Čas a prostor v teorii strukturace

Anthony Giddens regards the problem of order, which he defines as the problem of the organisation of society in time and space, as the fundamental problem of sociology. Inspired by T. Hagerstrand's time and space analysis and the sociology of E. Goffman he argues that society is composed of spatial and temporal zones. For him modernity is associated with the development of institutions that co-ordinate the temporal, spatial and social dimension of human action. Giddens sees the problem of time through the prism of the duality of reversible and irreversible time. He connects the concepts of the „duree“ and the „longue duree“ with reversibility, and the concept of „Dasein“ with irreversibility. Giddens is a critic of evolutionary ideas. His view of history in many ways resembles that of Foucault. He sees history in terms of episodic development, i.e. as a sequence of large-scale episodes – long-lasting sequences, separated by changes relating to the dominant institutions or societies themselves. Nonetheless, with his concept of radicalised modernity and theory of the transformation of time and space he paradoxically produces his own version of evolutionary theory, and this in some ways contradicts his declared anti-evolutionary attitude and stress on cyclical change and repetition.