Despite his renown as Britain's greatest sociologist since Herbert Spencer, Anthony Giddens' contribution to social theory is widely debated. Some argue that his thinking has been too eclectic, eschewing grand theoretical constructs for a collection of ideas with little more than descriptive value. Indeed, his career over the years has shifted from interpretations of classical social theory and the debunking of functionalism and positivism to the elaboration of structuration theory, a set of ideas that attempts to bridge the gap between agency and structure.

Others, however, point to his very work of structuration as a major theoretical contribution to sociological thinking. In his book New Rules of Sociological Method (1976), Giddens argued that agency produces structure and that structure is constituted of rules and resources by which that self-same agency is recreated. That is to say, Giddens wrote that the epistemology of sociological research was a "double hermeneutic" in...