| Summary/Abstract |
Most theories in the social sciences have intimations of both structure and agency, but in the English School (ES) corpus these appear in a particular way. While the ES is often considered a “structural theory”, in fact, the corpus is largely agentic in orientation. That is, the dynamic elements in ES accounts of international life are either collective or individual agents who hold institutional positions. They are states, state leaders, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), development officers, agency bureaucrats, and so on. Moreover, the agents are, themselves, constantly involved in creating, elaborating, reaffirming, or altering the institutional environments of their action. They are searching out institutional possibilities that will aid their specific objectives, in the process reaffirming them, while also creating or altering the structures within which they act. This points to the significance of structuring processes—successive actions that create stabilizing effects and whose effects have consequences for what follows. Agents acting within, and interacting with, institutions place the ES in a family relationship with the “new institutionalism” and, more specifically, with structuration theory.
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