper which comes just after the
introduction, Jay Lemke (2008) exemplifies this trend well. He makes a distinction
between ‘identity in action’ and emergent over short timescales, and identity shaped
by ‘structural or positional determination’ over longer timescales. Structural or
positional determination appears in the form of affordances provided by the
environment and specific contexts (Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998) or
as institutions (e.g. schools), or as internalised dispositions, as in Bourdieu’s (1977)
habitus. However, despite this clear acknowledgement of social structure as shaper of
identity, Lemke (2008, p. 39) goes on to argue that the structures he mentions are less
stable and durable, precisely at a time when globalising forces appear to be tightening
the large-scale structural organisation of the world. That is, we are living in a more
tightly interconnected world in terms of flows of material goods, technology, money,
ideas and people (Appadurai, 1990), which leads to greater instability and
ephemerality in our immediate and localised day-to-day lives.
A similar approach to social structure appears in many other identity-based
publications in AL/LAIC devoted to language and identity. Thus, while there is an
acknowledgement that structure shapes agency, constraining some activity while
facilitating other activity, there seldom seems to be any sustained and detailed
treatment of what is meant by structure and agency and exactly how they interrelate.
In order to move to this level of discussion it is necessary to make effective a
sociological turn in AL/LAIC, one in which scholars not only draw on sociology and
social theory, but also dissect and scrutinise in detail ideas put forth in sociology
and social theory before incorporating them into their work. Of course, some
scholars always have engaged in this type of exercise. Thus, there is Nikolas
 Language and Intercultural Communication 133

Coupland, Srikant Sarangi, and Chris Candlin’s (2001) Sociolinguistics and Social
Theory, an edited collection in which contributors take on key constructs and
analytical frameworks in great detail. And, authors such as Alastair Pennycook (e.g.
2007; see his discussions of performativity and authenticity), Claire Kramsch (e.g.
2009; see her discussion of signs, embodiment and subjectivity) and Jan Blommaert
(e.g. 2010; see his discussions of globalisation, scales and indexicality), just to name
three well-known examples, have always found space in their work, not only to draw
on constructs taken from sociology and social theory, but also to show the reader
how they construct their frameworks based on them. It is with this type of writing in
mind, that I now consider work from sociology which is relevant to any under-
standing of structure in the social sciences, and of course, AL/LAIC.

Structure and agency: Beck, Giddens and Bourdieu

Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not
make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly
found, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations
weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in
revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something entirely new, precisely in
such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up spirits of the past to their
service and borrow from them names, slogans and costumes in order to present the new
scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.
(Marx, 1852/1972, p. 437)

In this oft-cited quote, Marx clearly argues for the weight of history over all else,
somewhat dramatically describing it as the ‘tradition of dead generations [which]
weighs like a nightmare on the brain’. However, Marx also attributes to individuals
the capacity for action, as they can overthrow dominant social structures, even if the
historical constraints on agency mean that they may only ‘conjure up spirits of the
past to their service and borrow from them names, slogans and costumes in order to
present the new scene of world history’. As far as I can tell, no one in AL/LAIC is
currently drawing on Marx to any significant degree for ideas about identity, much
less structure and agency (but see Block, Gray, & Holborow, 2012, for a return to
Marxist-inspired thinking in AL in general). However, there has been a tendency in
recent years to employ thinking from contemporary anthropology, sociology and
social theory in such work. In what follows I examine the work of three scholars
whose ideas about structure and agency have been influential in the work of many
AL/LAIC researchers, either explicitly or implicitly.
In his work over the past three decades, Ulrich Beck distinguishes himself as
someone who has seemingly abandoned structure and tended to prime agency as the
focal point of his discussions of social life in late modernity. He has taken this tack in
that part of his work which focuses on ‘individualisation’, defined as follows:

‘Individualisation’ means, first, the disembedding of industrial-society ways of life and,

second, the re-embedding of new ones, in which individuals must produce, stage and
cobble together their biographies . . . put in plain terms, ‘individualisation’ means the
disintegration of the certainties of industrial society as well as the compulsion to find
and invent new certainties for oneself and others without them. (Beck, 1997, p. 95)

Elsewhere, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim (2002) go so far as to argue that sociology

may be divided along clear epistemological lines in the form of two incommensurable
134 D. Block

general approaches to the study of society, focusing on the individual or focusing on

the whole. The differences between these two approaches are seen to be widening
because in the current age of globalisation (understood to be developments taking
place over the past three or four decades), there is an emerging reconfiguration of
social structures ranging from the macro level of nation-states to the micro level of
family life. What Beck above calls ‘the disintegration of the certainties of industrial
society’ means that social scientists need a new toolkit and they need one that
addresses individualisation, leaving structure as something of an epiphenomenon
which arises from agency but which has no ontological existence without agency. In
an early account of his theory, Beck wrote the following:

Individualization . . . means that each person’s biography is removed from given

determinations and placed in his or her own hands, open and dependent on decisions.
The proportion of life opportunities which are fundamentally closed to decision-making
is decreasing and the proportion of biography which is open and must be constructed
personally is increasing. (Beck, 1992, p. 135)

Some 10 years later, Beck and Beck-Gernsheim discuss in detail what they call
‘institutionalised individualism’, whereby structure is redefined in terms of ‘self-
organisation’ and ‘self-thematisation’, in short, the individual project of ‘do-it-
yourself biographies’ (2002, pp. 23
24). Thus for Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, agency
as the individual’s ability to act on, control and transform the social worlds
surrounding him/her is at the centre of social analysis and indeed is effectively the
only game in town. As the authors put it, ‘[in] the emergence of a self-culture, it is
rather a lack of social structures which establishes itself as the basic feature of the
social structure’ (p. 51).
Somewhat more circumspect with regard to agency (and structure) is Anthony
Giddens. Indeed, unlike Beck, Giddens has put structure at the heart of his take on
social analysis. The ‘duality of structure’ refers to how structure is constituted by
agency but it recognises a recursiveness whereby structure, once created, shapes and
conditions agency. Giddens was motivated early on by the need to reconcile various
conflicts which had arisen in sociology by the 1960s and 1970s. Sherry Ortner (2006)
identifies three such conflicts, which she calls ‘oppositions’. One opposition was that
which existed between functionalists (the Durkheimian/Parsons tradition)
with
their interest in the norms, customs, traditions, institutions and the actions of
individuals which make societies stable and cohesive
and interpretivists (e.g.
Geertz)
with their interest in what social structures mean to those who are
constrained by them. Another opposition revolved around the contrast between
those focusing on the macro-level social structures (e.g. neo-Marxists) and those
focusing on micro-level interactions (e.g. Goffman). And finally, relevant to this
paper, there is the age-old issue of whether human beings and their actions are
determined by social structures that pre-exist them or they are free agents who act on
their own behalf and interest and make the world around them with few if any
constraints on their activity. In the quote from Marx cited above, one can see how he
very partially reconciled these two poles by allowing individuals a degree of agency
subject to the overwhelming weight of history. In the discussion of Beck, we see how
thinking might go quite far in the other direction, bordering on unfettered
individualism.
 Language and Intercultural Communication 135

Swimming among the different currents of thought identified by Ortner, Giddens

proposed structuration theory, which included the notion of the duality of structure:

The basic domain of study of the social sciences, according to the theory of
structuration, is neither the experience of the individual actor, nor the existence of
any form of social totality, but social practices ordered across space and time. Human
social activities, like some self-reproducing items in nature, are recursive. That is to say,
they are not brought into being by social actors but continually recreated by them via
the very means whereby they express themselves as actors. In and through their activities
agents reproduce the conditions that make these activities possible. (Giddens, 1984, p. 2)

With the ‘neither . . . nor’ qualification in the first sentence of this quote, Giddens
seems to avoid the kind of strong individualism which characterises Beck’s work.
Nevertheless, as we will see in a moment, he may still be taken to task for over-
emphasising individualism and agency to the detriment of structure.
Pierre Bourdieu is one scholar who is considered by some observers to have gone
too far in the direction of structural determinism, in the sense that he is deemed to
put serious constraints on the individual’s capacity to act as a free agent in
interactions with others (May, 2001; Pennycook, 2007). However, in my view,
Bourdieu constantly navigated the line between determining social structure and
individual agency in his work spanning some 40 years. In one of his more cited
works, Outline of a Theory of Practice, he states his case as follows:

It is necessary to abandon all theories which explicitly or implicitly treat practice as a

mechanical reaction, directly determined by the antecedent conditions and entirely
reducible to the mechanical functioning of pre-established assemblies, ‘models’ or
‘roles’ . . . But rejection of the mechanistic theories in no way implies that, in accordance
with another obligatory option, we should bestow on some creative free will the free and
wilful power to constitute, on the instant, the meaning of the situation by projecting the
ends aiming at its transformation, and that we should reduce the objective intentions
and constituted significations of actions and works to the conscious and deliberate
intentions of their authors. (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 73)

Two key constructs fundamental to Bourdieu’s understanding of structure and

agency are habitus and field. The first of these constructs, habitus, is defined by
Bourdieu as ‘systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures
predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles of generation
and structuring of practices and representations’ (1977, p. 72). However, it may be
described more prosaically as the individual’s internalised dispositions which (1) are
formulated out of engagement in situated social practices as well as actions linked
more directly with larger social structures, such as global economic forces and (2) can
adapt to new circumstances and generate novel responses. Meanwhile, fields are
spaces of social activity with evolving legitimate ways of being, thinking and acting,
in which individuals occupy positions of inferiority, equality and superiority. The
latter are dependent on the individual’s economic, cultural and social capital in
relation to other participants in the social activity. Crucially, fields are sites of the
reproduction, reformulation and transformation of sociocultural hierarchies, as well
as processes in which individuality and agency interact with the collective and with
social structure.
As Karl Maton (2008) notes, habitus and field are inextricably linked. However,
this link is not, strictly speaking, complete or reciprocal; rather, it is more process-like
136 D. Block

in nature. Thus, a particular field may be seen to structure an associated habitus

through instances of an individual’s engagement with that field. However, the habitus
does not structure the field in a reciprocal manner. Rather, the habitus structures the
field cognitively inside the individual (doing so partially, based on the individual’s
particular experience in that field) and thus serves as both a structuring and a
generative template with which and against which exemplars of practice within the
field take place. Practice, at the same time, is reducible neither to habitus (or any other
notion of individual agency) nor to field (as social conditioner and shaper of activity).
Figure 1 shows how practice stands in relation to these two elements.

HABITUS FIELD

PRACTICE

Figure 1. Bourdieu’s field, habitus and practice.

Of course, examining the different ways that Beck, Giddens and Bourdieu have
conceptualised and written about structure and agency does not tell us how influential
they have been in past and present AL/LAIC research which focuses on identity. A
perusal of books (e.g. Block, 2007b; Caldas-Coulthard & Iedema, 2008; Higgins,
2012; Joseph, 2004; Lin, 2008; Norton, 2000; Riley, 2007), survey articles and chapters
(e.g. Block, 2007a, 2009; Duff, 2012; Norton, 2010; Norton & Toohey, 2011), and
articles appearing in journals such as Multilingual and Multicultural Development,
Journal of Identity, Language and Education and Language and Intercultural
Communication, reveals that Beck is seldom cited, Giddens is sometimes cited and
Bourdieu is often cited. However, it should be noted that Bourdieu has been cited by
AL/LAIC researchers far more than Beck and Giddens not because his ideas are so
obviously superior; rather, there is the fact that he is the only one of the three to have
written explicitly and extensively about language and society. And this has meant that
his work has for some time been deemed to be relevant across a range of AL interest
areas. Still, it is also worth noting that although they are not cited often, Beck and
Giddens’ ideas about identity have seemingly filtered into the current zeitgeist of AL/
LAIC research on language and identity. Thus, Beck’s notions of ‘self-organisation’,
‘self-thematisation’ and ‘do-it-yourself biographies’, along with Giddens’ recursive
approach to the relationship between structure and agency (structuration), are
implicit in a great deal of work on language identity falling under the general umbrella
of poststructuralist and social constructivism, which I described above.
Examining the different ways that Beck, Giddens and Bourdieu have conceptua-
lised and written about structure and agency also does not, in and of itself, produce a
coherent model of how and to what extent these two abstract constructs interrelate.
And it is with this idea in mind that I move, in the next section, to consider in some
 Language and Intercultural Communication 137

detail the work of another sociologist, Margaret Archer, who has attempted to
elaborate what we may understand as a model of structure and agency for the social
sciences, doing so by writing against these three scholars.

Critique of Beck, Giddens and Bourdieu: the work of Margaret Archer

Over the past two decades, Margaret Archer (1995, 2000, 2007) has developed
critiques of how Beck, Giddens and Bourdieu have taken on structure and agency
in their work. For Archer, all three are, to varying degrees, ‘central conflationists’.
In applying this label, she means that they are not ‘downward conflationists’, that
is, they do not work deterministically from structure to agency (as supposedly
would be the case for Marx and Durkheim). Nor are they ‘upward conflationists’,
since they do not work deterministically from agency to structure (as supposedly
would be the case for Weber and those who have followed in his footsteps, such as
interactionists and ethnomethodologists). Rather, by positioning structure and
agency as mutually constitutive, Beck, Giddens and Bourdieu cannot develop a
theory of reflexivity which would allow them to contemplate a reflective being
coming across a structure already in existence. The three forms of conflation are
represented in Table 2.
Archer puts reflexivity, ‘the aspect of subjectivity which should be given its due’
(2007, p. 15), at the heart of the relationship between structure and agency, defining it
as ‘the regular exercise of the mental ability, shared by all normal people, to consider
themselves in relation to their (social) contexts and vice versa’ (p. 4). She sees people
as ‘active agents’ who ‘define their ultimate concerns: those internal goods that they
care about most, the precise constellation of which makes for their concrete
singularity as persons’ (pp. 6
7). For Archer, people act on these concerns,
developing for each one what she calls a ‘project’. A project is ‘any course of action
intentionally managed upon by a human being’ (p. 7). Carrying out a project involves
the exercise of ‘causal powers’, which may pertain either to the individual who is
acting or the external reality of the world surrounding the individual, social or
physical. While the individual’s powers work in a conscious way, those of the world
work automatically and independently of the individual’s powers. As regards the
social world, Archer is a critical realist, and this means that her view of society is
consistent with that of Roy Bhaskar, the founder of critical realism. He defines
society and its status vis-à-vis structure and agency as follows:

. . . society must be regarded as an ensemble of structures, practices and conventions

which individuals reproduce or transform, but which would not exist unless they did so.
Society does not exist independently of human activity (the error of reification). But it is

Table 2. Conflations and structure and agency (Archer, 2000, 2007).

Downward conflation Upward conflation (interactionists, Central conflation

(structuralists, functionalists) ethnomethodologists) (‘failed’ reflexivists)

Structure Structure Structure

NNN


¡¡¡
NNN NNN ???
¡¡¡ NNN



Agency Agency Agency
138 D. Block

not the product of it (the error of voluntarism) . . . Society, then, provides necessary
conditions for intentional human action, and intentional human action is a necessary
condition for it. Society is only present in human action, but human action always
expresses and utilizes some or other social form. Neither can, however, be identified
with, reduced to, explained in terms of, or reconstructed from the other. There is an
ontological hiatus between society and people, as well as a model of connection (viz
transformation). (Bhaskar, 1998, pp. 36
37)

Among these ‘structures, practices and conventions’ are educational systems, which
exist independently of the will and actions of individuals. However, this does not
mean that such structures are monoliths which are invariable and determine all
activity; rather they are (1) themselves the products of previous and ongoing social
activity, and (2) latent as regards the actual effect they can have on individual agency.
With reference to the latter point, Archer explains matters as follows:

The mere existence of a centralised educational system does not constrain curricular
variations, unless and until somebody advances the policy of, say, introducing
geographical or linguistic variation. Only when that project is mooted does centra-
lisation become a constraint, ceteris paribus [all other things being equal]. (Archer,
2007, p. 11)

This means that ‘for an objective structural or cultural property to exercise its
causal powers, such powers have to be activated by agents’ (Archer, 2007, p. 12). This
activation emerges as part of reflexive activity, which in turn unfolds in three realms.
The first realm is the ‘objective realm’, which Archer defines as the ‘[s]tructural and
cultural properties [which] objectively shape the situations that agents confront
involuntarily, and inter alia possess generative powers of constraint and enablement
in relation to [subjects]’ (p. 17). The second realm is the ‘subjective realm’, which is
about how ‘[s]ubjects’ own constellations of concerns . . . [are] subjectively defined in
relation to the three orders of natural reality: nature, practice and the social’ (p. 17).
Third and finally, there is the ‘reflexive realm’, or ‘[c]ourses of action [which] are
produced through reflexive deliberations of subjects who subjectively determine their
practical projects in relation to their objective circumstance’ (p. 17).
Putting reflexivity at the centre of her model, as mediator between structure and
agency, leads her to the following formulation:

Reflexivity depends upon a subject who has sufficient personal identity to know what he
or she cares about and to design the ‘projects’ that they hope (fallibly) will realise their
concerns within society. Equally, it depends upon the objectivity of their social
circumstances which, under their own (fallible) descriptions, will encourage them to
follow one course of action rather than another. Deliberation consists in people
evaluating their situations in the light of their concerns and evaluating their projects in
the light of their circumstances. (Archer, 2007, p. 34)

It is this three-part model of agency, objective structure and deliberation, which

Archer has applied to her research examining how individuals in Britain have lived
through significant structural changes in society over the past three decades. In this
research she is interested in how routine and routinised behaviour has given way to
reflexivity and transformations in behaviour. In short, Archer accepts the idea
propagated by Beck, Giddens and others that we are living in a global age which has
brought significant ontological change to societies like Britain. In addition, she is
 Language and Intercultural Communication 139

interested not in morphostasis, but morphogenesis, two terms which require a brief
explanation.
In a morphostatic society, there is a material (structural) as well as an ideational
(cultural) sclerosis, which produces the effect of stability. As Archer explains:

Cultural morphostasis, through the stable reproduction of ideas amongst a unified

population, generates an ideational environment that is highly conducive to structural
maintenance. Equally, structural morphostasis, through perpetuating social subordina-
tion and controlling marginality, makes a substantial contribution to cultural
maintenance. (Archer, 2007, p. 49)

What interests Archer, by contrast, is morphogenesis, defined as follows:

‘Morphogenesis’ is . . . a process, referring to the complex interchanges that produce

change in a system’s given form, structure or state (morphostasis being the reverse), but
it has an end-product, structural elaboration, which is quite different from Giddens’s
social system as merely a ‘visible pattern’. (Archer, 2010, p. 228)

One of Archer’s chief criticisms of Bourdieu is that his key construct habitus does not
allow for transformation or change of any kind. As Archer puts it, ‘the usage of the
concept of ‘‘habitus’’, under such changed circumstances, assumes an exaggerated
continuity in the socialisation of personal identities’ (2007, p. 48). Thus Bourdieu, it
would seem, can account for morphostasis, the process whereby the social and
cultural status quo is maintained, but not morphogenesis, the process whereby social
and cultural change is generated.
However, in my view, this talk about Bourdieu not elaborating a model which
would allow for agency, albeit an agency submitted to the contingencies of structure,
somehow does not hold up to scrutiny. This is especially the case if we examine post-
1980s Bourdieu, when he took on a more political activist role and a higher public
profile, whilst branching out as regards the fields of activity which he critiqued (see
his books on science and economics: Bourdieu, 2004 and Bourdieu, 2005,
respectively). To make this point, we might examine what he wrote towards
the end of his life. The following is a swipe at Beck and Giddens in his posthumous
(in English, though not in French) Fighting Back: Against Tyranny of the Market 2:

One sees in passing that when Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens extol the virtues of the
‘risk society’ and make the myth of the transformations of wage earners into dynamic
small entrepreneurs their own, they are merely instituting as societal norms those rules
imposed on the dominated by the needs of the economy (from which the dominant are
careful to exempt themselves). (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 30)

Thus Bourdieu seems to want to situate himself as distinct from Beck and
Giddens, a position that runs counter to Archer’s intention to position him as a
kindred spirit. However, he does so within the realm of an attack on neo-liberalism, a
theory of economics that currently seems to envelope everything going on around us.
Bourdieu here does not exclude academics from blinkered thinking and the influence
of TINA (There Is No Alternative), the neo-liberal mantra that so many of us hear
every day. This is an angle, it should be noted, which Archer never contemplates.
Indeed, she seems to accept the times in which we live and her theory of reflexivity is
an attempt to capture how people are getting on within them, but with no social
140 D. Block

critique of the times themselves. I thus wonder if Archer is not being unfair in her
portrayal of Bourdieu, a sociologist who obviously did not conform to academic
conventions, neither in France nor internationally, and who certainly when read in
the present does not conform to Archer’s way of engaging with ideas. Embedded in
social and historical webs so different from those of Archer (he an agnostic, she a
Catholic; he on the political left, she a conservative), the two scholars certainly
proceed in very different manners. However, while for Archer there is incommensur-
ability at the level of epistemology, I wonder if this incommensurability is perhaps
more a formal matter.
In Pascalian Meditations, Bourdieu writes about action, and, in effect, agency, as
follows:

The principle of action . . . lies in the complicity between two states of the social, between
history in bodies and history in things, or more precisely, between the history objectified
in the form of structures and mechanisms (those of the social space or fields) and the
history incarnated in bodies in the form of habitus, a complicity which is the basis of a
relation of quasi-magical participation between two realizations of history. Habitus, the
product of historical acquisition, is what enables the legacy of history to be
appropriated. (Bourdieu, 2000, pp. 150
151)

As Bourdieu suggests in the same book, one might think of the subject in terms of a
habitus or system of sociohistorically acquired dispositions and ‘feel for the game’. A
focus on the agent as habitus

restores to the agent a generating, unifying, constructing, classifying power, while

recalling that this capacity to construct social reality, itself socially constructed, is not
that of a transcendental subject but of a socialized body, investing in its practice socially
constructed organizing principles that are acquired in the course of a situated and dated
social experience (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 137).

He can write such things because ultimately for him the habitus is not written in
stone. As he explains:

Habitus change constantly in response to new experience. Dispositions are subject to a

kind of permanent revision, but one which is never radical, because its works on the
basis of the premises established in the previous state. (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 161)

And while Bourdieu can make bold statements like ‘[w]e learn bodily’, he does
not give everything away to discursive regimes and the disciplining power of
institutions. Instead, he keeps things material and grounded in economic realities,
what he calls the ‘ordinary order of things, the conditionings imposed by the material
conditions of existence’ (Bourdieu, 2000, p. 141), which at the time of writing would
have referred to neo-liberal economic policies, already well established around the
world.

Discussion
Archer’s treatment of structure and agency has the advantage of being transparent
and explicit. She makes clear to the reader what constitutes structure and what
constitutes agency and most importantly, how the two interrelate. Her realist
perspective, one consistent with the philosophy of Roy Bhaskar, leads her to a clear
 Language and Intercultural Communication 141

assertion that structure exists independently of agency. This is a somewhat novel

stance in discussions of this topic in the social sciences today, and it certainly is
uncommon in AL/LAIC research, where as I indicated above, social constructivism
and a poststructuralist epistemology have come to be dominant. Indeed, apart from
an article in Applied Linguistics by David Corson (1997) and a full-length book by
Alison Sealey and Bob Carter (2004), I have seen very little work which even
mentions the ideas of Roy Bhaskar. However, in the closing chapter of Jane Jackson’s
(2012) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Intercultural Communication,
Malcolm MacDonald and John O’Regan do write the following:

By rejecting both positivist essentialism and radical subjectivism, critical realism may
offer a methodology that has the potential to interrogate the claims that are being made
at both ends of the intercultural spectrum, from fixed nation-state views of cultural
identity to the radical relativist narratives of intercultural ‘becoming’. (MacDonald &
O’Regan, 2012, p. 561)

Despite her criticisms of Bourdieu, Archer is not tempted to follow social theorists
who clearly prime agency over social structure. She agrees with scholars such as
Giddens (2000) and Beck (1997), who argue that in the current era of globalisation,
we are witnessing in many parts of the world the decline of routinisation, a
phenomenon associated with more traditional and static social assemblages.
However, she is not willing to sign up to Beck’s notion of ‘institutionalised
individualism’, whereby structure and agency are conflated. This conflation is
deemed necessary by Beck because in the age of globalisation, traditional socialising
structures, such as the nuclear family, the neighbourhood and the school, are eroded
as shapers in one’s life. Structure thus is redefined in terms of ‘self-organisation’ and
‘self-thematisation’, in short, the individual project of ‘do-it-yourself biographies’
(Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002, pp. 23
24).
Instead, Archer attempts to establish a path around the scholars she critiques,
without losing strong notions of structure and agency along the way. She sees
individuals acting according to ‘projects’, which result from the unique capacity of
human begins to reflect on their pasts, presents and futures. Engaging in such
project-driven activity, individuals elaborate courses of actions as reactions either
to events occurring objectively (i.e. out of reach of their control) in the world or to
desires that they feel. In this sense, Archer’s talk of projects looks very similar to
Beck’s views on individualisation and self-construction. However, unlike Beck,
Archer retains the idea that there is social structure. In addition, while Beck sees
global society in late modernity as ‘becoming destructured’, Archer sees it as
‘undergoing restructuring’ (2007, p. 61). Thus, the courses of action that she posits
have implications as regards the interrelationship between individuals and their
environments, between their internally driven agency and externally driven structure.
In particular, Archer emphasises that there are social structures, such as groups of
people acting in concert, which potentially both constrain and enable individual
agency. However, though real, they are not relevant, in a sense, until the individual
engages in a project which includes them.
Examining Archer’s views on structure and agency, I share Dave Elder-Vass’s
(2007) view that they can be reconciled with Bourdieu’s. However, his exposition of
this view is tied to his attempt to construct what he calls an ‘emergentist theory of
human action’, one which would bring together Archer’s reflexive deliberation and
142 D. Block

Bourdieu’s habitus. My attempt at reconciliation is based on my inability to accept

Archer’s portrayal of Bourdieu. Thus, in those parts of Bourdieu’s work in which he
explicitly discusses the relationship between structure and agency, I cannot see that
he gives too much away to agency; nor that he has no theory of social structure
existing independently of the actions of individuals. For example, when writing about
the activity of scientists, he writes the following:

Agents undertake actions . . . [in fields], the ends, means, and efficacy of which depend
on their position within the field of forces, their position within the structure of the
distribution of capital. Each scientific act, like every practice, is the product of the
encounter between two histories, a history embodied, incorporated in the form of
dispositions, and history objectified in the very structure of the field and in technical
objects (instruments), writings, etc. (Bourdieu, 2003, p. 35)

In this way, Bourdieu is foundational to my view of the relationship between

structure and agency, which leads me to a final section in which I will explain what
the previous discussion means for AL/LAIC researchers interested in language and
identity.

Conclusion: reframing structure and agency for intercultural communication

First and foremost, there is a need to make clear how agentive the participants in
AL/LAIC studies are. Are they totally constrained by the social structures which
envelope them and shape the activity in which they engage? Or are they free to act as
they please in the different domains of activity in which they find themselves on a
day-to-day basis? Of course to pose these two questions in this way is to fall into the
dichotomous either/or thinking, the ‘both ends of the intercultural spectrum’
(MacDonald & O’Regan, 2012, p. 561), which, as we see in the discussion above,
is rejected by scholars ranging from Giddens to Bourdieu. Still, given my claim
throughout this paper that AL/LAIC researchers have not devoted enough in-depth
discussion to the structure/agency dynamic, these questions need to be addressed in
some way. What then can we say about my fellow contributors to this issue?
In Suresh Canagarajah’s paper, we see how highly educated sub-Saharan
migrants living in the USA, UK and Australia insert themselves into the highly
stratified systems of spoken Englishes, in which, for example, different accents index
different relative statuses. In their comments about what they can and cannot do, and
indeed what they manage to achieve and do not manage to achieve, some of the
research participants seem to position themselves as in control and able to exercise a
great deal of individual agency. However, there is, always lurking in the background,
the relatively stable systems which shape what ways of speaking are legitimised and
recognised as valid in a range of fields of social activity, and which exist
independently of these individuals’ actions. To be sure, Canagarajah is keen to
acknowledge that the encountered indexical orders are not non-negotiable, that the
scales in play cannot be considered as static and predefined and that the valuation of
scales is ever changing. However, it is understood that his research participants have
to negotiate their way through life taking into account the history and established
traditions of standard (and non-standard) forms of English and the relative prestige
indexed by these forms, as well as the ever-present value scales (from high to low) at
play in all communication.
 Language and Intercultural Communication 143

In Christopher Jenks’ paper, there are equally powerful notions of the native
speaker as the paradigm against which all other English speakers define themselves.
In his research examining English as a lingua franca in multi-party voice-based chat
rooms, he finds that whenever evaluative behaviour occurs, the benchmark is always
an idealised understanding of the native speaker of English. Thus chat room
participants will at times make reference to their interlocutor’s accent, generally
doing so in a complimentary manner, as descriptors like ‘excellent’ or ‘nice’ are used.
And when chat room participants talk about themselves, modesty is in order and
they may make reference to their status as non-native speakers and as ‘foreigners’. In
this case, we are in the presence of another type of stratified system of English. It is
one which is more global in scale, with the idealised native speakers at the top, and
then the rest, the ‘foreigners’, below. Like Canagarajah’s research participants, Jenks’
have to negotiate their way through their chat room interactions, taking into
account, as I explained above, the history and established traditions of standard (and
non-standard) forms of English and the relative prestige indexed by these forms, as
well as the ever-present value scales (from high to low) at play in all communication.
In John Joseph’s paper, the topic is ‘othering’ and in his multi-layered discussion,
there are notions of in-group and out-group. One can be an in-group member, which
entails rights, obligations and expectations about legitimate and authentic behaviour.
Straying from the latter can lead to the opprobrium of fellow-in-group members. One
can be an out-group member but act like an in-group member, in which case there is
the risk of being seen as an interloper, an encroacher or something worse. However,
none of this is permanent or fixed and there is a fair amount of diversity of intentions
and practices as regards othering across the diverse contexts which Joseph deals with:
red and grey squirrels in context, Gaelic teachers and language usage, a ‘homophobic-
sounding’ gay man, and mutual comprehensibility in question in English-language-
mediated interactions involving speakers from Scotland and Newcastle, and so on.
Though structure is not the focal point of his discussion, Joseph invokes structures in
the form of groups in contact, showing how agency is enacted, but not necessarily
under the conditions chosen or even preferred by the agent.
In Elana Shohamy’s paper, there is a discussion of the uneven power relationship
between what she calls the ‘agents of the tests’
that is, government policymakers,
the testing industry and testing administrators
and the ‘test takers’
that is, the
students who have to answer whatever questions have been set, all too often with only
one correct answer possible. Implied in this apparently dichotomous relationship,
however, is a scale running from abstract notions of power in society at the top, to
the agents of power (government, the educational institutions and establishment)
and through to schools and teachers, at an intermediate level between the powerful
agents of testing and the test takers. It is interesting how in this paper Shohamy puts
teachers as both agents of testing and test takers (the latter role linked to how in an
increasing number of nation-states around the world, teachers are subjected to a
great deal of scrutiny as regards their performance). Other stakeholders, from
policymakers to parents, might also act as both agents of tests and test takers
depending on whether they are holding others to account or they are being held to
account by others. Parents, for example, may follow dominant educational discourses
which frame education as working best when it is testing led. On the other hand,
parents may be judged by fellow parents according to how well their children do on
tests: the dominant and preferred model of parenting may be pushy parents who
make sure that their children achieve their middle-class entitlement, succeeding in
144 D. Block

increasingly competitive educational systems around the world (Block, 2012). In her
paper, Shohamy effectively shows how structuring structures, in the service of power,
are layered vertically in testing systems.
Finally, in Qu Weiguo’s paper, there is a discussion of how intercultural
differences, in the realisation of politeness relating to hospitality, need to be seen
not in static, presentist terms, as solely a question of different cultures conflicting,
but as phenomena in the present which emerge from distinct historical developments.
In other words, he argues for a historically based approach to politeness to
complement the already well-established culturalist approach. Qu cites compelling
evidence to suggest that politeness in anglophone cultures today is very different
from what it was centuries ago, and that what it was centuries ago is perhaps, in some
ways, not very different from how it is understood in Chinese cultures today. In
particular, he refers to what is known as ‘imposition hospitality’, that is, a hospitality
whereby the host as provider behaves in an extremely obsequious manner towards
the guest as receiver, making clear that if the hospitality offered is not accepted, he/
she will be offended. An example of this type of hospitality is the insistence by a host
that a guest continue eating even after the latter has made clear his/her total
satiation. Qu does not specifically refer to individual agents and their degree of
freedom in acting as hosts and guests in contexts in which politeness arises; however,
he does make clear the importance of history, as well as culture, as structuring
structures, even if he does so within a Stuart Hall inspired notion of identity as a
‘production’ emergent in ongoing activity.
The papers by Canagarajah, Jenks, Joseph, Shohamy and Qu all share a similar
view of identity, which is consistent with the interactionist approach of Bucholtz and
Hall outlined above. And while they do not always mention structure or social
constraints as a backdrop to the agency exercised by their research participants, they
do make clear how structures and constraints are important and how they work, in
short, how the sociohistorical shapes the individual’s ability to act as an agent.
Nevertheless, in my view such implicit acknowledgement could be complemented
with a specific and explicit engagement with some of the ideas coming through the
work of Bourdieu and Archer, as discussed above.
For example, for each of the research participants appearing in these papers, to
what degree are the actions that they take morphostatic or morphogenetic, that is,
reproductive or transformative of existing sociocultural orders? In addition, the
authors might examine these individuals in terms of their relative reflexivity, taking
into account how their activity sits at the crossroads of Archer’s three key constructs:
the ‘objectivity of . . . social circumstances’; the individual’s ‘personal identity’ and
their life ‘projects’; and the individual’s ‘deliberation’, which includes ‘evaluating
their projects in the light of their circumstances’ (2007, p. 34). Finally, what of
Bourdieu’s conceptualisation of the historically embedded and individually embo-
died habitus which can ‘change in response to new experience . . . [as d]ispositions are
subject to a kind of permanent revision, . . . which is never radical, because it works
on the basis of the premises established in the previous state’ (Bourdieu, 2000, p.
161)? What are the historically embedded individual trajectories of research
participants? And what is happening in the fields of social activity in which they
act, which impacts on, and indeed might change, their dispositions (habitus)?
Taking on these and other issues related to structure and agency would no doubt
complicate discussions of identity in AL/LAIC studies. However, it would add a level
of richness to what are already rich interpretations, while assuming the challenge of
 Language and Intercultural Communication 145

engaging with ‘one of the most deep-seated problems in social sciences’, as Bakewell
(2010, p. 1689) describes matters in the quote which opens this paper.

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Chris Jenks, the editor of this special issue of LAIC, along with John
Gray and the anonymous reviews for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper. All
remaining deficiencies are the responsibility of the author.

Notes on contributor
Professor David Block obtained his PhD in Applied Linguistics from the University of
Lancaster in 1995. He is currently ICREA (Catalan Institute of Research and Advanced
Studies) Research Professor in Sociolinguistics at the Universidat de Lleida. Over the past
20 years, he has published articles and chapters on a variety of applied linguistics topics,
including SLA, multilingualism and identity. He co-edited with Deborah Cameron
Globalization and Language Teaching (Routledge, 2002), co-authored with John Gray and
Marnie Holborow Neoliberalism and Applied Linguistics (Routledge, 2012) and is the author of
Social Turn in Second Language Acquisition (Edinburgh University Press, 2003); Multilingual
Identities in a Global City: London Stories (Palgrave, 2006); Second Language Identities
(Continuum, 2007) and Class and Applied Linguistics (Routledge, 2013).

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