Critically assess Michel Foucault's contribution to the Essay

Critically assess Michel Foucaults contribution to the structure-agency debate - Essay ExampleMost sociologists, from Durkheim to Talcott Parsons and Radcliffe Brown focus on the standard structures of societies for explaining behaviour patterns. The wider acceptance of the social-structural explanations of individuation is attributed to the fact that unlike an individuals characteristics, social structure is represented by an elaborate conceptual framework (Cote & Levine, 2002 46). However, it will be seen that sociologists such as Cooley, Blumer, Goffman and Garfinkel emphasise the significance of agency, the symbolic nature of human interaction and the ways in which humans negotiate roles and meanings on an on-going basis.According to Foucault, modern society is extremely differentiated and fragmented. Power is not a commodity which can be acquired, nor is it the property of an individual or class, it is rather a structural phenomenon, an extensive meshing which is all-encompas sing. Foucaults view of modernity is that there exist many centres of power, and connections between various areas of power. This approach is in contrast to the Marxist emphasis and focus on the class struggle and the state, as the centres of power. Further, the mode of production, the work and the industrial sphere that Marx identified as central to power, is different from the Foucaultian view of power as alive in several different social settings and locations (Layder, 2006 125, 126).The intellectual movement of the eighteenth century, termed as the Enlightenment developed the concept of modernity along with a wind of disciplines which constitute the social sciences, forming the modern conception of knowledge (Billington, 1998 6). Dawe (1970 208) states that to solve the problem of social order the Hobbesian approach to human nature, which is in the absence of external constraint, the interest group of private interests and desires leads invevitably to both social and individu al disintegration was taken into