Beyond agency

The reason why agency/structure and micro/macro debates remain unresolved i s the bad essentialist habit of treating such pairs as opposite natural kin ds. Once variation is allowed, agency and structure. or micro and macro, ar e temporal? poles bracketing a continuum. with serial entities moving along this continuum over time. Explaining these transformations from agency int o structure, or micro into macro. and vice versa is the challenge for expla natory theory. This challenge is met by switching to a constructivist level of second-order observing. Then, agency and structure become variable devi ces or frames different observers might use to perform different sorts of c ultural work.