Critically assess Michel Foucault's contribution to the Essay

Critically assess Michel Foucault's contribution to the structure-agency debate - Essay Example Most sociologists, from Durkheim to Talcott Parsons and Radcliffe Brown focus on the standard structures of societies for explaining behaviour patterns. The wider acceptance of the social-structural explanations of identity is attributed to the fact that unlike an individual’s characteristics, social structure is represented by an elaborate conceptual framework (Cote & Levine, 2002: 46). However, it will be seen that sociologists such as Cooley, Blumer, Goffman and Garfinkel emphasise the significance of agency, the symbolic nature of human interaction and the ways in which humans negotiate roles and meanings on an on-going basis. According to Foucault, modern society is highly differentiated and fragmented. Power is not a commodity which can be acquired, nor is it the property of an individual or class, it is rather a structural phenomenon, an extensive network which is all-encompassing. Foucault’s view of modernity is that there exist many centres of power, and connections between various areas of power. This approach is in contrast to the Marxist emphasis and focus on the class struggle and the state, as the centres of power. Further, the mode of production, the work and the industrial sphere that Marx identified as central to power, is different from the Foucaultian view of power as existing in several different social settings and locations (Layder, 2006: 125, 126). The intellectual movement of the eighteenth century, termed as the Enlightenment developed the concept of â€Å"modernity† along with a range of disciplines which constitute the social sciences, forming the modern conception of knowledge (Billington, 1998: 6). Dawe (1970: 208) states that to solve the problem of social order the Hobbesian approach to human nature, which is: â€Å"in the absence of external constraint, the pursuit of private interests and desires leads invevitably to both social and individual disintegration† was taken into