Understanding Social Structural Change: Change Agency, Mediated Dualism and Fragmented Habitus

Abstract

Agency plays a crucial role in social and economic change, especially in regional transition processes. Interpreting the influence of context on agency reflects the spatial ontology of economic geography. However, culture, as one dimension of context, is still profoundly limitedly understood within economic geography. For instance, it is often constrained to tangible cultural heritage or formal institutions. Moreover, individual-level agency has remained understudied, especially how individuals develop their capacity to act, since it is challenging to distinguish individual and their position within in/formal organizations. Here, we suggest addressing these limitations by integrating Bourdieu's notion of habitus, which contributes to transcending the dichotomies between materials and culture and between structuralism and individualism. Hence, the primary objectives of this paper are as follows: (1) to undertake a comprehensive review of habitus from broader social sciences, in particular to explain the mediated dualism of habitus; (2) to respond to the criticism that habitus is a static concept, and to explain the potential to investigate change; (3) to explicate how agency interacts with habitus. Finally, we recommend economic geographers to integrate fragmented habitus with agency to study social structural change, thereby enriching the discipline's comprehension of context.