For A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, social structure meant the actually existing network of social relations among persons and groups. He was less interested in individual psychology and more interested in how society maintains continuity through patterned relations.

This approach inspired the idea that society is made up of interconnected parts whose stability depends on regularised relations. Structure appears as a kind of social framework holding the collective together.

Critique: this perspective tends to overemphasise stability and underplay conflict, domination and social change.

Parsons saw social structure as the organised system of statuses, roles, institutions and norms that work together to maintain social order. In his view, the social system depends on patterned role expectations and shared values.

Structure for Parsons is not merely a list of institutions; it is a normative order. Family, economy, polity and culture all perform functions necessary for systemic equilibrium.

Critique: Parsons is often criticised for turning social structure into an over-integrated and overly harmonious model that neglects conflict, coercion and inequality.

In a Marxist framework, the core of social structure lies in the mode of production — the arrangement of property, labour and class relations. The most important structural fact is not consensus but the division between those who own and those who work.

Thus social structure is fundamentally unequal. Law, state, education and ideology do not float freely; they are tied to the economic base and help reproduce class domination.

Contribution: Marx makes visible the structural nature of exploitation. Critique: classical Marxism may reduce too much to economy and understate autonomy of culture and gender.

Interactionists do not deny pattern, but they warn against treating structure as too fixed and external. For them, society exists because people continuously interpret symbols, negotiate meanings, and perform roles.

This approach shifts attention from abstract systems to lived interaction. Structure appears less as a hard frame and more as something reproduced through everyday encounters.

Critique: interactionism can underplay how deeply large institutions and inequalities shape those very interactions.

Giddens tried to overcome the old opposition between structure and agency. He argued that structure is both the medium and the outcome of social action. People act within rules and resources, but by acting they also reproduce those rules and resources.

This is called the duality of structure. Structure is not a thing standing outside action; it exists through repeated practices.

Importance: this is one of the most sophisticated modern responses to the structure-agency debate.

Bourdieu rethinks social structure through the concepts of field, capital, and habitus. Social structure is not only formal institutions; it is also the patterned distribution of economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital across fields.

Individuals carry structural histories inside themselves as habitus. Thus social structure becomes embodied, reproduced and naturalised in taste, aspiration, confidence, speech and lifestyle.

Contribution: Bourdieu explains how inequality persists without appearing openly coercive.

Feminist sociology insists that social structure cannot be understood without gender. Family, labour markets, law, culture, and politics are structured in ways that privilege men and devalue women’s labour and autonomy.

In this view, patriarchy is not only an attitude but a structural order embedded in institutions, property relations, sexuality, violence and representation.

Contribution: feminist analysis expands the idea of structure beyond class and state, showing how domination works through everyday institutional arrangements.