Descripción de los Casos de uso del sistema

The first important step in Giddens’s theory of modernity is to define structure (organisations, agencies) as ‘resources’ and to suggest that rules-and-resources enable rather than restrain action. The limiting tendencies of structures are seen as necessary and helpful and as such should be viewed positively. The structures and thus the rules-and-resources are instantiated at the moment when action takes place and they therefore have an influence or binding effect on action for the duration of that moment only (Ransome 2010).

According to Giddens’s theory of modernity, by using rules-and-resources actors also reproduce the conditions in which rules-and-resources are useful to them and thus also reproduce those rules-and-resources themselves which implies that the ingredients of social change and the means by which social change actually takes place must already be present in the rules-and-resources as they currently exist (change from within).

Giddens sees the forces of social change a little less in terms of ‘the structural forces of change’ (such as changes in social infrastructure, the physical fabric and make-up of institutions and organisations) and more in terms of how social actors change their ideas, values and beliefs. It is the level of ‘meaning’ that attracts his attention rather than the level of institutions (Ransome 2010).

According to Giddens, social actors posses power (capacity for drawing upon the rules-and-resources around them) but the various social actors (influential and subordinates) are bound together by the various rules-and-resources at their disposal – the social actors exist in a dynamic relationship with each other. Giddens argues that social actors have at their disposal a very extensive body of knowledge about how to act and behave in the social world. This capacity, Giddens argues, gives them the ‘transformative capacity’ not only to act (a capacity Giddens calls agency) but to do so deliberately and intentionally and in ways that can seriously alter the world around them. According to Giddens, power is an intrinsic property of social action rather than an independent force or quantum that ‘the social structure’ draws upon to control individual freedoms.

According to Giddens, social systems have a material existence and are embedded in time and space (we can actually see and describe them objectively) whereas social structures are largely hypothetical until they are made real at the moment when social actors make use of them (they are latent⁵) (Ransome 2010).

Giddens goes on to suggest that social theorists also have to think again about the kinds of forces that institutions exercise over or within society. In addition to the forces of capitalism, industrialism and instrumental rationalisation (instrumental rationality), he identifies three more driving forces, time and space, disembedding mechanisms and reflexivity, described below (Ransome 2010):

The driving force of ‘time and space distanciation’ refers to the ways in which notions of time and space (which for practical purposes is more easily understood as ‘place’) are radically different in modern society compared with how they were in pre-modern society. He argues that in the modern worlds time and place are recast in much more complex and abstract ways. Technologies like air travel, global media and increased use of world-wide-web means that the range of experience is much more varied than it used to be; time and space are no longer the barriers standing in the way of experience.

For example, one can relate to the experience of being in a tsunami affected area and the destructive nature of tsunamis by watching coverage on television or internet.

The second driving force Giddens proposes is the increased role of money and expert systems as ‘disembedding mechanisms’. The presence of expert systems in every spear of life – which have become much more complex in form, are often embedded in technological developments and increasingly involve abstract processes and relationships – means that they tend to extend far beyond the comprehension and control of any individual social actor. For example, the numerical calculations involved in estimating how a certain property is or isn’t located in a risk zone of a flooding event having certain probability or frequency is not easily comprehensible by a non-technical person.

The third driving force proposed by Giddens as ‘reflexivity’ proposes a double-sided or twin process by which social actors are affected by the conditions in which they act and yet are able to bring about changes in those conditions. Referring to ‘reflexivity’

Giddens argues that by constantly monitoring their own behaviour social actors are always altering the boundaries between structures and action. It defines how the objects and contexts of social action are constantly being changed by the knowledge actors have of those objects and contexts. In simple words, reflexivity is the property of knowledge, wherein knowledge itself is contended to be a societal property or an asset existing in the minds of individuals (Etzioni 1968 cited in Winnubst 2011). Thus, reflexivity defines the process of how certain social phenomena are bound to be directly affected by the emergence of new knowledge about them.

Giddens furthers the concept of reflexivity as: i) reflexively-organised behaviour and ii)

for sure. He emphasises this by proposing that the notion of reflexively applied knowledge is itself something the social actors reflect upon and that it eventually affects the sense of trust social actors might have had in their ability to define what knowledge is. Giddens argues that in recent times the rate of response (changes and feedback) has speeded up significantly which has resulted in providing much more energy and momentum to the process of generating change to an extent where ‘change’ itself has become focus of activity. When applied to the more intimate level of personal development, the concept of reflexivity helps in developing a more robust and multidimensional perception of the social actor with relevance to that social actor’s inherent characteristics. Thus, according to Giddens, reflexivity is the mechanism for the development of personal and social identity. It refers to the ways in which social actors are increasingly able to monitor their own behaviour, and to change what they do, in light of their own experiences. He then argues that through the reflexive modernisation, ‘experts’ become part of the knowledge pool and that individuals are able to reflect on and change the behaviour of other actors through mediated experience.

To summarise, Giddens proposes that rules-and-resources are there to enable action in the social domain and that the social actors, while maintaining their capacity to induce change in the society, pertaining to their embodied rationality, are also guided by these rules-and-resources. Giddens proposes that the process of modernisation, or the process which induce changes in society, has been driven along by time-space distanciation, disembedding mechanisms and reflexivity, and that these forces and processes have become dramatically speeded up and more intense in recent times. As a result and which is of relevance to this thesis, Giddens argues that knowledge no longer remains the preserve of the experts; the experts become part of the knowledge pool.