The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics (266 page)

The belief that the interpretation of the US Constitution should be based only on adhering to the ‘original intent’ of those who drafted the Constitution or the amendment in question. It is not always easy to see how original intent can be found out. See also
judicial activism
.

 
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Industrial restructuring following a reduction in protectionism. Structural and sectoral adjustment programmes initiated as part of
World Bank
conditional lending, and in conjunction with advice from the International Monetary Fund, require governments to agree to policy reforms intended to stimulate the supply side of the economy and overcome balance of payments difficulties, chiefly by liberalization and less state intervention.
PBI 

 
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A form of
functionalism
—developed from the work of the social anthropologist Radcliffe-Brown and systematically formulated by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons (
The Structure of Social Action
)—structural functionalism seeks out the ‘structural’ aspects of the social system under consideration, and then studies the processes which function to maintain social structures. In this context, structure primarily refers to normative patterns of behaviour (regularized patterns of action in accordance with norms), whilst function explains how such patterns operate as systems. A recurrent criticism of the structural functionalist view is that functions seem to determine structures, with the consequence that it becomes impossible to derive structure from function in a coherent manner. This tendency of structural functionalist explanation has led to a resurgence of interest in the rival tradition of
structuralism
.
PBm 

 
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In general terms, the doctrine that the structure of a system or organization is more important than the individual behaviour of its members. Structural inquiry has deep roots in Western thought and can be traced back to the work of Plato and Aristotle . Modern structuralism as a diverse movement-cum-epistemology began with the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). In social and political theory, structuralism refers to the attempt to apply methods influenced by structural linguistics to social and political phenomena. Its distinctive methodological claim is that the individual units of any system have meaning only in terms of their relations to each other. Saussure, who did not use the term ‘structure’, preferring ‘system’, saw language as a system of signs to be analysed synchronically, that is, studied as a selfsufficient system at one point in time (rather than in historical development). The French social anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced Saussure's epistemology to social science, arguing that analysts should develop models to reveal the underlying structural mechanisms which order the surface phenomena of social life. Lévi-Strauss uncovered the ‘unconscious psychical structures’ which, he thought, underlay all human institutions. Within political science and international studies, structuralism has had an important influence. This is particularly evident in structuralist
Marxism
and in critical realist philosophies of social science which often claim that Marx's theory of exploitation is an example of an underlying causal mechanism at work in society.
In international relations, structuralism has two distinct senses. Latin American structuralism refers to influential doctrines developed by
Prebisch
and the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA). Prebisch argued not only for national strategies of import-substituting industrialization but also for regional integration and international co-operation between exporters of primary products. These policies, and the analysis underlying them, became the official doctrine of the Third World through the activities of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), established in 1964 with Prebisch as founding chairman, and need to be carefully distinguished from the far less meliorative neo-Marxist ideas of the Latin American dependency school.
Secondly, structuralism may refer to the twist given to realist international relations theory by Kenneth Waltz . Instability and war were less the result of corrupt human nature or poorly constituted states than of changing distributions of power across states in an anarchical international system. Earlier realist explanations that had dwelt on the characteristics of individual states and their leaders were dismissed as reductionist. Debate between structuralists, often assisted by borrowings from microeconomic theories of imperfect competition, centred instead on which was likely to prove the more stable, a bipolar or a multipolar system.
PBm/CJ 

 
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A social theory which aims to grasp the importance of the concept of action in the social sciences without failing to highlight the structural components of social institutions. The approach was principally developed by the sociologist Anthony Giddens (
Central Problems in Social Theory
), and has become highly influential throughout the social sciences. Drawing upon (whilst attempting to transcend) the traditions of
hermeneutics
,
functionalism
, and
structuralism
, the theory of structuration seeks to reinstate the importance of the concepts of time and space in social and political analysis. Central to structuration is the notion of the duality of structure. All social action consists of practices, located in time-space, which are the skilful, knowledgeable accomplishments of human agents. However, this ‘knowledgeability’ is always ‘bounded’ by unacknowledged conditions and unintended consequences of action. Duality of structure therefore attempts to convey the idea that structure is both the medium and outcome of the practices which constitute social systems. The theory of structuration is the latest in a long line of attempts to grapple with one of the central problems in social analysis, the agency structure dilemma.
PBm