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The efficacy of human action or agency tends to get lost in the language of structure (Sewell, 1992, p. 2). Agency here refers to individuals’ or groups’ abilities (intentional or otherwise) to affect their environment (McAnulla, 2002, p. 271). In other words, the weakness of this approach lies in its overstatement of structural factors in guiding and directing human behavior and understating the role of agency and praxis in also shaping those very structures. A focus on the nature of the Jamaican state and the quality of its political performance, including the external factors impinging on its ability to provide good governance, offers enormous insights into the rationale for popular protests. However, this book is concerned with giving adequate regard to the diversity of agential actions and the value frameworks held by each member of the political and cultural community which drive them to behave in particular ways when making claims upon the state. I also account for the peculiarities of the social context under which some citizens live, including the existence of citizen-inhabited subcultural systems operating independently of the structural power of the state, with rigid rules and loyalties which affect the manner in which people within this sphere organize themselves and take collective action to defend their interests.
In this scenario, the metaphor of structure no longer implies permanence and stability, and citizens are not cleverly programmed automatons who simply react to the absolute influence of structure. Rather, structure (which here represents the Jamaican state and social and economic structures) is not impervious to human agency—that is, the strivings for a better way of life that are embodied in the angry and frustrated voices which provide the motivations for popular collective action. It is these agential actions by citizens which cause structures to absorb change, in the same way that the nature and quality of structures influence the types of political behaviors citizens display. Indeed, my approach resembles closely the theoretical notion of structuration (Giddens, 1979, 1984), whereby structure and agency closely interact and are mutually dependent. Here, structures shape people’s practices, but people’s practices also constitute and reproduce structures. In other words, the study recognizes that structures do enable (as well as constrain) what individuals do,