MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort

The New Structuralism

2025· reference-entry· en· W4417350985 on OpenAlexaff
Timothy R. Hannigan

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford Research Encyclopedia of Business and Management · 2025
Typereference-entry
Languageen
Field
Topic
Canadian institutionsUniversity of AlbertaUniversity of Ottawa
Fundersnot available
KeywordsStructuralism (philosophy of science)Cognitive reframingSocial structureMeaning (existential)Field (mathematics)Focus (optics)Power (physics)InstitutionalismSocial system

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract In the early 1960s, the field of sociology underwent a major revolution, as it shifted away from a dominant view called structuralism. This view conceptualized society as a system of universal interrelated elements and fundamental structures. Critical in the shift away from structuralism was a reframing of social structure. One subsequent approach called new structuralism viewed social structure as being historically contingent and continually re-enacted by social actors in context. This was initially developed as a response to the critiques of the original structuralist framework, such as the ahistorical bent, the disregard of power, and focus on systemic stability instead of human agency. Unlike proponents of the companion approach called post-structuralism that emerged around the same time, the new structuralists continued to view social structures as both empirically observable and durable. The unique angle of the new structuralist approach was in reframing social structure away from the older arguments about universal deep structures and hierarchies across societies. This approach maintained a focus on social structure but saw it as being situated. As a dynamic and relational view, this showed how structures were continually reproduced through power relations of social actors embedded in networks built around systems of meaning. The impact of new structuralism can be seen in contemporary institutionalism and organizational analysis. This literature developed in a new structuralist direction by conceptualizing social structure as culturally embedded in institutional fields. As recognized areas of institutional life, fields contain sets of organizations that regularly interact and share both meaning systems and regulatory frameworks that enable concerns about legitimacy and isomorphism. Organizations are therefore deeply embedded in—and help to coconstitute—institutional fields. Fields contain organizations and social actors but also logics and norms. They provide important social boundaries, forming the medium that suspends social networks and the relational positions of actors. Embedded agency is local to fields, as actorhood is both enabled and constrained by institutional elements and configurations. In turn, these can evolve as actors interact over time.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.002
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Not applicable · Consensus signal: Not applicable
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.513
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0020.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.003
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0020.003
Research integrity0.0000.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.039
GPT teacher head0.332
Teacher spread0.293 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.

Study designNot applicable
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

Explore more

Same venueOxford Research Encyclopedia of Business and ManagementFrench-language works237,207