Using Giddens' Structuration Theory to Inform Business History

In considering the future of business history, scholars in the 1990s must respond to increasing calls in the field for stronger theoretical underpinnings. Over the last decade, panels at the Business History Conference (BHC) and in other special-purpose conferences and related books [e.g., Ternin, 1991; Lamoreaux and Raff, 1995] have focused considerable attention on economics as a potential theoretical base for business history. Such an approach as been productive for some business historians; however, economics, with its narrow focus on the market and its assumption of independent, self-seeking rational actors, may seem unduly limiting to others. The potential contributions of noneconomic theoretical perspectives to business history have occasionally been addressed in the business history community [e.g., Lipartito, 1995], but less frequently and with less sustained attention than the contributions of economics; other social science perspectives have been more visible in the history of technology, where the social construction of technology approach, for example, has achieved widespread popularity [Bijker et al., 1987; Bijker, 1995]. This paper suggests another non-economic (and, indeed, nonfuncfionalist and non-posifivist) theoretical perspective structurafion theory, developed by British social theorist Anthony Giddens that may usefully inform business history. Reading and understanding Giddens' social theory is notoriously difficult; both the theory itself and the language in which Giddens expresses it are relatively inaccessible. (Giddens himself comments that "'Structurafion' is an unlovely term at best..." [Giddens, 1984, p. xvi].) Nevertheless, as I have struggled to understand this complex social theory (which I encountered in my non-historical research •) and have noted some of its extensions and applications to the study of contemporary organizations [Barley, 1986; Macintosh and Scapens, 1990, Orlikowski and Robey, 1991; Orlikowski, 1992;