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The past and recent developments of the disputed Spratly Islands have alarmed the international community due to China's constant increased presence with its sophisticated military infrastructures over reclaimed lands of the Spratly Islands. Considering international arbitrators favoured the Philippines in the 2016's verdict and the July 202l's incident of China's military incursions nearby Malaysia's Sabah maritime border, this article seeks to argue an increased alarming security dilemma among Southeast Asian claimant against China over the Spratly Islands. This article uses Social Constructivism approaches and illuminates social interaction processes between agency and structure or between China premier and state bureaucrat and within the intersection of domestic and international dimensions of China. Unlike conventional International Relations (IR) theories, Social Constructivism provides merits of Structuration1 approach to appreciate intricate social relations between China premier and its domestic calculus in determining China's behaviour over the disputed Spratly Islands. In return, Structuration allows nuanced reading beyond the lines in matching President Xi Jinping's verbatim intention through China's behaviour in the disputed Spratly Islands. When reading China in the disputed Spratly Islands, it is appropriate to ask this question: does leadership affect a nation's behaviour and its domestic calculus? In a way to understand this, the Structuration approach is applied. Through the lens of the Structuration approach, this article examines the nexus between the leader as \"agency\" and the state's institutions as \"structure\" by emphasising Xi's state leadership and his social interactions over several institutions with the China's state system, illuminating a likely pattern of China's actions over the disputed Spratly Islands. By linking the early days of Xi's speeches to the present plausible behaviour of China in the disputed Spratly Islands, this article illuminates the ascendency of highly and increasingly unlikely positive images of Xi's construction of China, even among the existing partners of the Belt and Road Initiatives (BRIs) as well as Southeast Asian claimant states over the disputed Spratly Islands.

This article advances theory on social movements' strategic adaptation to political opportunity structures by incorporating a narrative perspective. Our theory explains how people acquire and use knowledge about political opportunity structures through storytelling about the movement's past, present, and imagined future. The discussion applies the theory in an ethnographic case study of the climate movement's mobilization around the UN Climate Summit in Paris, 2015. This analysis demonstrates how a dominant narrative of defeat about the prior protest campaign in Copenhagen, 2009 shaped the strategizing process. While those who experienced Copenhagen as a success preferred strategic continuity, those who experienced defeat developed a \"Copenhagen narrative\" to advance strategic adaptation by projecting previously experienced threats and opportunities onto the Paris campaign. Yet by relying on a retrospective narrative, movement actors tended to overlook emerging political opportunities. We demonstrate that narrative analysis is a useful tool for understanding the link between structure and agency in social movements and other actors affected by (political) opportunity structures.

Understanding the power of the prime minister is important because of the centrality of the prime minister within the core executive of British government, but existing models of prime ministerial power are unsatisfactory for various reasons. This article makes an original contribution by providing an overview and critique of the dominant models of prime ministerial power, highlighting their largely positivist bent and the related problem of the prevalence of overly parsimonious conceptions of the structural contexts prime ministers face. The central argument the paper makes is that much of the existing literature on prime ministerial power is premised on flawed understandings of the relationship between structure and agency, that this leads to misunderstandings of the real scope of prime ministerial agency, as well as its determinants, and that this can be rectified by adopting a strategic-relational view of structure and agency.

Abstract Finding common ground between theories that have never or seldom spoken is a necessary first step to bridge-building, particularly concerning their foundational bases. This article proposes to develop such a footing for a dialogue between the Marxist version of Latin American Dependency Theory (MDT) and Robert Cox’s neo-Gramscian Critical Theory (NCT). The onto-methodological debate around the agency-structure relation offers a possible starting point for a discussion of (in)compatibilities, in particular by deciphering how each understands the relation; but also by asking whether they bring particular social ontologies that need to be addressed. Resumo Encontrar um terreno comum entre teorias que nunca ou raramente se falaram é um primeiro passo necessário para a construção de pontes, principalmente no que diz respeito às suas bases fundacionais. Este artigo se propõe a desenvolver tal fundamento para um diálogo entre a versão marxista da Teoria da Dependência Latino-Americana (TD) e a Teoria Crítica Neogramsciana (TCN) de Robert Cox. O debate onto-metodológico em torno da relação agência-estrutura oferece um possível ponto de partida para uma discussão sobre (in)compatibilidades, em particular decifrando como cada um entende a relação; mas também perguntando se eles trazem ontologias sociais particulares que precisam ser abordadas.

This paper elaborates an aspirations–capabilities framework to advance our understanding of human mobility as an intrinsic part of broader processes of social change. In order to achieve a more meaningful understanding of agency and structure in migration processes, this framework conceptualises migration as a function of aspirations and capabilities to migrate within given sets of perceived geographical opportunity structures. It distinguishes between the instrumental (means-to-an-end) and intrinsic (directly wellbeing-affecting) dimensions of human mobility. This yields a vision in which moving and staying are seen as complementary manifestations of migratory agency and in which human mobility is defined as people’s capability to choose where to live, including the option to stay, rather than as the act of moving or migrating itself. Drawing on Berlin’s concepts of positive and negative liberty (as manifestations of the widely varying structural conditions under which migration occurs) this paper conceptualises how macro-structural change shapes people’s migratory aspirations and capabilities. The resulting framework helps to understand the complex and often counter-intuitive ways in which processes of social transformation and ‘development’ shape patterns of migration and enable us to integrate the analysis of almost all forms of migratory mobility within one meta-conceptual framework.

By showing how a number of temporal assumptions shape three mutually exclusive narratives, the article argues for a mediated and reflexive understanding of events, one that is more open and less likely to fall into the pitfalls of a confrontation between different versions of retrospective responsibility. The article begins by looking beyond the agency and structure debate and into the temporal dimension of narrative, mainly for the sake of understanding the relationship between continuity and change. The article covers three potential narratives, focusing on their influence on the study of events, policy, and retrospective responsibility. It then illustrates their impact on mainstream understandings of the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014. Upon describing the problems of positing strict continuity and change, both of which impact accounts of retrospective responsibility, the outline of a more reflexive, mediated approach to events and temporality is introduced, based on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics. In doing so, the article demonstrates the disadvantages of Erlebnis, an approach that unreflexively applies a limited set of temporal assumptions, highlighting instead the advantages of Erfahrung, an approach that strives for a mediated understanding of events.

In this article I argue for a relational approach to the agency–structure problem. Structure has three dimensions from this perspective but, at its most fundamental, it is a network comprising social actors (human and corporate) and the relations connecting them. Defined thus structure has measurable properties which generate both opportunities and constraints for actors and which shape processes, such as diffusion, which affect and implicate them. Agency is integral to this model. Actors are the nodes of the network and their relations are built, maintained, modified and broken by way of their interactions. However, I argue that the human organism only fully becomes a social actor by way of interaction. In effect, both agency and structure are emergent properties of social interactions/relations which act back upon and shape those interactions/relations. In addition to resolving theoretical problems this approach has the advantage of facilitating empirical analysis of structure.

What theories or concepts are most useful at explaining socio technical change? How can – or cannot – these be integrated? To provide an answer, this study presents the results from 35 semi-structured research interviews with social science experts who also shared more than two hundred articles, reports and books on the topic of the acceptance, adoption, use, or diffusion of technology. This material led to the identification of 96 theories and conceptual approaches spanning 22 identified disciplines. The article begins by explaining its research terms and methods before honing in on a combination of fourteen theories deemed most relevant and useful by the material. These are: Sociotechnical Transitions, Social Practice Theory, Discourse Theory, Domestication Theory, Large Technical Systems, Social Construction of Technology, Sociotechnical Imaginaries, Actor-Network Theory, Social Justice Theory, Sociology of Expectations, Sustainable Development, Values Beliefs Norms Theory, Lifestyle Theory, and the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology. It then positions these theories in terms of two distinct typologies. Theories can be placed into five general categories of being centered on agency, structure, meaning, relations or norms. They can also be classified based on their assumptions and goals rooted in functionalism, interpretivism, humanism or conflict. The article lays out tips for research methodology before concluding with insights about technology itself, analytical processes associated with technology, and the framing and communication of results. An interdisciplinary theoretical and conceptual inventory has much to offer students, analysts and scholars wanting to study technological change and society.

Research on the environmental dimensions of human migration has made important strides in recent years. However, findings have been spread across multiple disciplines with wide-ranging methodologies and limited theoretical development. This article reviews key findings of the field and identifies future directions for sociological research. We contend that the field has moved beyond linear environmental \"push\" theories toward a greater integration of context, including micro-level, meso-level, and macro-level interactions. We highlight findings that migration is often a household strategy to diversify risk (new economics of labor migration theory), interacting with household composition; individual characteristics; social networks; and historical, political, and economic contexts. We highlight promising developments in the field, including the recognition that migration is a long-standing form of environmental adaptation and yet only one among many forms of adaptation. Finally, we argue that sociologists could contribute significantly to migration-environment inquiry through attention to issues of inequality, perceptions, and agency vis-à-vis structure.

Institutionalism gives priority to structure over agency. Yet institutions have never developed and operated without the intervention of interested groups. This paper develops a conceptual framework for the role of agency in historical institutionalism. Based on recent contributions following the coalitional turn and drawing on insights from sociological institutionalism, it argues that agency plays a key role in the creation and maintenance of social coalitions that stabilize but also challenge institutions. Without such agency, no coalition can be created, maintained, or changed. Similarly, without a supporting coalition, no contested institution can survive. Yet, due to collective action problems, such coalitional work is challenging. This coalitional perspective offers a robust role for agency in historical institutionalism, but it also explains why institutions remain stable despite agency. In addition, this paper forwards several portable propositions that allow for the identification of who is likely to develop agency and what these actors do.