Revisiting and Reconstructing the Structure-Agency Problematique in International Relations Theory

• Main Authors: Hao Liu, 劉昊
• Other Authors: S. Philip Hsu
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2009
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/31651042094903863007

碩士 === 臺灣大學 === 政治學研究所 === 98 === During 1980s, there had been a notable turn of sociology theory in the discipline of international relations. The related social philosophy and social theory was brought into the IR theoretical space to re-examine problems deeply rooted in IR positivism paradigm. In this trend, Alexander Wendt introduced the Structure–Agency problem framework to improve the weakness of the IR structural theories which were stuck in traditional framework of level of analysis and neglected the importance of mutual constitution role between structure and actors. Following Wendt’s steps, other researchers tried to introduce more insights on the social theories spectrum into the discipline to evaluate the theory Wendt had established and constructed diverse synthesis approaches, addressing further ontological, epistemological, and methodological philosophy issues. With critical reviews, this article recognizes that most of these structure–agent writers appear to insufficiently develop their key concepts and frequently misuse or distort the original meaning of social theories. Structure and agency concepts are not internationalized properly by their hands and remain highly sociological reference, especially presented in the way researchers copy the disputes between social theorists and paste them into IR as convenient means of mutual criticism. Therefore, IR structure–agency problem turns out to be a lack of international character discussion undermining the academic development on this issue. Standing upon these reflections, this article manages to extensively retrospect the relevant social and international theory to capture the key ontological concepts and to find out their developing contexts so as to address a better synthesis framework with more conceptual support. Besides, in order to provide analytical bases, I also dedicate myself to the work of internationalizing Structure–Agency ontological synthesis and establish an international field structure theory based on the hierarchical feature of IR. In this field theory, the interaction between structure and agents is presented by position-embedded agential interaction inside and outside of hierarchies, which reproduces or transforms the relational structure. This article also highlights critical operative mechanisms and constructs a time-based Structure–Agency integration framework to achieve comprehensive understanding. In the final stage, the developed theoretical framework is applied to the academic community of international relations–as an example–to display its empirical analysis implications.